Perspectives

There are cartoons to be found around a similar theme regarding how differing perspectives on a situation can lead to radically different conclusions, these will often centre around two people arguing whether a pair of numbers on the ground between them reads '16' or '91' or some other variation involving numbers with rotational symmetry. Oddly, one never sees it with '88'..

I think it a useful image, but it lacks the nuance of real life situations.

Years ago I used to give my children the illustration of two people facing each other across a table. Placed between them is a Rubik's cube, angled with an vertical edge closest to each of them. For ease, we'll say it's completed.

When asked to describe what they see, both parties will be able to agree on the colour of the top most surface.

Perhaps it is Yellow.

However, their stories will then diverge. One may say the other faces are Red and Blue, but the other will be emphatic that the faces are Orange and Green.

They then have a choice.

They may decide to continue to argue. Indeed, both of them are right from their viewpoints, and there is no reason to accept any alternative description of the situation.

Or they may choose to co-operate, to accept that alternative perspectives on a situation can help provide a wider understanding of the environment.

hmmm.. This is coming across as needlessly didactic. ("I had to teach myself to be auto-didactic..")

Anyone with a scintilla of understanding of perspectives and narratives would have worked out pretty quickly where this was going!

However, there is one last part of this scenario that I think is worth pointing out.

A cube has six sides.

Whether or not these two people decide to argue or accept alternative points of view, there will always be the truth of the side of the cube on the table that neither can see. But is still there. No matter how many perspectives or narratives may describe a situation, there will often be more that is hidden, or at least not easily accessed.

I have no idea if my children remember this illustration; but I hope that others might find it a useful thing, especially in teaching children about perspectives, understanding people, and the narratives they carry with them.

Answering for a friend..

I was asked by a friend about the result of the 2016 UK Referendum about leaving the EU - "the vote has happened and yes it was close, but it was democratic, so why can't people accept it and get on?"

Alas, there is no quick answer, there is a lot of nuance surrounding the issue in terms of arguments before the vote, interpreting the result, and how to proceed downwind of that. Plus there is a fundamental problem with debating the subject - it appears no one's interested if it can't be expressed in a couple of sentences. It's not an attention span thing, nor an issue around intelligence, it appears to be, possibly, more to do with not wanting to examine issues of trust and identity, but that's probably my psychology degree talking(!).

So - I'm not going to even attempt to give a short answer. I will lay out what I see as the central issue at stake, and why 'accepting it and moving on' would be to dismantle, rather than promote, democracy in the UK.

The main problem with what happened in 2016 is one based in constitutional law, and what defines 'democracy.'

Aristotle, Weber, and others upon whom we base our ideas of democracy and governance, set out and discussed many forms of democracy. It's not a single immovable object or idea. The word has problems. Like the word 'love' - when someone says it, what is the context, and what are they actually meaning? Equally, what does a person mean when they say 'democracy'? Drawing lots is blind democracy, everyone gets a go at choosing, though no one has a direct choice in the outcome. There's Representative Democracy, such as in the House of Commons, where groups elect a person to represent a number of people. This itself has a problem - whom does the Representative represent? Is it 'the people,' is it their affiliated party, is it some broader ideal? It's worth bearing in mind folk like Edmund Burke ('the father of modern Conservatism'), who spoke at length about the 'solemn and overriding duty of members of parliament,' said "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion;" and Churchill - "The first duty of a member of parliament is to do what he thinks, in his faithful and disinterested judgment, is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain."

There are many other forms of democracy, e.g. Proportional Representation; Alternative Vote system - about which we had a referendum in 2011 and rightly rejected; and others. Somewhere tucked in amongst all that is just the ordinary vote where the most votes cast for an idea wins - the simple majority. Pretty much every thinker on the subject sees this as the lowest form of democracy, and declare it only appropriate for small numbers of people and for matters of lesser consequence. Weber worries about 'mob rule' (it's proper name, by the way, is ochlocracy), Aristotle goes so far as to call it 'Evil Democracy,' and no one ever suggests using it for anything with large numbers of people, nor important issues - such as determination of matters of State!

