Internet – Page 5 – Me on the net

Weather, seasons and Christmas

At this time of the year, we are looking forward to spring, even though spring is officially about a month and a half away, which puts us slap in the middle of winter. There are signs, though, that spring is around the corner. Plants which bloom early in the year are starting to show signs of life, and the buds on some trees are showing some green as they prepare to burst into green bunches of leaves.

Every burst of clear weather seems to produce both warmth during the days and frostiness during the night. It seems that each cycle is slightly warmer than the last but that might just be me wishing an end to winter! The wetter times don’t seem to be bringing the freezing cold wintry blasts, though there is the occasional shower of hail or sleet mixed in.

English: Snow pellet/Graupel Français : Grain ... — English: Snow pellet/Graupel Français : Grain de neige roulée (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The main reason for the hope that winter is drawing to a close is the now noticeable lengthening of the days. The day length is up from 9 hours and 12 minutes or so at the solstice to 10 hours and 12 minutes or so today. The day is lengthening at a rate of more than 2 minutes per day at the moment.

I don’t mind the cold as such. It’s the constant shrugging on and off of clothes as one transitions between indoors and outdoors that bugs me, and the necessity of keeping the house warm, which in itself means going outdoors to fetch fuel, which of course involves donning extra clothing and all the annoyances which go with that.

There is a sort of seasonal drag in the clothing department, incidentally. I’ve noticed that I tend to resist slinging on the extra clothing in autumn and early winter and I’m likewise reluctant to take it off as the weather and temperatures improve.

Of course, July and August are the warmer months in the Northern hemisphere and northerners will be experiencing shorter days and colder weather. As we track in to spring you Northerners will be heading towards autumn and eventually winter. We will be looking forward to spring and summer, which pretty much bracket Christmas for us.



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Of course, since I originate from the Northern hemisphere myself I have had to become accustomed to having Christmas in summer and I personally think it’s great. With Christmas at the start of summer we can enjoy it without the hassle of keeping warm. It does make the traditional northern Christian festival meal seem a bit heavy though and who want to roast a turkey for hours in warm weather?

It does conflate two events however – the Christmas holiday period and the traditional summer holidays which seem to merge seamlessly into one another. One effect of this is that people seem to be unavailable from Christmas Eve through to the beginning of February, which was something that I had trouble adjusting to when I moved here.

Tradesmen tend to be unavailable from the start of the Christmas period well into the New Year and some smaller shops also close for an extra week or two. Obviously this has its advantages for the shop keepers, but I still feel disappointed when my favourite barber is closed until mid-January!

We have a Public Holiday for the Queen’s Birthday in June (June 1 this year) and the next Public Holiday is on October 26, which means that there is almost 5 months of the year without a Public Holiday during the darkest part of the year. One advantage of having Christmas in mid-winter is that it gives one something to look forward to as the days close in.

Winter is cold, obviously, but that in itself is bearable (up to a point). But there’s a phenomenon called the “chill factor” which makes windy winter days seem much colder. My weather app on my phone tells me that the temperature outside is 6.9 degrees centigrade, but the it “feels like: 4 degrees centigrade. It recommends 3 – 4 layers of clothing and a windproof layer. Brrrrr! Fortunately it doesn’t seem too wet out so walking the dog should not be too arduous.

In this season of the year we tend to get low pressure system after low pressure system forming in the Tasman Sea which bring cold fronts across the country with associated fronts bringing storms and rains. Sometimes they come down from the tropics and hit us from the north, usually bringing warmer but wetter weather from the north. We tend to get better more settled weather when a high pressure system comes to us, spun off from a high pressure system over Australia.

(I took a break and walked the dog. While we out we were hit by what you could euphemistically call a “wintry shower”. In other words, wind, hail and rain!)

Many people from the Northern hemisphere tend to find Christmas in summer unsettling, but I quite like it. I’m not a barbecue person, but the occasional meal taken outside is very pleasant, and it is becoming more usual over here to have a barbecue on Christmas Day. Another advantage is that when one is Christmas shopping one doesn’t have to dodge the weather as one dashes between shops and fights one’s way through the crowds of late shoppers, all after that elusive and critical last gift.

However, although I think that mulled wine is an abomination, there is something pleasant about sipping your favourite alcoholic tipple in front of a roaring fire. Maybe while doing something traditional, like listening to a CD of carols carefully enunciated by Korean choirs who have no word of the English language and who have little to no idea about the traditions involved.

One thing about having winter at this time of the year, it means that I can tease relatives who live in the Northern hemisphere as we climb up towards warmer weather while they slide down to autumn and winter. However I have to acknowledge that they can get their revenge in six months later as the cycle of the seasons continues to repeat. I’ll be looking out the thermal undies when they start talking about snowdrops and crocuses.



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“Yet feet that wandering have gone, turn at last to home afar”

The title is part of the poem spoken by Bilbo Baggins at the end of “The Hobbit” by J.R.R Tolkein, as he sees his home from afar on his return. However he did not finally settle there, moving to Rivendel before the events of “The Lord of the Rings”. Eventually he and others, including Frodo and Gandalf sailed off to the West and out of the knowledge of the people of Middle Earth.

This poem came to mind as we returned to New Zealand from England, having visited relatives in England, Wales and Ireland. We had a great time and it was sad to leave, but when we touched down in Auckland I have never previously felt so deeply that we had arrived home. And we still had the leg to Wellington to complete!



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The leg from Auckland to Wellington was brilliant! The air was so clear, although with some cloud, so the mountains poked their snowy heads through the white blanket. Even the lower peaks of some of the hills showed snow cover, as New Zealand had just emerged from a cold snap.

As we closed on Wellington I could see Kapiti Island from the window. Unfortunately my cell phone had run out of power so I could not take any pictures. To add insult to injury we turned left and passed south of Kapiti Island before passing to the west of Titahi Bay Porirua Harbour.

Just before Porirua city the clouds closed in, hiding the city itself and the northern suburbs of Wellington. The cloud cleared a little further south but not in time for me to spot our roof from the air!

