Valve operated mindset?

I see Bletchley Park has released some new photos of the Colossus, one of the valve operated computers used in World War II. 

Back in those days it was all paper tape input, but you can see the outline architecture of a von Neumann machine, which is filling an entire room.

We had venerable Elliott 803 in my first computer room. It was transistorised but similarly arcane and had paper tape input, along with the 39-bit word (don't ask). It only had 4096 memory cells I seem to remember and needed to be programmed in Autocode. We didn't have mag tape, but it supported 35mm film coated with magnetic material, by Kodak.

Then the Elliott 503 came along with Algol to write Apps and the rest is, as they say, history.

It's worth noting that this heyday of invention was largely from the International Computers Limited  ICL stable: Elliott, Marconi, English Electric and Leo (Joe Lyons corner houses). The business-focused part of this group in turn became part of ICL - a 10%-nationalised company formed in 1968 by Harold Wilson's Labour government, whilst the automation parts of Elliott went to GEC - the company which would end up briefly running Dragon Data before the the latter's collapse in 1984.

GEC would eventually end up as part of British Aerospace - BAe Systems, whilst ICL was subsumed by Fujitsu in 1998, although it kept its name until 2002.

ICL (and later Fujitsu) continued to win many government bids with their COBOL-running competitors to IBM's machines- some say it also staved off antitrust. 

COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These domain weaknesses resulted in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability. It was designed for clerical programming with forms...

Many said that ICL's new range (2900) was better technology, but IBM had the marketing clout.

In Europe there are IBM buildings adjacent to major German organisations with processing centres. In the UK I can think of Fujitsu across the road from big government processing centres.

FutureMe

 Well maybe I'll do this. Send a letter to future me.

https://www.futureme.org/letters/new

Waiting for the phrase Technical Debt to be in a sentence with Horizon.

I'd add project is overrunning and the commercial folk are getting agitated about the contract.

Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. 

In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code. 

aka 'shipping bugs' 

 If you’ve been in the software industry for any period of time, chances are you’ve heard the term “technical debt”. Also known as design debt or code debt, the phrase (or more accurately, the metaphor) is widely used in the technology space. It is referred to as a catchall that covers everything from bugs to legacy code, to missing documentation. But what exactly is technical debt anyway? And why do we call it that? 

 Technical debt is a phrase originally coined by software developer, Ward Cunningham, who in addition to being one of 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto, is also credited with inventing the wiki. He first used the metaphor to explain to non-technical stakeholders at WyCash why resources needed to be budgeted for refactoring. 

 He didn’t realize at the time, but he had coined a new buzzword in the software community. Later, it would become the subject of countless academic studies, debates, and panel discussions. 

 Years later, Cunningham described how he initially came up with the technical debt metaphor: 

 “With borrowed money, you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but then until you pay back that money you’ll be paying interest. I thought borrowing money was a good idea, I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.”

Snowdrop

Well, Happy New Year. Let's hope it's a good one. 

We've already the first snowdrops appearing which I take as a good omen. Although driving back from London to Exeter a couple of days ago was very wet and windy. 

Now we've taken down the Christmas decorations and reset the house, so we are good for 2024. And I've cycled about 50 miles so far and am back on track.

 

Santa Calculations 2023

 

Time to republish the Santa Calculations, which I first published back in 2006 and then updated in 2010. Then I was using 7 billion as the world population. Now its 8 billion.

Firstly, here's the link to the Santa tracking system created by NORAD. 

For those of you who are more interested in the technology of Santa, NORAD's FAQs provide the following: 

I've again used the Joel Potischman and Bruce Handy calculations as the basis for the speed calculations, with my own adaptations:

The most notable corrections to be applied are:

- Santa delivers no gifts to naughty children (not even coal)
- Naughty to nice ratio is 1:9
- As confirmed by NORAD, one Santa distributes all of the gifts.
- There is only one family per household.
- Santa bypasses non Santa belief system houses.
- Reindeer have recently eaten fresh magic acorns.