One might quickly point out that the House of Commons uses this simple majority vote when passing law - the Ayes and Nays. However, for each law, there are multiple layers and votes - HoC vote on first reading, House of Lords debates and suggest amendments, HoC has second reading and vote, HoL debates/amends, HoC has third reading and final vote. So whilst the voting process is simple, the procedure is not. Being the 'Mother of Parliaments,' with the first modern General Election in 1695, we have had rather more practise at this than any other current nation. Whilst we have no constitution written in a single place, we have centuries of law and protocol set out which guide the processes. Whilst I'm am often iconoclast and have little time for pointless tradition, I'm pleased that our Parliamentary system has some, and though it's not perfect, it's generally fairly robust.

So.. we come to The Referendum Act 2015. Referenda can be set out in a variety of ways, and this act was debated and designed to fulfil a certain function. Page one of the Act states clearly that it was to be 'Advisory,' and here is the first point of contention. Being advisory meant that it was not intended to be binding or the result brought directly into law; its purpose was to bring the electorate's views to a Commons debate about what is best for the country in relation to the EU. We have run very few referenda in the UK, mostly because they are not felt to be 'good democracy' in a land which is governed by a Representative Democracy where there is a countrywide vote at least every five years (originally it was every three, a couple of centuries back..). Other than the AV Ref, none of the referenda have been binding, though Cameron stated he 'believed' the Scottish one in 2014 was, but there was no stated legal basis for his claim, it certainly wasn't in the legislation.

Very few of the referenda held in the UK have had any controls placed on them - thresholds for turn-out, motion to carry, etc. And whilst they have been, arguably, very poorly designed democratically, it's not, really, been an issue as the results have generally not been close. The various Welsh referenda had thresholds stated for motion to carry - in 1979 the motion was rejected; in 1997 it just passed the threshold and so the Welsh Assembly was created. With results not having been close, we've basically 'got away with it.' It wasn't good democracy, but the result covered over a multitude of sins. The EEC referendum in 1975 was non-binding, as the 2016 one was designed to be, but with 67% in favour from a 64% turnout, there was no need to work out how to process the information.

It is worth noting that Alex Salmond tabled an amendment to put in provisions for motion to carry for the 2016 Ref, indeed he proposed a quadruple lock, that not only should there be an overall UK majority, but majorities in each of the four component parts of the UK. His amendment was rejected on the grounds that the referendum was to be advisory and non-binding. Had he proposed a different form of threshold, it might have been accepted. Having said that AV Ref had amendments tabled by the Lords twice to have some sort of threshold, but they were defeated both times by the Commons. The 2015 Referendum Act was debated and passed.

Between the Act gaining Royal Assent and the actual vote, the Conservative party issued a leaflet to every household saying that 'the Government will implement what you decide.' And here is the root of the problem. That leaflet had no basis in law - the Act didn't say that, none of the debates said it. But being in a Govt leaflet gave it an air of authority from which it is hard for a politician to distance themselves without looking 'un-democratic.'

So the day came and went, and the result was a knife edge. If you tossed a coin 35m times you'd get a similar result. Nigel Farage stated a few days before the 23rd June that 'in a 52:48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way.' Curiously prescient of him.. The final result was marginally closer than his fears, being 51.9:48.1. There are arguments about the quarter of the electorate who didn't show up to vote, and whether their abstentions should be taken into account; but the Ref Act 2015 didn't mention anything about them, so we'll leave that to one side.

From the result the advice to HoC would be that we had a divided nation, and when they get around to having the debate on whether we should remain in the EU, they would have to tread carefully and sensitively around the subject. That was the purpose of the whole exercise.

Only, that's not what happened. HoC have still not had that debate. David Cameron made the decision himself, declared we were leaving, and walking into Number 10 humming a curious tune. Within 24 hours of the result, centuries of parliamentary constitutional law were bypassed. And this is the bone of contention. Folk like Gina Miller have contested it in court, and the High Court have ruled that the leaflet was not legal, and had no right to have stated what it did. The hearings also raised various concerns about the process, and what the result actually meant.