As we passed over Wellington Harbour I got a good view of the lower Hutt Valley, including Petone and its wharf, close to where I used to work. Then it was all stations go for landing.

My own experiences led me to consider travels in general. As you do. We were excited to leave, since were going to see our relatives and have interesting times. Bilbo Baggins set out excitedly and with trepidation. In his case he knew very little about what was going to happen to him, and had he known, his cautious streak may well have impeded his going.

As with Bilbo’s travels, our travels had their excitements and their tedious aspects. As with Bilbo, the first sight of home came as an immense relief and the experiences of our travels became things to tell other about, to share with them. We however met no dragons though we saw many representations of them in Wales.

English: Side view of Smaug at the Juarez stre... — English: Side view of Smaug at the Juarez street portion of the parade. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This seems to me to be a common pattern. Even to blasé businessman travellers there must be some slight anticipation of events of the day or days ahead. When returning home, even the businessman would probably be looking forward to sleeping in his own bed. Even a simple commute to work embodies this pattern of anticipation, experiencing and relief on return to home.

Frodo reports that Bilbo warned of the dangers of going on a journey.

“He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.'”.

While neither Bilbo (in “The Hobbit”) or Frodo (in “The Lord of the Rings”) left home completely willingly, Bilbo being chivvied into it by Gandalf, and Frodo out of duty, many people completely willingly step into the “great river” that starts at every doorstep. There appears to be a conflict between the desire to remain comfortable at home and to experience new things.



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We were extremely tired by our journey which took a mere month or so. I can’t imagine how people such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo spent so long travelling. Marco Polo was away for 24 years!

Interestingly many travellers returned with truly amazing tales, of tribes of people with no heads, their faces in their torsos. Of people who consisted of large feet with eyes and mouths, presumably divided into left-footed and right-footed tribes. Where are these strange tribes today?

Today of course we can travel round the earth in a day, and to places in between in a few days or so. It is apparent to us that those fanciful peoples could never have existed, so where did they spring from?

Well, a traveller would know that his tall tales would be next to unverifiable. He may well have been travelling for months and would know that it was unlikely that anyone would go and check his reports. It may be that his communications with local inhabitants was limited and that he misunderstood the locals and then reported what he thought they had told him as his own experiences.



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Maybe the traveller would be trying to source funds to go back again, maybe to bring back one of these mysterious people. I can report that all the people that I met and saw were built to the standard pattern!

One thing that Columbus and Polo would not have had to cope with is jet lag. This condition is a consequence of moving to fast between time zones. At the rate that Polo was travelling that would be the least of his problems. I’ve not read his history but I can guess that he did not so much as travel slowly as move his home steadily to the east and then to the west as the commercial opportunities arose. While Columbus travelled faster, his rate of travel through the time zones probably caused him few problems.



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So, glad as I am to get home, I find jet lag debilitating. I’m fine when I get up, and fine during the day, but for some reason, when 7pm or 8pm rolls around my eyes start to droop. They say that jet lag lasts for a few days, so I should be over it in a day or so.



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(This blog has returned to normal. I hope someone out there enjoys my maunderings.)

Speed



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(Posted late again! Whoops!)

Every time I write my 1,000 words it is a challenge but sometimes it is more of a challenge. As I’ve said before, sometimes I know roughly what I want to include, while other times I pick a topic and go for it. This post is one of the latter.

Speed. Anyone who has been on the Internet since the early days knows about speed. When I hear people complaining about the speed of their connection I quietly laugh as I consider the days of dial-up, and of 2400 baud modems. A megabit download could take half an hour to an hour if the connection held up that long.

A Telia SurfinBird 56k modem, made by Telia. T... — A Telia SurfinBird 56k modem, made by Telia. They often came with a Internet package from the company in the late 1990s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As an aside, the “skreee, Kaboinga, boinga, boinga, skeeee…” of a dial up modem connecting induces nostalgia in me, though I’d not go back to those days! Today’s Internet is sometimes called the Information Superhighway. The old dial up Internet was much like a dirt road. With potholes.

When one takes a journey, say from one end of the country to the other, one sets out on local roads, which may or may not be congested, then one travels over the Motorways, or the Interstates, or the Autobahns. Then one travels on the local roads at the far end. Any of these may be congested, but the local roads are most likely to be slower to traverse.

The same is true of the Internet. Your local ISP is equivalent to the local roads at your end of the trip, and the target website or whatever you are connecting to is in their ISP’s local network.

If we delve a little further, it is evident that the copper or fibre that makes up the Internet is not really a factor in the speed of the Internet. Signals in the fibre travel at light speed. Typically this is less than light speed in empty space, but it is close to it. Signals in copper travel slower than this, but still at a significant percentage of the speed of light. (I’d put a link in here, but the subject is complex and I found no clear explanation. YMMV).

The real reasons that fibre is preferred over copper is the huge bandwidth and the much smaller attenuation in fibre cables. Bandwidth is often described in terms of how many lanes a highway has. Obviously the more lanes the more traffic a highway can handle. Attenuation is interesting. It’s as if your car starts out in New York in pristine condition, but deteriorates en route to Los Angeles, until it arrives at its destination looking like a bucket of bolts, if it makes it that far.

Whether or not the packets are transmitted by fibre or copper, the signal must somehow be loaded onto the cable, and this takes significant time. The packet of data is placed into a register on the network connector by the computer and a special chip translates that to a stream of bits on the wire, or pulses of light in the fibre.



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These pulses then whiz off onto the network. However they don’t travel all the way in one hop. Your computer connects to a modem device that sends the signal to your ISP, where the signals hit a router. This device looks and a whole packet of data, then send it off again towards its destination. It doesn’t get to its destination in one hop, and there may be a dozen or more hops before it gets there.

At the beginning and the end of each and every hop there is a device that grabs the packet of data off the wire, decides where to send it and puts it on another wire. These devices are called ‘routers’, a term which many people will have heard. As you can imagine, each hop adds a delay (or latency) to the packet of data. These delays are quite small but they add up.