Calculation Assumptions (2022):

- World population = 8.06 billion
- Children under 18 = 2.689 billion (Hmm may be higher)
- Global Santa based belief systems: 33%
- Max children requiring delivery therefore 887 million
- Children per household: 3.5 (may seem high?) 
- Number of households requiring distribution 253 million
- Naughty to nice factor applied but not many all naughty households
- Remove all naughty households (25% 0f 10%) = 6.3 million
- Eastern orthodox using Jan 5 instead of Dec 25 = 18.2 Million
- Target Households = 234.8 million on Dec 25
- Estimated child bed time 21:00 (9pm) with 7 hours sleep. 

(child sleep duration on Dec 24 may also require revision)

Gives circa 31 hours (24+7) for all deliveries
Time is 1860 mins or 111,600 seconds

The average number of homes to visit per second = circa 2096. 
So average delivery per household is circa 500 milliseconds, which is why Santa normally appears a bit blurry (I previously thought it was the sherry)

Land surface minus Antarctica is around 79 million square miles. Distribute destinations evenly = 0.7 miles between households creating a total distance of circa 110 million miles.

So 110 million miles in 31 hours = 3.6 million miles an hour or circa 1000 miles per second or Mach 4770 at a linear speed.

This explains Rudolph's red nose because of air resistance creating around 20 quintillion Joules of energy per second, which would convert a non-reindeer nose to charcoal at such energy levels. I think the acceleration and deceleration per household may also need some examination.

Luckily Santa has lots of special powers so these mere physics facts are no problem to such a superhero. 

Refining Cover Story

Refining an idea...

Living it large

 We stayed in a hotel, close to our old apartment. It's all about the lifestyle around there.

Battersea Power Station

It was interesting to revisit some of our old haunts in Chelsea Bridge Wharf. Of course it's now all part of the greater Battersea Power Station complex, which is a worthwhile day trip in London. I notice that even the Made in Chelsea gang have many of their sessions over in Battersea now. We used to call it 'South Chelsea' anyway.

The reassuringly expensive wine is still on sale in the General Store, with normal bottles around £25-£60 and the selected specials ranging up to £800. And next door is that vagabond of a wine bar which dispenses metred wine.

 

Walk through the power station and it is difficult to see the impact of the recession. Everyone carries high-end shopping bags and luxury goods are ubiquitous. I think it's called bi-modal distribution.

Here's one of the infinity pool overlooking the Battersea chimneys.

Robot robbery

Meh. I had to pay for parking the other day and the machine only took cards. I put in my car registration and then did the pay by card thing but somehow it didn't register. I didn't realise and thought the transaction had gone through.

Wrong. I received the threatening £100 penalty notice ten days later and had to decide whether to contest it. 

Instead I paid the £50 settlement under protest, with a complaint about the machine being faulty. The reply told me I'd admitted liability by paying the £50 and that the machine wasn't the responsibility of the parking company in any case. Hand washing.

They are being allowed to get away with too many swindles. And, no, they are to sorry for any inconvenience. 

Triumph

 

I was checking Strava today and received the end of year summary. I was aiming for 4,000 cycled miles and did just over that total with a couple of major bursts late in the year. It declared my result a triumph. I'll take that.

Cover Story - GPT-X AI iPhone 16

 

I asked my AI system to generate a cover for my test novel - Cover Story - which I'm thinking will be a collection of Ed Adams covers and their origins. Simply, how I wrote the various novels. One page for the cover and another for the blurb. More or less a catalogue.

This is what it generated first - completely unmodified. I tried again and the next covers were distinctly  'darker'. Too much dystopian future in my writing I guess. 

I'll be testing the Apple AI on an iPhone soon, so then we'll see what can be achieved without using a bank of networked computers. Samsung Gauss is a similar idea. My latest Mac has multiple neural net processors inside, so it seems to be the way things are going.

Generative Large Language Models on an iPhone. Whatever next?

Guys and Dolls

Got a Theatre fix at the Bridge Theatre near Tower Bridge. Guys and Dolls. Fun, energetic immersive show. Came out singing 'luck be a lady tonight'. Impressive show.