Tuesday - Erlang User Group

A while ago, I started reading a book by Bruce Tate called "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks", covering some fairly esoteric computer programming languages like Haskell and Io.

One of these was Erlang and it's about as far removed from mainstream languages as you can get. It was designed by Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms company, solely for their needs at the time, about twenty years ago. It's designed for raw information processing; taking an information stream, doing something with it, and sending it somewhere else. What's unique is that it does all this at light speed and, which is becoming more important, concurrently.

All this is well and good and sort of stuck in a small niche part of IT were it not for two things: Erlang went open source a few years ago and hardware is starting to support concurrency, which is causing some headaches with conventional languages.

I went a bit further with it, the point at which my head started to hurt, but I signed on with the Erlang User Group and went to one of their meetings yesterday evening. It was hosted by Erlang Solutions and concerned the use of Erlang at EE (or T-Mobile).

The presenter was Chandru Mullaparthi, Head of Service Development at EE, and was a very down-to-earth speaker. He's been using Erlang for about twelve years and went through the system at EE, highlighting the areas of interest, in particular the anti-fraud features (without giving away anything proprietary). Erlang has allowed him and his team to react very quickly (less than a few days) to any new threats that happen on the EE network, giving them quite a good competitive advantage.

Erlang still looks very niche and so different from conventional languages as to be difficult to justify learning (much less teaching) for the average programmer, but I can imagine it's use spreading, perhaps through the use of Elixir.

Bank Holiday Monday - Kite Flying in Shoeburyness

I thought I'd blow the cobwebs away by taking the camera to Shoeburyness to take advantage of the good light we've been having. There's always some kite-surfers off the shore, and a school practices there, but today there were loads. I walked around and took some quite good snaps:

3D Despicable Me 2

Out on the 22nd June. I can't wait!

I've also found this clip of weapons testing:

New Lego - Bad Hair Day

I got some new series 10 today and looks very bad for someone:

An Amazon and a Gorgon (but it's all Greek to me!). I also found a shop which still sells previous series:

The Black Knight looks like he could start a fight in an empty room, and as the old proverb goes: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he becomes an Eskimo.

Oxfam Tuesday - Mobile Phones and Jimmy Cliff

I've finished my exams for the year yesterday, so I was more than glad when Mark asked me to do an afternoon shift at the shop.

It was upstairs, so I got to see Lee on my way out. He was serving a customer who I'd had some problems with a few weeks ago. One of the records he'd bought was scratched and he wanted to have it replaced. Fine. Normally I just either do a refund, find a replacement or have them pick out something of equivalent value. A happy customer is a returning customer. He was a bit funny with me, though, and wanted to listen to the record to see if it was scratched. I didn't know much about the hi-fi in the back and told him as much. He'd obviously told Lee the same story and got his way, playing some C&W stuff. Lee wasn't exactly happy with him either, but he was more philosophical than I.

Other than that, the shift was uneventful. I did get to play some old ska and reggae tunes on the player including this Jimmy Cliff classic:

When the shift ended, we were all setting off to leave when Cherie said that her mobile phone had just started ringing before she had taken her bag out of the locker. It was from someone who was telling her that they'd forgotten their sweater this morning. At one time, I said, people only used the phone when someone had died, or had accepted a proposal of marriage. Now it's whether they've got a headache. Or not, sometimes.

Source Code

Although it's been available through my subscription to LoveFilm for a while now, I ended up watching it on Film4 the other day.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who repeatedly lives the last eight minutes of another man's life in an effort to identify the bomber of a train before another, larger, bomb is detonated.

It's a romantic sci-fi/time-travel thriller about having second chances. The plot is a good one (a kind of techno-thriller version of Groundhog Day) and Gyllenhaal handles the role competently, but the support is good too, especially his "handler", played by Vera Farmiga. A superior pizza movie.

Oxfam Friday - "I thought this was the music shop?"

Another Friday morning at the shop, but this time on the bottom deck as June was in Linconshire, visiting.

Georgina was upstair playing a 1980's hits collection (she has a thing for Rick Astley). Most of it was trash, but there was the odd gem:

Weird hearing it IN German.

You do get the odd customer as well, and today was no exception. A chap came in, confused somewhat, and asked for "Dave or Ryan". Dave's our music expert, and Mark seemed to know who Ryan was, but this chap was after a guitar strap as his had broke the previous night at a gig. We couldn't help him, but "There's always the  the music shop next door (Allegro Music)". "I thought this was the music shop!!", he said. "No, mate. This is a book shop. It's the books on the walls that give it away", and he departed, perplexed. Seriously.