English: Avaya ERS 8600. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the Information Superhighway doesn’t look that flash after all. Sometimes I wonder how data actually gets through at all. It’s as if there was a multi-lane highway across the country (the world even), but it is studded with interchanges which take significant time to traverse, increasing the time taken for the trip – light would take nanoseconds to get from here to Sydney if we had line of sight, but over the Internet it takes milliseconds.

Satellites are even worse. To reach a geostationary communications satellite and return takes of the order of half a second, an age in computing terms. Of course most communication satellites are lower than that so the delay is not as much as half a second, but it is still significant.



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The advent of streaming services has exacerbated the problem. The basic issue is twofold. To use the motorway analogy, there are many more cars on the road and as a result the interchanges are becoming crowded resulting in congestion. In general the motorways themselves are fast and free-flowing, but the interchanges have not caught up.

An ingenious partial solution is to strategically place machines around the world which effectively distribute the stuff that people want to receive, so that the same content is available locally. It’s like taking all the copies of the pictures in a gallery in Los Angeles and storing the copies in New York, Miami, Washington and so on. Rather than having to go all the way to Los Angeles, a New York viewer sees the picture locally.

In the diagram shown, we see an "Akamaize... — In the diagram shown, we see an “Akamaized” website; this simply means that certain content within the website (usually media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, video) will not point to servers owned by the original website, in this case ACME, but to servers owned by Akamai. It is important to note that even though the domain name is the same, namely http://www.acme.com and image.acme.com, the ip address (server) that image.acme.com points to is actually owned by Akamai and not ACME. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the sources of delay to your streaming the latest version of TV shows are many. The first possibility is your own setup. Maybe your network and modem are not up to the task. Secondly there is the telecom network. Tricky stuff happens between you and your ISP which if the province of the telcos. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but in some cases switching a couple of connection in the roadside cabinet or in the exchange helps.

Then there is your ISP. ISP will be keeping a close eye on the traffic through their part of the network, but the rapid rise of the streaming services has caught them a little bit unawares, and some are scrambling to keep up. Then there is the Internet backbone. It is unlikely that there are issues here. Finally there is the target ISP’s network and the target site’s network and the site itself. Any of these could cause issues, but they are way beyond the control of the end user and his/her ISP.



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Speeds on the Internet are phenomenal when compared to the early days. Things are much more complex these days. It is amazing what can be achieved, and those of us who have experienced the early days are less likely to whinge about speed issues as we remember that it was like!



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Documentation

Documentation. The “D word” to programmers. In an ideal world programs would document themselves, but this is not an ideal world, though some programmers have attempted to write programs to automatically document program for them. I wonder what the documentation is like for such programs?

To be sure if you write a program for yourself and expect that no one else will ever look at it, then documentation, if any, is up to you. I find myself leaving little notes in my code to remind my future self why I coded something in a particular way.

Such informal documentation can be amusing and maybe frustrating at times. When reading someone else’s informal documentation such as “I’m not sure how this works” or “I don’t remember why I did this but it is necessary”. More frequently there will be comments like “Finish this bit later” or the even more cryptic “Fix this bit later”. Why? What is wrong with it? Who knows?

The problem with such informal in code documentation is that you have to think what the person reading the code will want to know at this stage. Add to this the fact that when adding the comments the programmer is probably focussing on what he/she will be coding next, the comments are likely to be terse.

Add to this the fact that code may be changed but the comments often are note. The comment says “increment month number” while the code actually decrements it. Duh! A variable called “end_of_month” is inexplicably used as an index to an array or something.

English: Program Hello World Česky: Program He... — English: Program Hello World Česky: Program Hello World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who has ever done any programming to a level deeper than the usual beginner’s “Hello World!” program will know that each and every programmer has tricks which they use when coding, and that such tricks get passed from programmer to programmer with the result that a newcomer looking at code may be bamboozled by it. The comments in the code won’t help much.



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Of course such programming tricks may be specific to the programming language used. While the same task may be achieved by similar means at a high level, the lower level of code will be significantly different. While that may seem to impose another barrier to understanding, I’ve found that it is usually reasonably easy to work out what is going on in a program, even if you don’t “speak” that particular language, and the comments may even help!

While internal documentation is hit and miss, external documentation is often even more problematic. If the programmer is forced to write documents about his programs, you will probably find that the external documentation is incomplete, inaccurate or so terse it is of little help in understanding the program.

In my experience each programmer will document his/her programs differently. Programmers like to program so will spend the least possible amount of time on documentation. He/she will only include what he/she thinks is important, and of course, the programmer is employed to program, so he/she might get dragged away to write some code and conveniently forgets to return to the documentation.

If the programmer is at all interested in the documentation, and some are, he/she will no doubt organise it as he/she thinks fit. Using a template or model might help in this respect, but the programmer may add too much detail to the documentation – a flowchart may spread to several pages or more, and such flowcharts be confusing and the source of much frustrated page turning.

Of course there are standards for documentation, but perhaps the best documentation of a program would be to specify the inputs and specify the outputs and then a description of how the one becomes the other at a high level. As I mentioned above a programmer will probably give too much detail of how inputs become outputs.

Documentation tends to “decay” over time, as changes are made to the program and rarely is the documentation revisited, so the users of the program may need to fill in the gaps – “Oh yes, the documentation says that need to provide the data in that format, but in fact that was changed two years ago, and we now need the data in this format”.

The problem is worse if the programmer has moved on and gone to work elsewhere. Programmers tend to focus on the job in hand, to write the program to do the job required and then move on to the next programming task, so such code comments as there are will be written at the time that the programmer is writing them. Such comments are likely notes to the programmer him/herself about the issues at the time that the program is being written.



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So you get comments like “Create the app object” when the programmer wants a way to collect the relevant information about the data he/she is processing. Very often that is all that one gets from the programmer! No indication about why the object is needed or what it comprises. The programmer knows, but he/she doesn’t feel the need to share the information, because he/she doesn’t think about the next person to pick up the code.