In the months that followed, it became apparent that the rhetoric of the Leave campaign was flawed. Arguments have been put forward about dishonesty from the Remain group, but there has been little to disprove about their position, as we have lived it for the last 40 years. Now, political campaigns based around mis-truth is nothing new, and whilst it's irritating that folk took in the lies and voted in line with them, as well as their views on immigration, control, etc., they voted that way and that's all there is to it. One hopes they may regret it, and see truth of what happened, but one oughtn't hold one's breath. No one likes to face having been lied to. However, the issue at stake here, really, is due process, and whether we are a democracy.

Fast forward a few months, and the Article 50 White Paper is published. After the Leave campaign championing the phrase 'Take back control,' it was interesting to note that the White Paper claimed on the first page that Parliament has “remained sovereign throughout our membership" of the EU. Issues surrounding the absorption of EU law that were touted during the campaign also appear slightly disingenuous when the statistics show that in the last decade the UK voted with the EU for over 2000 items of legislation, which all became parts of UK law, and voted against around 50 items. Those 50-odd still became UK law against our wishes, but agreeing with 97.5% of the laws put forward suggests that we did pretty well.

January 2017 saw the 'European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017' debated and passed: and still the debate about the referendum result hadn't happened. And this is a problem. Proper UK democracy - the following of laws passed, the conventions and protocols of how our Parliament is designed to operate, the checks, balances and due process - has been willingly and knowingly laid aside. And it's all rather odd. We have recourse to the High Court with this. It should not be seen as a done deal, as 'the people have spoken' - this isn't about the people having spoken, and never was. Advice was sought from them, and that was it. Were 'The People Have Spoken' a thing, one looks back to that first modern General Election in 1695, and it turns out The Whigs won. If The People Had Spoken, then how the heck do we have a Tory government now? It's a meaningless phrase, and coupled with the highly emotive 'The Will Of The People,' makes it very difficult for any politician with an understanding of the complex issues surrounding withdrawal from the EU to voice their concerns.

Deployment of these phrases suggests the spirit of Machiavelli is alive and well.

My friend also said "I thought about the last election, which was very close. So I looked that up and it was something like 42% Cons and 40% Labour. I think those of us who were disappointed but cleverer than me worked out that if it had been counted differently Labour would have got in." This is a valid point, and why our democracy is structured such that we hold General Elections at least every five years. Opinions change, ideas of what is best for the country are not static. Three years after 1695, the Tories won. The Will Of The People, had it existed, had changed, overturning the Will of three years before; and so democracy in this country started to roll its difficult journey through modern history.

Whilst referenda are infrequently used by the UK, there may be an argument for using them periodically to test the electorate's response to an idea outside of the general political process. There have been a few concerning Welsh self governance, each with sufficient time between them that testing the waters may be worth while. Having a second EU referendum some decades following the one in 1975 may or may not have been a good governance. There are some worries from history about the multiple deployments of a referendum as a political tool, and satirical films on the subject, such as 'The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, bear consideration in relation to the nature of the political forces seeking to use them.

There are fundamental issues with the nature of how the 2016 referendum was run, both in preparation and following it, which I have highlighted here. They could have easily been mitigated. Using a simple majority is an appropriate way of answering questions such as 'should we watch Thomas The Tank Engine or In The Night Garden?' but not for the determination of matters of State. A 'super-majority' is more appropriate if the result is to be binding - yet none was set, as it was both declared during Parliamentary debate and in the legislation that it would not be needed given the nature of the intention underlying the vote.

My feelings about the result, I don't doubt, come through in my choice of words and phrasing, and had the process followed been in line with our democratic traditions, I would have been stoic and less vociferous in the face of a similar result.

