Candles in the rain

I remember seeing Melanie Safka perform in London once. Lone guitar on the stage. She'd played Woodstock, the first female to open a new record label(Buddha) and had a string of hits. Songs about roller skates, animal crackers, things being a certain kind of symbol if they were longer than they were wide. That scratch and sniff cover on Garden in the City (my copy still works!). Well, she's got a brand new key now.

Wasting my time

 

I've received a few of those password messages recently. You know, the ones where someone in Bangkok is trying to log into my account. I log the attempts to the security gateway and report them to the service that is being hijacked.

It occurs how much time I now waste doing this. With a combination of a security gateway, a firewall and a sandbox, plus around 1,110 unique passwords, it's just the waste of time of it all. 

Press here for more information.

AI goes shirty

I've just seen the respectable example cited of using AI to analyse the shirt a man is wearing,  when the man comes on and tells me how white my shirts can be but, he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me. But if he did my AI could recognise the shirt and order one just like it online.

Crazier than the Bonzos. Ask Mr Stanshall. 

Spoken intro by on-the-street reporter:

Hello, well that was the sound of Roger's Wah Wah Rabbits. You heard them eating endive there. That's very cheap at this time of the year. But now here in Willesden Green...yes, brrr...it's a bit chilly, but no matter, because we're going to talk about shirts!

I'm going to take you right away straight over to the Earls Court Olympia to watch the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt even

Good morning. Could I have this shirt cleaned "express," please ?

Yes, that'll be three weeks, dearie

Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Well they're shakin' my shirt all over the place  But it's been thrown right back in my face Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt

New horizons in sound now as Roger plays a solo on the electric shirt collar Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt?

teenage engineering and the rabbit

I must admit to a slightly bemused expression when I first heard about the pocket-sized Rabbit R1 being promoted by Teenage Engineering.

It's not what you think. It's a compact bright orange AI device that's like a smartphone but which only has AI functionality. Scroll wheel, microphone button, camera. Tamagotchi on steroids maybe? Or the AI part of my car's speech recognition? 

It's an interesting take from the folk who made those build it yourself synths.

you and whose army?

It's getting heated. Now it looks as if Trump is resurrecting his old plans to have a private army similar to Putin's Wagner group. The stars help the person in command. I suppose it will help Trump take over dissident towns and corral non-supporters.

Among Trump critics who’ve had run-ins with his security, complaints include unnecessary force, discriminatory profiling and removing people from events based on little more than their appearance. 

Crass landing

'Oops I did it again' could be the donald's walk-on music. America sleeps its way into another presidency run by the king outlaw. Laundering, Sleaze, Payola, Defamation, Tax Evasion, Rigging. He's denied them all and just got bigger suits. 

The press must love it, for the number of stories it can generate.

As Britney might say:

"Oops, I did it again
I played with your heart, got lost in the game
Oh baby, baby
Oops, you think I'm in love
That I'm sent from above
I'm not that innocent"

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...