I don’t want to give the impression that I think that documentation is a bad thing. I’m just pondering the topic and giving a few ideas on why documentation, as a rule, sucks. As you can imagine, this was sparked by some bad/missing documentation that I was looking for.

Open source software is particularly bad at this as the programmer has an urge to get his program out there and no equal urge to document it. After all, a user can look at the code, can’t he/she? Of he/she could look at the code, but it is tricky to do so for large programs which will probably be split into dozens of smaller ones, and the user has to be at least a passable programmer him/herself to make sense of it. Few users are.

Screenshot of the open source JAVA game Ninja ... — Screenshot of the open source JAVA game Ninja Quest X (I am one of the programmers) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So I go looking for documentation for version 3.2 of something and find only incomplete documentation for version 2.7 of it. I also know that big changes occurred in the move from the second version of the program to the third undocumented version. Ah well, there’s always the forums. Hopefully there will be others who have gone through the pain of migration from the second version to the third version and who can fill in the gaps in documentation too.

Television



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Television as a medium is less than one hundred years old, yet in the sense of a broadcast over radio waves, it seems doomed as the rise of “streaming” sites takes over the role of providing the entertainment traditionally provided by broadcast television.

My first recollection of television was watching the televising of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. I can’t say that I was particularly interested at the time, but I do remember that what seemed a large number of people (probably 20 or so, kids and adults) crowded on one side of the room while the television across the room showed its flickering images on its nine inch screen.

Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II X (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I remember when at a later date my father brought home our first television. It was a large brown cabinet with a tiny noticeably curved screen. When it was set up properly and working, it displayed a black and white image on a screen which was smaller than the screen of an iPad.

The scan lines on the screen were easily visible, and the stability of the circuits that generated the scan were unstable, so the picture would flicker and roll from top to bottom and tear from left to right. Then someone would have to jump up and twiddle some knobs on the rear of the set to adjust it back into stability, or near stability.



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To start with many people did not have aerials on their roofs. For one thing, television was new, and secondly the aerials were huge. They were generally large constructions, either in an X shape or in a H shape several feet in length. Most people started with an internal aerial, the so-called “rabbit’s ear” aerials.

These were small, low down and generally didn’t work too well as they were nowhere near comparable to the wavelength of the transmitted signal. Nevertheless they enabled people to, in most cases, get some sort of a picture on their new televisions.



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The trouble was that with a weak signal and unstable circuits, the person leaning over the television to tune it more often than not affected the circuits and signal. With the rest of the family yelling instructions and with a clear(-ish) picture on the screen, it only took the movement of the person tuning the set away from the set for the picture to be lost again.

Of course soon everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the aerials shrunk in size as television was moved to higher frequencies, and as the technology improved. The classic shape of a television receiver aerial consists of a bristly device, sometimes with smallish mesh reflector, one dipole and several reflectors and directors, which pretty obviously points towards a television broadcast station.

Nederlands: Zelfgemaakte schets Yagi antenne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many tower sprung up on the tops of convenient hills to provide the necessary coverage and it is a rare place these days when the terrain or other problems prevent the reception of a television signal. Even then, coverage could probably be obtained by usage of satellite technology.

However, after several decades of dominance the end of the broadcast network looks like it is in sight. The beginning of the end was probably signalled by the Video Cassette Recorder, which enabled people to record programs for viewing later. People were no longer tied to the schedule of a broadcaster, and if they wanted to watch something that was not on the schedule, they went to a store and hired it.

The video cassette stores appear to be going to have an even shorter lifetime than television itself. Of course most of them have switched to DVD as the medium but that doesn’t make a significant difference.

What does make a difference is the Internet. Most people are now connected to the Internet in one way or another, and that is where they are getting a major part of their entertainment, music, news, films, games, and also that is increasingly where they are getting their TV-style entertainment, what would otherwise be called “TV series”.

TV companies produce these popular series, an example of which would be “The Big Bang Theory”. This show has run for years and is still very popular on television, but it also available for download (legitimately) from one or more companies that are set up expressly for the purpose of providing these series online, on the Internet.

In countries at the end of the world, like here, it takes months or even years for the latest episodes to be broadcast here. If they ever are. So more and more people are downloading the episodes directly from the US, either legitimately or illegitimately.

This obviously hits at the revenues of the companies that make these costly shows, so, equally obviously they are trying to prevent this drain on their revenues. The trouble is that there is no simple way of ensuring that those who download these programs are paying for the service. If they are paying and the supplier is legitimate then presumably the supplier will be paying the show producers.

Once an episode is downloaded, then it is out of the control of the show’s producers. The recipient’s ethics determine if he will share it around to his friends or keep it to himself. If thousands of people (legitimately) download it, then presumably some of the less ethical will then share it on, and it soon becomes available everywhere for free.

icon for Japanese File-sharing program perfect... — icon for Japanese File-sharing program perfect dark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It will at some stage reach a point where broadcasting a television program is no longer economic. The producers will have to primarily distribute their programs via the Internet and somehow limit or discourage the sharing of the programs around. That would mean the end of TV broadcasting as we know it.

We are not anywhere near that situation yet, and the program production companies will have to come up with a new economic model that allows them to make a profit on the shows without broadcasting them over radio waves. The more able companies will survive, although they may be considerably smaller. TV actors will only be able to demand much smaller salaries, and budgets will be tighter.

Another factor that the program production companies will have to take into account would be loss of advertising revenue. Losing advertisers can scuttle a television show, so this is not a minor factor.

Whatever happens in the long term, as I said above, a new economic model is necessary. I’ve no idea what this will look like, but I foresee the big shows moving to the Internet in a big way.

Broadcast TV will continue for some time, I think, as there are people who would resist moving away from it, but it is likely to be much reduced, with less new content and more reruns. It may be that the broadcast TV may be reduced to a shop window, with viewers seeing the previews and buying a series with a push of a button on their smart TVs.