However, I hope I have shown, in some way, that whilst the result of the referendum is, perhaps, lamentable and will have many far-reaching consequences to its enactment (there I go again); the problem is not so much the result, but the undermining of our democratic constitution. This is, fundamentally, why we should not 'accept it and get on.'

As a side note, it is worth noting that the civil service in Whitehall are perfectly competent in drafting watertight 'democratic' legislation, one need only examine the laws surrounding a Union's right to strike.

There is a real irony that the path being followed is one that is significantly undermining democracy, whilst being carried out in that name. Perhaps it is the British love of irony that has held most MPs back from following Burke and Churchill's advice.

Addendum

Those who practise science will know that on the proposal of a hypothesis, one develops a methodology to test the hypothesis, then examines the results to look for trends in the data that support or refute that hypothesis. Various statistical tests are available, and depend on the structure of the methodology as to which is appropriate; but no matter which tests are used, one looks for a result which decisive. It is accepted practise to look for results which have a significance of greater than 5%, anything less than that is considered to be noise - it doesn't support the hypothesis and any scientist worth their salt will reject that hypothesis, and go and make a cup of tea (optional, though recommended).

Whilst the 2016 Referendum

• was essentially, a political, rather than scientific, experiment;
• had, as we've seen, a curious methodology; and
• had results that won't even fit a simple T-Test, let alone an ANOVA

the difference between the two votes was 3.8%. As mentioned, were one to toss a coin 35m times the result would be very similar (so long as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern were not involved..).

Intricate matters of law aside, if anyone is willing to base fundamental matters of State on something comparable to the toss of a coin, they should probably re-evaluate what they believe 'democracy' to be.

Incognito

I met Sandra Bullock the other night.

It was in a dream (of course), but it was she nonetheless.

It was mid afternoon on the Underground, a sparcely populated carriage. I forget which line. She was sat alone, just sitting, with shades on to mask identity. I was curious, so sat next to her. After a short time I enquired if she knew the time. The turn of head, catching eyes, tone of voice confirmed my suspicions that is was indeed her. After a minute or two I mentioned, sotto voce, that I was a big fan of her work. She allowed me to make conversation, and we chatted for a while.

I had little else to do during the afternoon before a train home, so I silently elected to get off at her stop. We continued to talk, how she found England to be, weather, books, history. I asked if she had time for a coffee, which she needed some persuading to accept. I said I would ensure she got to her appointment in some offices not too far away.

We had just over half an hour.

I found a caff on a back street, with few customers. We shared a large slice of lemon drizzle cake over a latte and pot of tea, and continued to talk about life, love, hopes and failures. It was all very easy and pleasant, no pretensions and no awe.

Leaving the caff, I walked her, as promised, to the offices. Just as we parted company I gave her a copy of my CD remarking "I'm not a doctor, but I think you ought to take one of these." Our warm valedictions included no talk of meeting again, or even being in touch.

I wonder if I'll see her again.

A Taste Of..

well.. it turns out my eldest is a fan of contemporary Icelandic folk.. Today she introduced me to the music of Of Monsters And Men - very nice too.

I have paused to reflect a little on musical introductions.

In our youth, my brother and I perused the record collexion of our father, elements of which helped inform our musical tastes. It worked out quite well - in the very late 70s to mid 80s when we were finding our way, Dad's LPs stretched from the earlyish 60s, through the 70s to a few then contemporary discs; acknowledging some overlap, Simon and I almost divided the collection in two, excepting a few stragglers. The music we discovered from then has remained with us since. My brother finds himself a lifelong fan of the more 60s based music, such as The Beatles, the blues, and rhythm and blues (hit, as they say, it..); I took more from the second half of the collexion, with such diverse elements as The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, ELO, Supertramp, 10cc - basically the building blocks of a life spent in the environs of progressive rock.


I have three children, and (sadly) do not live in the same house as them. For one reason and another it is highly unlikely that they will give much thought to looking through my LPs. Even were we to share accommodation it would still be an improbable proposition. From what I see there may be a few reasons.