Being downstairs amongst the hoi polloi, I got to witness the low intensity conflict between Michelle and John "I don't look for trouble, it finds me" McCarthy. They were arguing over shelf space again when Mark waded in and sided, as much as he could, with John. After it had died down, John remarked to Michelle, "Look, there's a bit of space on this shelf.", to which I warned him that if he didn't watch himself he'd end up going through the front window, "lying sprawled on the pavement outside surrounded by broken glass and copies of Ulysses!"

Tuesday - Iron Man 3 in 3D

Being cheap Tuesday at Empire cinemas, I thought I'd take a rest from my studies and go and see Iron Man 3 in 3D.

Dunno. I thought the plot was a little all over the place, trying to be complicated and instead just being long winded. I also don't think that references to The Avengers helped either, because the assumption is that you saw that film (Is this Avengers 1.5 or was that Iron Man 2.5?). Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) was as cute as ever, even more so when she's annoyed, but it felt as if they were trying too hard. Ben Kingsley was really funny as The Mandarins' alter ego, and he stole the scenes right out from under Robert Downey Jr. Guy Pierce was also enjoying himself as Stark's nemesis, Aldrich Killian.

The problem I had with all the suits was probably the engineer in me: I wanted to know what they were all for and how they worked. Maybe more is less in this case. As for it being in 3D, well, that was a treat, but it didn't seem to add to the occasion much.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

Yesterday I attended the presentation given by Amnon Eden and David Pearce at Birbeck hosted by The London Futurists.

The initial part of the presentation, given by Amnon, a lecturer in Computer Studies at The University of Essex, was a review of the book, a collection of academic essays regarding what the singularity is and the current state of research into the subject. It was an interesting talk, especially one of the criticisms written by Eric Chaisson from Harvard. The talk was mostly regarding the machine aspect of the singularity, and he showed this video of a DARPA experiment:

The second part of the talk, by David Pearce, was about the consequences of enhancing human intelligence and that trying to enhance machine intelligence may be flawed by the inability to overcome the binding problem. This is where our brains take sensory input, shapes, textures, colour, etc., and create an inner representation of the outside world, something that is a fundamental part of consciousness but is difficult to program into a machine.

The presentation was very good and the Q&A lively, as usual, but marred somewhat by the heating in the basement, which was oppressive.

Oxfam Friday - Barn Owl, Charlie Parr and The Duritti Column

Doing a Friday morning shift at the shop, which was a welcome tonic after another week of college work, I was upstairs and played a few freebee's I had lying around Chez Lemon.

Although the best was the old blues album, with the usual haunting track by Robert Johnson, the most interesting was Strange Brew, with tracks by Barn Owl (The Long Shadow) and Charlie Parr. I couldn't find a decent video of the track I listened to (Jesus is a Hobo) on Youtube, but I found this instead which is pretty good.

I also listened to The Durutti Column, a Manchester post-punk band that never got the same recognition as New Order or The Smiths. This has got Johnny Marr in there somewhere:

New Lego - Revolution

I've got some new lego from series 10, and it's revolutionary!

He doesn't look happy. Maybe he needs a cup of tea?

As you can see, I also got a grandad and a baseball player.

New Lego - New Series

Series 10 of the current run of Lego Minifigs has been issued and I've got two new ones, a Centurion and a Skydiver:

The Roman looks like he's about to poke someone's eye out with his Gladius.

As well as the usual type of figures there is a remote chance of finding a unique figure, Mr Gold, one of only 5000!

Oxfam Friday - New Bands and Old

I did a morning shift today up on the top deck and, after a week of frentic college activity, it was a fine tonic. I played one of the freebee albums off Mojo magazine from August 2009 called New Harvest:

And a jolly fine selection it is. One of the best tracks is also the first, Fools from The Dodos:

There was also fine tracks by Ventiver, D.M. Stith (Thanksgiving Moon, which is delightful), Iron and Wine, and this one from Akron/Family:

They did Gone Beyond a while back which was was a joyously riotous.

Dave, our music expert, has put some collectable 7" vinyl in a box to one side and I was leafing through them when I spotted some old Smiths singles, including this classic:

And it's the original issue, with "Jeane" on the B-side. There's been a few covers over the years, but I rather like this one from The Skints.

Camden - The Game

DriveThru RPG are promoting their new card games site called DriveThru Cards. You can either download the cards, and print them yourself, or order them printed from the 'States, for a rather hefty postage. One of the free one's available is Camden, based on the market. Yeah, that Camden.

It's a tile-laying game from Gamesmith. Seems okay, and any game based on a place I've actually worked in must be worth a look.