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40 Years

Forty years, around 14,600 days, 350,400 hours, 21,024,000 minutes, or 1,261,440,000 seconds. In other words around 1.3 gigaseconds. That’s the amount of time that I have been married to my wife, Elizabeth, known to everyone as Matty. I don’t mean to imply that it seems a long time – it doesn’t! Far from it. But it has been a long time, and I am amazed. Firstly because it has been a long time and secondly because we have stuck together for that long.

In that time the earth has travelled 37,600 million kilometres, light from earth or the sun has travelled 40 light years, or 3.8 x 10^14 kilometres. There are around 2,000 known stars within 50 light years of earth, with 133 falling among the brightest 10%, and according to my calculations around half of them are less than 40 light years away. That means that there is little chance that any LGMs will have been blinded by the flash of the photographer’s camera.

In that time a lot has happened. We have had three children and shortly after that, moved half way around the world. The kids have grown up and we now have three grandchildren, who are also growing up fast. The youngest has been at school for a year now, and it seem only recently that her mother was just starting school herself. Thankfully the kids have not dispersed too widely and they and the grandkids will be lunching with us tomorrow to celebrate.



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I’ve been looking at the things that have happened and changed in that 40 years. Strangely I had thought that the moon landings had not finished when we got married, but in fact there was no overlap. The last moon landing (Apollo 17) happened in 1972, before we were married. (The first landing was in 1969). Weird!

While men have not been to the moon in the last 40 years, many man-made devices have been sent to other planets and even to comets, The Hubble space telescope has sent back amazing photographs of the depths of space and other such telescopes have followed suit.

One of the biggest successes in exploration of the solar system has been the Mars Rover Opportunity which has operated on the surface of Mars since 2004. It’s original planned activity period was scheduled to be 90 sols or Martian days (slightly longer than an Earth day). However Opportunity is still functioning and sending back amazing photographs much more than 10 years since it landed.

Many of Opportunity’s photographs and panoramas can be found on the NASA web site, which also contains stunning photographs, both modern and historical, of rocket and shuttle launches. It also includes astronomical photographs taken by many different telescopes and photographs taken on the moon and from orbit. I highly recommend it.

Of course many important happenings occurred in the last 40 years. One of the biggest was the rise of the Internet. The birth of the networks that formed the Internet happened in the 1970s, and the term “Internet” was used in a technical document in December 1974, four months before we got married!



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Most people spend a lot of time on the Internet using a browser and viewing sites and that aspect of the Internet, originally called “the World Wide Web”, originated in CERN in the late 1980s. At some time a lot later than that I downloaded a copy of the NCSA web server and create a “Hello World” web page. I then pointed a browser at it (probably an early version of Internet Explorer) and up popped my “Hello World” page! At the time I was thrilled and delighted!

Of course not all things that have happened in the last 40 years are so great. According to the WWF the Earth has lost half its wildlife. 40 years ago global warming had not become a topic of concern, although it was first mentioned by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.

Another notable event around 1975 was the first commercial flight of Concorde in 1976. It went out of service in 2003 having failed to become a commercial success. I worked for British Aerospace at one time, though not directly on anything to do with Concorde. I also worked for British Aerospace who made the Olympus engines for the Concordes.

In 1977 the Queen celebrated her celebrated her silver jubilee, and she is still going 40 years later! I don’t remember much of the celebrations but I do remember that it was a big thing at the time!



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While searching around for links for this post I came across this useful link from the Sunday Telegraph which lists events from the last 50 years. It’s amazing how many seem to be fairly recent and at the same time a long time ago. The first case of AIDS was diagnosed in 1980, for example. The Vietnam war ended in 1975. The first test tube baby was born in 1978. Her son was conceived naturally and was born in 2006.

So much that we take for granted today was not around when we got married. No Internet as above. No cell phones. According to the Sunday Times list above, the first British mobile phone call was made by the comedian Ernie Wise to Vodafone. The first mobile phones were small bricks and had battery lives which were very short. They were also rare and expensive. Facebook, Twitter and all the other “Social Media” sites were well in the future and the multifunction devices that mobile phones have become were almost unimaginable.



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So many things have changed that it is a wonder that anything has lasted. Our marriage has lasted, even though the concept of marriage itself has changed to include same-sex marriage, over the four decades. It seems that even same-sex marriage is becoming less popular, with couples often having children first and getting married later. That still seems odd to me, but it seems to work for many people.

We’ve made it through 40 years while all things have changed around us. I’m proud of that fact and hope that we can continue for many more. But we have a long way to go to beat my parents – they just recently celebrated 70 years of marriage.

Time waits for no man

English: Text: "You can't stop time... bu... — English: Text: “You can’t stop time… but you can turn it back one hour at 2 a.m. Oct. 28 when daylight-saving time ends and standard time begins.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s approaching the equinox, that time of the year when the day and the night are of almost equal length. It’s the vernal or spring equinox here in the Southern Hemisphere, and the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. For a number of reasons, the day and night are not of exactly equal length, and alternative definition is the time when the plane of the earth’s equator passes through the centre of the sun.

At around this time of the year many countries adjust their clocks to take advantage of the increasing daylight in the evening. Most countries who do this change their clocks forward in spring and back in the autumn, hence the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back”.

The reasons for the usage of “Daylight Saving Time” are debatable. The original intent was to align working day more accurately with the daylight hours while leaving more daylight time at the end of the day. Without Daylight Saving Time, people rose in the morning after an hour of usable daylight had occurred. It was during the two World Wars that “Daylight Saving Time” was first practised extensively in many countries.

Nowadays we are accustomed to “Daylight Saving Time”, and naturally there are dissenters who believe that it is unnecessary or counter productive. A farmer may point out that his cows don’t practise “Daylight Saving Time” and so the changes in the clocks are of no benefit to him, and can even cause him inconvenience.

“Daylight Saving Time” is around one hundred years old, so it is a fairly recent invention. Indeed the synchronisation of clocks, even in a single country, is a recent phenomenon. Now we have clocks synchronised globally.

Computers have clocks. Indeed the very functioning of a computer requires a very accurate clock, so it should be no surprise that we take advantage of this requisite to extend computer clock usage outside of the computer itself.