My favoured format is not so common these days, my children are growing up in a culture where their jukebox is based around YouTube and other related phenomena. Whilst they know what to do with a CD, mostly, it seems that they would rather not.
My LPs are at least two formats old. They are not an instant medium. Whilst they offer a degree of random access, it is less than their successors. As we choose to label each successive generation with having shorter attention spans than their forebears there seems to be the expectation that the labels will be correct, and so allow technology to close the gap on desire and gratification. To my children, such ancient tech as the vinyl disc now seems a more than slightly alien concept, and less attractive as a route to music than the click of a mouse.


As an aside, I do question some of the short attention span claims; many youths over the last 15 years seem to be able to handle long films and lengthy series such as LOTR, Harry Potter and Twilight..


A second reason is that my favoured music is further removed from the present than where my adventure began. In the 80s when we were plundering Dads LPs, his collexion was taken from the culture and time he lived through, which was a still a recent memory. A fair swathe of the music was still played on the mainstream radio, maybe not on the hippest shows, but since it was, at the time, between 5 and 20 years old it wasn't so far out of reach. Some of the bands in Dad's collexion were even still making music.

My LPs represent a similar length of time as my father's, but offset by 5-7 years, from ~1968 to ~1983. My taste has never been immediately contemporary, and as such is less representative of 'my time' in the way that Dad's was of his. I do not have anything by Wham!, Duran Duran, Bros, Bryan Adams [errr, OK, I'm getting a little sketchy.. Since I didn't really pay any attention to what was hip after about 1983, I have little idea whom to list here!]. My children are unlikely to encounter the artists whose albums I possess anywhere other than my record collexion, so there isn't the same draw of 'Dad, do you have anything else by..'. It is not the case that there are vaguely familiar names as it was for me.

I believe there may be other factors of perception at play, along with standard generational differences, but they're probably not worth investigating at this point.


This is not to say that I cannot make small suggestions here and there to maybe help my offspring along the way in their journey of music. They may find my record collection irrelevant, perhaps artefacts of an increasingly lost time; but I hope I might be a relevant signpost here and there.

Having listened to 5 tracks from Of Monsters And Men, I was able to suggest some items from Laura Viers 'July Flame' album which were not poorly received. Perhaps in time I might be able to drop in some Fleet Foxes, then maybe a hint of CSNY, Joni Mitchell and Creedence ClearWater Revival.. Well, might as well try make the best of it - I know she'll never go for Genesis or Gentle Giant!

Tomorrow never knows

I've been reflecting on a bit of code I've had to write recently, and it's got me thinking about how far ahead one should think in designing things - whether it be software (as with me) or anything else..

For a current piece of work, I have inherited a code base which is well suited for its intended use. It doesn't appear to have much fat/ bloat/ unneeded features. It has structure, it has an apparent internal parsimony which holds it together as one would hope. The user interface of the software is primarily mouse driven, and as such the controls are well set up for the various interactions that the modern computers tend to offer when it comes to pointing devices - move over, clicking with any of three buttons, mouse wheel support, etc.

A new feature was added just before I got the code, something that required accepting keyboard as well as mouse input. This is cross platform code, supporting Apple Mac & Windows. The Apple code was working as hoped, but the Windows code wasn't. So I went to have a look.

It was very clear that the keyboard-based enhancement given to the Mac side of the code was very much an afterthought - something bolted on to the fairly tight code that was already there. It stuck out, not in an ugly fashion, but like a new extension on a house where the bricks haven't been matched to the original structure. The corresponding Windows code had not been written at all, and so my task was to write it. The nature of the framework/library presented certain challenges, based on how the original code had been designed. It had been designed with just the purpose of getting the job in hand done (that is, mouse based input), and so weaving new functionality was not as simple as it could have been if there had been an eye kept open to the future.

My observations are not a criticism of the original developer (be they one or many), but more about the nature of what should be included during the design phase of a project.