In the early days of computers, the clocks were not synchronised between computers. In fact that synchronisation had to wait for the development of networked computers. The people who used these isolated computers had to set the clocks manually, which was acceptable when computers were rare, but became a chore when computer usage started to climb and more desk had computers on them.

In a computer there are two sorts of clocks, a hardware clock and a software clock. The hardware clock is the fundamental clock in a computer system and it ticks thousands of times per second. If you’ve ever browsed the specs of a computer system you will likely have noticed the clock specification, the (these days) gigahertz rating. This is closely related to the clock speed, and the number of operations that the computer can perform in one second.



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The original computers had speeds rated in kilohertz, so today’s computers are of the order of one thousand million time as fast as the old klunkers.

The software clock is related to the hardware and takes the clock information and translates it into a human usable date and time. It can’t do that without reference to the outside world as the hardware clock consists merely of a stream of “ticks” and doesn’t understand the concept of seconds, hours, days, months and days of the week. There is no weekend in the hardware clock’s world.



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The reference to the outside world in the early days of computing meant the operator typing in the time, and the software clock relating that to a tick of the hardware clock. From then on the software clock just counts ticks and works out the human usable date and time from that.

As computers started to be networked together, a problem arose. Computer A’s and computer B’s clocks will have been set by a human to as close as the human can manage, but they may be several seconds apart, a lifetime in computer terms. This can cause issues like money appearing in bank accounts before the money disappears from the sending account when the transaction is automated. All transactions are automated these days.

At the same time as computers got networked, some far seeing people decided to set up a network of atomic clocks. These clocks are much more accurate than computers hardware clocks which can “drift”, because not all computer clocks tick at exactly the same rate. As a service this service is provided on the Internet and this has almost universally been adopted.

Your computer will contact a local time source, which contacts a less local time source, and so on until one of the top tier time sources is connected. Thus they all synchronise with the top tier time source. All the top tier sources synchronise with each other so eventually all computer clocks are synchronised.

A computer synchronises with its time source by basically sending a packet of data to its time source and the time source replies. The computer compares the times and repeats the process a few times to get an average, and then, since the packet has to go out and back, halves the average and estimates the time at the time source as the time sources knows it. Then it sets the hardware clock to match. It continually does this, constantly updating its clock as necessary, which gives a very accurate value for the local time.

One might question the necessity of this accuracy. Isn’t it being a bit pointless to set clocks with such nit-picking accuracy? In a news story which I can’t now track down, a financial organisation lost millions, maybe billions of dollars because they did not handle a “leap second” accurately. Automatic stock market trading programs made thousands of trades in the few milliseconds that the company was out of sync with the rest of the world. But to you or I, doing our “online banking”, it won’t matter.

It’s worth remembering that the world-wide time system is pretty new. In these days we are accustomed to be able to contact someone on the other side of the world and to know what the time is with the contactee. But this is new.

It used to be the case that the local time was a sort of local consensus and did not rely on clocks. Then when clocks became more common the local reference time source was the clock in the spire of the church. Time was still local as the church clocks were not synchronised.

As time keeping became more important, the local time zone might expand to cover a time or a city. Clocks could be synchronised in a small area by use of travelling clocks or watches, and really accurate clocks and watches enabled the explorers from Europe to travel the world.

The advent of long distance travel (by the railways) and of telephonic communications resulted in the need for consistent time information across countries and across continents. However, standard time was only legislated in the United States in 1918, and this subsequently spread to the parts of the rest of the world that were not using Greenwich Mean Time.

A plate indicating the Greenwich meridian in S... — A plate indicating the Greenwich meridian in Stidia, Algeria. Photo taken in July 2005 by François Noël. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Breaking the Chain

An elephant named Neelakantan owned by trying to break its chain on . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A good friend of mine has posted at least one picture a day for a long time now. He has posted for well over a thousand days without a break. It’s a phenomenal achievement and I’m in awe of his accomplishment.

Just recently he has been ill and confessed yesterday that he had been close to breaking the chain, which would have been a real shame. But his predicament led me to consider my own blogging and the drives that make me add a new post every week and prevent me from breaking my particular chain.

Figural sculpture representing ‘Introspection’ at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can’t speak for him of course, obviously, but I can do a bit of introspection on my own blogging. When it comes down to it one can only speak for oneself and attempts to speak for others are doomed from the outset.

I have tried before to create a blog and failed. I’d get three or four weeks into it, I’d forget and then months would pass before I thought of it again. This time I’m well past the 100 posts and pushing on. To put it another way I’ve been burbling on for around two years and I’m still going.

25 Years – The Chain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t do it for an audience, though around 100 people have “followed” this blog over the months. I don’t know how many people, if any, actually read this blog on a weekly basis. So although I put it “out there”, I do it mainly for myself, even though I hope that those who stumble across it like it.

So what is different this time? When I started this blog it was intended to be a record of my culinary activities and each entry was just a few hundred words. Then I switched to posting more general stuff and the number of words reached 1000 per post. Early on I decided to post once a week. Now I post pretty much only “general stuff” and waffle on for 1000 words.

English: cooking in desert (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I posted earlier on how I choose the subjects that I post on. Roughly speaking something suggests itself to me or I sit down and pluck a subject out the air at the last minute. I don’t generally find it difficult to reach 1000 words – Look! I’ve already typed more than 300 words and I haven’t yet got to where I thought I was going when I started!

I was going to talk about the urge to keep the chain going. Come Saturday I might have an idea in mind, maybe not. If not I might not have even thought about the blog, but come Sunday it is nagging at the back of my mind.

The grotesque nagging wife (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s no question that I am going to write the blog entry, but my enthusiasm may be low. It may seem a chore, something that is going to take up my time, when I could be slouching around doing nothing. I call that relaxing.

But I may also have thought of something that I want to write about. I may have some idea of the points that I want to make, but I always think that I won’t have enough ideas to bulk out the article to 1000 words, even though I have never failed to reach that limit every time!