The term 'Agile' has been a buzzword in many circles for a number of years, and software development has not been shielded from it. In software it frequently manifests itself as a strategy for getting done only what needs to be done at a given time, and if needs change in the future, then you just adapt what you did previously. There is some sense to this - why prepare for something that may never be needed?

I must confess, I've never been totally sold on the whole 'Agile Development' thing (with a capital 'A'). Being 'agile' (lowercase 'a') seems a good idea to me - being able to respond quickly to change, and building the tools & libraries with which one can meet those challenges looks like reasonable sense. But an ethos of 'do today what you need today' often comes across as a little shallow. Does it work, or does it just commoditise development in an unhelpful way? Many places seem to swear by it, but it's largely the developers who blow that trumpet: might I suggest that there's a hint of MRDA about this - they are the ones who benefit the most, since (perhaps) it is a way of ensuring longievity of employment, as "built-in obsolescence" doesn't really factor with software in the same way that it does with physical products..

hmmm.. Getting a little sidetracked here, I might return to that topic another day (I might not).. However, the question remains - to what extent should one have an eye on the future when making something today?

When a carpenter designs a standard rectangular table, should they make allowance for a possible fifth leg to be added? Would experience suggest that this may be rather pointless excercise?

When purchasing land to build a road, should allowance be made in advance for potential escalation of traffic numbers and the possible need for future widening? Would experience suggest that this may be a prudent thing to at least explore.

My guess is that it's the 'experience' which would dictate these things. Carpenters will generally have some idea how many legs will be needed to support the weight of wood they have before them. Transportation Planners have access to all kinds of statistics of traffic flows & growth rates for more types of road than any of us could be interested to know existed. Based on my time sat writing software I know that, had I been one of the original designers of the library I have been working on, I would have put in some provision for keyboard input. However, I may have well been very wrong to do so, since experience of this type of product would suggest that it was an unnecessary design feature (given that it's a totally mouse driven environment in over 99% of this niche market), and I would be putting fat where it wasn't needed.

It would have made today's job a lot easier though.

The past comes calling

One of my favourite corners of the internet, known as KvR, runs various competitions.

There is a monthly writing comp in which a piece must be written & recorded within certain defined boundaries (mostly a limit to the length, must stick to a given theme, but occasionally others). The first three weeks of a month are devoted to the writing and recording, then the last week all the entrants (and other forum members) vote on the pieces to decide a winner. I've never won, but have entered many times through the years; generally there are 50-70 entries. Worst I did was last, best was 4th, generally I'm in the first quarter. I do it more for fun than chart position. Some of my entries can be found here.

KvR also runs 'Developer Challenges,' where independent developers get the chance to enter a new creation each, and the community gets a ton of new free stuff! There have been three (DC06, DC07 & DC09); I (both uniquely and cheekily) have entered 4 times.. I have faired averagely, which I don't mind; the things I have written have been devised & created during snatched moments and so their ranking is probably a fair assessment. However, they have garnered attention away from the arena of competition, being recommended by folk at varying intervals. This has been very pleasant. From checking server logs (in the way that one does), I have found a new reference to my DC09 entry 'SynecDC.' It's from the myvst website and can be found here.



I enjoyed making SynecDC, and there is an idea for a big brother to it which will add further modulators; but it's not coming any time soon! My favourite patch is "DragonCity" which can be heard at 1:29.

Mixed Emoticons

Some time back, well I can place it between Oct 1997 and mid 1998, I went looking for information about 'smilies,' or 'emoticons' as the are now often called. The internet was a much smaller place, so finding information was (in some ways) easier; but equally, search engines weren't everything we might expect today, and so finding information was (in some ways) harder [www.altavista.digital.com was my weapon of choice, tho' I used others].

In 1995 a friend had printed on A4 the symbols *:O) and stuck it to her fridge. This was my first encounter with the idea of making faces using ASCII. Whilst I had known about Bulletin Boards and the like, they weren't something I'd had much opportunity to play with; though I was computer minded, I had not been exposed to various esoteric elements that we now take for granted.

So there I was, on a dull Friday afternoon, working for Seele (UK) Ltd, looking after their network at the London Fruit and Wool Exchange (lovely place, actually); I dialled up to wander the web, something that wasn't really a common thing to do. I typed in Penny's hieroglyphic to see what else there was about of a similar format. Scott Fahlman's Smiley Lore page already existed, which was a good read - this was before the concerted effort by Microsoft and others to find his original post in 1982 which suggested :-) as a way of highlighting that a thought should be taken lightly.

I also found a few pages which listed out known derivatives - those we know well, like wink ;-) tongue out :-p etc, but also a collexion of many and varied peculiar and artful items. However, I saw a gap. Something was missing. Thus I submitted my contribution to the smiley world, and it made it on to a number of pages which have long since disappeared.

It was 'Davy Crockett'

Q:-)

I give it again in support of all those whose frontiers are wild - may they become kings (and queens) in such places.

Heck is other people's code

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, so whilst Bill Bruford's Earthworks captures my aural attention, I will vent a little about one of the main hassles that can beset a jobbing programmer - received code.

I am currently engaged in 3 projects (yay! I have some work!), two of which are longer standing than my recent redundancy. But all three are causing me grief in one way or another...

In most lines of work, one can generally pick up where another has left off. One will mumble and grumble about certain things that have been done before, or be pleasantly surprised by other bits of what is found. A clerk might despair of their previous incumbent's filing incompetence; a solicitor may be pleased to see the last person to touch a case made a note about an often overlooked piece of law; handymen will often have little praise for the last person to lay hands on the items that they have been called to 'fix.'

Software is little different from any other discipline in this respect. When one starts a new project, or returns to work on something that one hasn't touched for a long time (even six months can be a long time in programming), there can be many "err.. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?" moments (I'll refrain from the more common exclamations..). Equally there can be a number of 'oh, that's pretty neat' epiphanies, but they are generally fewer and farther between.

So I have three projects. The latest I have received generally seems of a reasonable standard, and certainly does what's its supposed to (it's code for two products which have been on the market for some time); however, getting the thing to compile on the various platforms for which it's specified has been a challenge, and one I have not been able to get through without some very gratefully received help. Most places I have worked, the received code will at least have the decency to be able to construct itself if you tell it where to look for its component parts. Alas this one has been an uphill struggle; it's almost there, but not totally done yet, hence taking a break to reflect here just to regain some clarity.

The other two projects are conversion projects of work I have previously undertaken (MIDI Madness and a vocal plugin written for the NTrack software studio). Both pieces of kit work well and are 'in the wild', but the respective clients asked me to make them available for the Apple Macintosh [a 'mac' for those unaware of the history ;-)]. This has meant a complete ground-up rewrite for one, and a switch of libraries for another. Dealing with my own code is alright, here and there I notice things and wonder what I was thinking, (let's call it a 'QQSP' moment, or maybe just 'QSP' for brevity); but getting it to grips with yet another person's (or company's) idea of how something should 'work' and how I can stitch something that was perfectly solid onto can be.. well, a long and quite windy road. The odd thing is that at the end of the day, both these projects will just do what they did before!

Right, well, back to it...

Reading week

Today (well, yesterday, it's actually tomorrow now), I had a very nice time sitting on a train reading (book, magazine, newspaper, in that order) & doing some listening. I will write about some of my recent listening in another post.

In between journeys I met up with some very pleasant gentlemen in Reading. I was hoping to meet Tiny & Keyop, especially Princess.. even 7zark7, but alas no, they weren't there. The very fine fellows have asked me to do some work with them. At the  moment it will be a week a month, but it's exactly what I want to be doing. I know that not everyone who reads this will share my views, but I see this as an answer to prayer, and I feel very blessed by the day, the attitudes of the chaps, and that very nice lunch they took me for. Oh and the chance to fiddle about with some fantastic and rare old gear :-)

Tomorrow (today - see above) I meet with my local Job Centre. They will, no doubt, ask what I will be doing the other three weeks of a month.