…More Than 1000 Words (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I expect that in the early days of my blog, if I had missed a week that would be it. I doubt that I would have picked up the thread again. The chain got longer and longer and it would seem to be a shame if I were to break it now

As it was, I nearly broke the chain when I and my wife went away for a weekend, and I didn’t have the time to write the blog for that weekend. However, I had posted that I was going to catch up, and catch up I did, thank the little gods. Even though I may not have many regular readers, I felt an obligation to any that I might have to keep the chain complete.

English: The M2 missing link, Ballymena See 190444. A view of the site for the missing motorway, some eleven years after the M2 had opened. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a period coming up in the future when it will be very difficult for me to post weekly as usual. I will be away from home for a month or so and will not have easy access to my usual computer. I will have to work out a way of getting past this period, either by cutting down my posts in size or just by declaring that I will be skipping a few weeks.

Preparing and planning for a break is a bit different to having difficulties in posting because of illness or some other reason. If illness or other reason prevents one from posting and forces a break there is of course the possibility of making an extra post to re-link the chain. Posting weekly as I do, I have a week to catch up, but my friend does not have that luxury as he posts every day. I’ve been able to catch up before my next post is due, so far at least, so it is less likely that a break in my chain would be fatal.

The missing-link between corset and corselette from 1914 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, when we talk about likelihoods, we must take into account the people involved. The blog in question has gone through several versions, including a version on Usenet newsgroups and a web-based version. It started as a newsletter for New Zealand expatriates, but has evolved into a blog featuring my friend’s interest in photography. And birds. So it has survived and evolved, and I hope and suspect that it would continue to survive and evolve even if some event should occur which causes a hiatus.

English: Sgùrr a’ Mhaim and the Devil’s Ridge Taken just as the ridge drops down to the hiatus in the ridge. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What about mine? Well I’m frankly amazed that I have managed to keep going for so long. My previous efforts have lasted a few posts at the most. Obviously, at some time or other my blog will cease. I just hope that I can keep it going for a long time yet.

I don’t think that I will run out of ideas and if I do I can just take a metaphorical pin and stick it in the Internet somewhere and pull out a topic. After all, Google has an “I feel lucky” button. Pressing that button reveals that 22 January 2015 was Grandfather’s Day in Poland. Hmmm, I could make something out of that, I think.

“The Favorite” – Grandfather and Grandson – “Ο Αγαπημένος του Παππού” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All things are connected

English: computer network IP address (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are networks everywhere. Not just the Internet or the LAN at work, but everywhere. A network could loosely be defined as being comprised of a number of nodes and a number of connections between them. A node is a point or thing which is connected through a connection to another node. A connection is what joins nodes together. This rather circular definition will do for now.

A family can be described by a network. Let’s consider a typical average nuclear family with parents and 2.4 kids. Errm, on second thoughts, lets make that 3 kids. If each person in the family is a node, we can’t really have 0.4 of a kid.

A Date with Your Family (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So there are multiple connections between any one family member and another. The father has a connection with his wife, his daughter and his sons. The daughter has connections with her father, her mother and her brothers. One way that this could be shown in a diagram is to draw a pentagon, each vertex of which is a member of the family and lines between the family member showing the relationships.

That’s a total of 15 interrelationships in a small family. Actually depending on the way you look at it, there may be more, as the father is the father of his daughter but the daughter is not the father of the father (obviously). This can be looked at at two relationships, one from father to daughter (A is B’s father) and another from the daughter to the father (B is A’s daughter), or one relationship between father and daughter.



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If you consider that there are two relationships between any two family members, then each relationship can be considered to have a direction and a value. “A is B’s brother” and “B is A’s brother”, for example. Alternatively the relationship could be simple viewed as “brothers”, in which case the relationship has a value, but is non-directional.

I’ve described the familiar relationships in detail to hopefully bring out the facts that relationships between nodes and connections can be complex or describe complex situations. It’s entirely a matter of what you want the network to show.

The Internet is what people tend to think of when someone says “network” and it is indeed a complex network with myriads of interconnections across the globe, but in another way it is quite simple. Basically you have a computer, say your desktop or laptop, connected to the Internet. When you request a webpage, your request is sent to another node on the network, which then sends it to another node, and that forwards it on to yet another node and eventually the request arrives at the destination.

The clever part is that you might think that every “node” on the Internet needs to know where all the other nodes are, but in fact all it needs to know is where to send the request next.

It seems almost magical. Your computer doesn’t know where wordpress.com is, though it does look up its unique address (known as an IP address). It still doesn’t know where wordpress.com is, so it sends the request and the IP address to your ISP. Your ISP looks at the IP address and sees that it isn’t one local to the ISP, so it passes it on.

As noted above the message is passed on and on until it reaches its destination and then more magic happens as the remote machine responds to the request and sends the response all the way back. It may even travel back by a different route.



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The magic is that some of the nodes know around 200,000 addresses on the Internet and where the next step should go. These addresses are in the most part partial in that the address will be like the street address, without the building number.

So although the Internet is a complex network with many many connections between nodes, the basic principle by which it works is simple, based on an address lookup system (DNS) and a simple unique address for each device on the Internet.



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(OK there’s more to it than that, but the complexities are mainly at the “edges” of the Internet and mainly spring from the need for security and for organisations to have a “gateway” or single address on the Internet).

When we plan a journey over the road network, we generally have some idea of where we are going or we get out a map. We then scan it for the start and end of our journey and work out what direction we need to travel and the intermediate towns.

But if we travelled like a message travels on the Internet we would first travel to the nearest town and ask someone where we need to go to get to our destination. He or she would point us to the next town to which he or she believes we should go. We would then travel to the next destination and ask again.

It would seem that such a process could result in us going round and round in circles, but eventually we will reach a place where the traffic director knows a large part of the roading network and is able to redirect us to another city which is known to be closer to our destination. Once we are on the right road, the process will eventually result in us reaching our destination.

Another network is the network formed by people we know and the people that they know, and the people that they know and so on. There is a theory that to from you, to someone you know to someone they know and so on, it takes six or less steps to reach any person on the planet. This is referred to as “six degrees of separation“.