..of cabbages and things..

I find it a peculiar thing just what one can accumulate - physically, mentally, emotionally...

Today has not been an easy day. The laptop at which I currently type is a pleasant thing, 17" screen, good keyboard with numeric pad (tho' CTRL is not always where I expect it); plus it has a collexion of software I like - AVAST for anti-virus, Agnitum Outpost for firewall, VMWare Server for sandboxed development work, plus various other juicy bits of kit. But all is not entirely well.

I like Outpost, I was one of the first adopters, buying my license within a year of the product coming out. I liked the way it presented itself, the way the rules worked, etc. But most of all I liked the way it was extensible - one could write one's own plug-ins for it. Being a coder, this was very appealing. However, I could never work out what I would want a firewall plug-in to do, since everything seemed to do what it needed via the rules. One chap wrote a plug-in which showed network traffic in a task-tray icon, which was very good - but since he'd done it, there was no need for me to. Oh well. After trialling ZoneAlarm, Symantec and a number of others at the time (this was 2001/2), I went with Outpost and have stayed with it for the last 8 or more years.

However, it has an issue with this laptop that I've never been able to get to the bottom of, and it appears neither did Agnitum. I was not the only one to report it - sudden, unexplained BSODs. I use the past tense, since I am using version 4. Agnitum are upto version 7. So, why don't I just upgrade? Well, as previously stated, I use VMWare products, and Outpost blocked all the VM network traffic in version 5 & 6, something reported on both Agnitum & VMWare forae, but never adequate resolved. Version 4 doesn't have this problem.
In the last week I have had upto 3 BSODs a day, and today I have downloaded the latest version having it in mind to try it out. However, I have a lot invested in this harddisk (both in terms of data & installed programs), and don't want issues of having to start over - so I thought I'd get my BART disk (Backup And Recovery Tools to the initiated) with a trusty copy of Drive SnapShot on it, and image the disk for safety, then try out Outpost 7.

I then go to find the disk - ha! Where did I put it? I knew it had come back from where I had been working sometime ago, so it must be in the flat. For reasons best explained elsewhere, for almost 2 years I have been living away from my family, the last 16months in this flat. I have various items with me that I have procured from where my family are, plus items I have gained since being here. I hadn't realised quite how much was here! There is a bedroom and a living area - two rooms.. shouldn't be too hard to find a disk in a clear red jewel case, surely..

And this is where I find what I have accumulated. Since being here I have been given a bookcase & have a set of shelves, plus a desk and some drawers. This furniture houses many things - I have my DSP library (as in Digital Signal Processing, not some documentation of an ego trip) culled from countless websites & PDF printouts; I have home-burned CDs & DVDs; I have books; I have artefacts of my life.

In looking for the disk I have ended up wading through things that need filing... I have found that in the time passed since printing of various bits of DSP papers, my knowledge has accumulated to the point where some things I remember struggling with in the past seem that much more readily accessible... and I have found various bits of art & craft and such that the children have made for me whilst I have been out of the house, even a father's day card that my eldest made for me when she was about 5 (7 years ago).

It's a curious thing that, in a relatively short time, a person can accumulate such a wealth of 'things' that occupy space, mind and soul, and the effects that they can have on one's being. Having to hawk through the stuff was a fairly tedious chore (and not finished - filing still needs to be done...); finding that one has progressed in the field in which one endeavours to create is gratifying; and being presented with emotionally significant artefacts can hamper one's desire and ability to remain focussed...

With this somewhat draining task, along with various other duties in the administration of my welfare today, I haven't done much dev work, which I know I should have done. I'd be interested to here folk's views on the extent to which I should feel guilty about that! [I did some useful work the last 3 days, in my defence]

Did the disk turn up? Well, yes it did.. I had given up & was going to settle down with a beer & watch 'Gonks Go Beat' whilst having some Llama pie I made yesterday, and idly looked in a pile of things on the desk where my DevPC is. Bottom of the pile. I think I saw it wink at me.