Similar numbers can be calculated for smaller sets of people. The Kevin Bacon Number relates movie stars through films that they have starred in with other people. Number higher than 4 are rare. The Erdős Number relates people by the number of scientific papers that they have co-authored.

head of Paul Erdös, Budapest fall 1992 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These somewhat whimsical numbers do demonstrate how closely linked the human race is. So far as I know no study has been done of the importance of bridging individuals is. I’m talking about those who perhaps emigrate to a country, thereby directly linking together two populations that may be less loosely connected, increasing the connectivity and reducing the number of degrees of separation.

Computers and cells

(Oops! One day late this week!)

A computer has some similarities to living organisms. Both produce something from, well, not very much. A computer program has data input from various sources, and produces output to various sinks or targets. A living organism takes in nutrients from various sources, and produces branches, leaves, fur, bones, blood and other organs.

Of course there are differences. A computer is much, much simpler than a living being, even single celled organism. A computer in general only has a relatively small number of parts, but the “parts” in a living organism number in the billions. And of course, living organisms reproduce, but that may change in the foreseeable future.

Some animals are sentient, but I’m not going to discuss that here. Maybe in another post.

A computer has hardware, software and operates on data. The data is either part of the software or read from buffers in the hardware. It stores its calculations in “memory”, which is special hardware with particularly fast access speeds.

The computer produces results by placing data into buffers in the hardware. This results in things happening in the real world, such as printing a letter or number on paper, or more frequently these days, on some sort of screen. It may also do many other things, such as control the flow of water by moving a valve or other control mechanism.

Computers communicate with other computers, by placing data in an output piece of hardware. The hardware is connected to a distant piece hardware of the same sort which puts the data into a buffer accessible to another computer. This computer may be a specialised computer that merely passes on the data. Such computers are called routers (or modems, or firewalls).

Computers, specialised only in their usage, are found in washing machines, cars, televisions, and we all these days have multi-functional computers in our pockets, our cellphones. It would be hard to find a piece of electronic equipments these days that doesn’t have some sort of computer embedded in it. Very few of these computers are completely isolated – they chatter to one another all the times by various mechanisms.

(Incidentally, I came across a bizarre example of connectivity of things the other day – a wifi teddy bear. Say you are sitting in the lounge and you want to send a message to your child who is in her bedroom. You pick up your tablet and send a message to a “cloud” web site. This sends a message to your child’s tablet which is in her bedroom with her. The teddy bear, which is connected to the child’s tablet by wifi, growls the message to the child. No doubt scaring her out of her wits.)

So in the current technological world everything is connected to everything else. Much like all the cells in a living being are connected to all the other cells in the organism, directly or indirectly. So how far can we take this analogy, where the organism is the network and the individual cells as the computers. (Caveat emptor – I am not a biology expert, so don’t take what I might say from here on as gospel).



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A computer consists of hardware, software, and operates on data. A cell is sort of squishy, so “hardware” can only be a relative term, but a cell does have a relatively small number of organelles, such as mitochondria. The nucleus, which contains most of the genetic material, acts as the control centre of the cell, much as the CPU is the control centre of a computer.

The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of these genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression—the nucleus is, therefore, the control center of the cell.

In the cell, the genetic material is in some sense the software of the cell. It contains all the necessary information to create the cell itself or more interestingly the information needed to cause the cell to split into two identical daughter cells. This information is generally encoded in the DNA of the chromosomes.

The cell also contains, within the nucleus, an organelle called the nucleolus. This organelle (which is part of the nucleus organelle) seems from my reading to mostly relate to RNA, while the rest of the nucleus mostly relates to DNA, very roughly. RNA and DNA perform a complex dance called protein synthesis in organelles called ribosomes.

Cells produce chemicals, which can be consider analogous to computer outputs and receive chemicals from other cells, and so cells communicate, in a sense, with each other. Since all cells are equal genetically, it follows that a cell’s type, liver, skin, lung or brain neurone is determined by factors in its environment.

The model of an artificial neuron as the activ... — The model of an artificial neuron as the activation function of the linear combination of weighted inputs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This only loosely true as each cells is the daughter of another cell and inherits its type, but in the early days of an organism’s life, before organs are formed cells do differentiate. Just as when computers were new, they were all very similar, keyboard, monitor, and beige case.

As the computer-sphere evolved, special types of computer evolved, such as routers and modems, and firewalls. Not to mention phones. Computers became specialised. Similarly cells become differentiated, some going on to become liver cells for example, and others brain cells (neurones).

When an organism is young and a cell divides both cells are the same type, but when the organism is very young there is no differentiation. The DNA in the cell contains the necessary information to determine the cell type and tissues and organs are created in the more complex animals.

This process obviously can’t be random, otherwise cells of the various tissue types would be all mixed up. It seems to me, maybe naively, that while the “program” for creating cells is in the DNA, some factors in the environment convey such information as how old the organism is, and what type of cell needs to be created.

an example of a Program (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We know from investigations into fractals that a simple equation can result in the creation of an image that looks very much like a tree or grasses and that small changes to the equation can lead to different tree or grass shapes. It is tempting to think that a similar process takes place in organisms – a general rule is given which results in the right sort of cells being produced in the right places.

The problem with the fractal idea is that it only creates simple shapes. An arm with fingers, skin and so on is beyond the capabilities of a fractal process so far as I know. Fractals don’t stop. Again, so far as I know there’s no way to iteratively create a tree structures with leaves.



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So the “software” of the cell, the “program” embedded in the DNA doesn’t appear to be analogous to a simple computer program that draws fractals. Of course that doesn’t mean that we can never describe a simple organism completely in fractal terms, and create analogous distinct individuals.

It seems that a long as the analogy is not pushed too far, computers in a distributed network are reasonably similar to living organisms. Please note I am note referring to the fractal type computer programs, but am talking about the way that computers themselves in a network are somewhat analogous to living organisms. Primitive ones!

Sample oscillator from hexagonal Game of Life. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)