A recent conversation reminded me about my recent exposure to the Cloud, a word which has been banded around a good deal recently. It's been used regarding new technologies and is the latest bandwagon to jump on, but try to determine what the cloud is and the focus is on the technology, partly because anyone with any interest in the subject is a technologist of some kind. This is missing the point.
The Cloud does have a technological angle but the main aspect is a commercial one. It allows companies to scale their web applications easier and more economically than in the past, allowing small companies to compete with much larger companies with greater resources.
For example, a three-man company, consisting of a business analyst, web developer and a QA specialist, develop a treasury web application. To deploy the application such that one customer can use it requires that either the customer hosts the application, the company does, or an ISP or other third party does. The first requires that the customer buys the relevant hardware/software and is responsible for maintaining it. The second requires that the development company do the same. The problem with the third option is that, previously, the inflexability and cost is was prohibative, especially if the application is complex and as the number of customers increases. It's this third aspect that the Cloud, and it's technologies, have changed. By making available complex and powerful resourses, and making them scalable at an incremental cost, the small company can provide the services that the large company, with it's own dedicated servers, can. Added to this is the fact that smaller companies have much better operating costs than large ones.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Spring Roo
The London Java Community (LJC) meeting this month was regarding Spring Roo. This seems to be a CASE tool for depoying Java objects to the web, giving similar functionality to Ruby-on-Rails and saving programming time doing so.
The event was well attended, with nearly a hundred people, and introduced by what were termed "lightning" talks, lasting about ten minutes. One of these described the LJC's involvement in the Java Community Process, which determines what the specifications are for the Java language and, more importantly these days, what happens with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which powers not just Java but a host of other languages.
The event was well attended, with nearly a hundred people, and introduced by what were termed "lightning" talks, lasting about ten minutes. One of these described the LJC's involvement in the Java Community Process, which determines what the specifications are for the Java language and, more importantly these days, what happens with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which powers not just Java but a host of other languages.
Friday, 24 June 2011
Black Crusade
Fantasy Flight Games, as has become a tradition, have created a free introductory adventure for their new W40K RPG, Black Crusade. Called Broken chains, it's available here.
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Cloud Foundry
I attended the London Spring User Group seminar on the Cloud Foundry. This is styled as "Platform as a Service (PaaS)", which extends services such as Azure and AWS to allow deployment of web services (in the larger sense) involving multiple technologies. The talk was given by Russ Miles, who had the habit of walking up and down, causing the video podcast to have to re-focus every so often. Russ demonstrated the public service by deploying Java, JavaScript and Ruby code and then did the same with a private Cloud Foundry he's set up on his own server.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Information is Beautiful
I was watching a program on statistics the other day and they referenced this (clicking in the image will take you to the full diagram):
Sunday, 5 June 2011
UK Games Expo 2011
I was in two minds about whether to go to this as it was in Birmingham, a good three hours drive, but in the end I relented. And it did take me three hours as I got lost in the city suburbs trying to find it.
It was different from Salute, in that instead of being in just one giant room, it occupied lots of differnt rooms in what is Birmingham's Masonic Lodge. Unfortunately, the Talisman sessions were the day before, which would have been very enjoyable, but there was plenty to look at and quite a few games being played. There was a model of the Battle of Towton (War of the Roses):
and someone has thought up a game of Catch the Pidgeon:
And I bought some stuff.
The first is a collection of game poems, which is an on-going project. It's a party game (or several, really) but unusual, and I was intrigued.
Next is an RPG called Polaris. It's as much a work of fiction as an RPG, and has me somewhat baffled.
The third is a hard science-fiction RPG called Shock.
As I was leaving, I was stopped and asked for my identification:
It was different from Salute, in that instead of being in just one giant room, it occupied lots of differnt rooms in what is Birmingham's Masonic Lodge. Unfortunately, the Talisman sessions were the day before, which would have been very enjoyable, but there was plenty to look at and quite a few games being played. There was a model of the Battle of Towton (War of the Roses):
and someone has thought up a game of Catch the Pidgeon:
And I bought some stuff.
The first is a collection of game poems, which is an on-going project. It's a party game (or several, really) but unusual, and I was intrigued.
Next is an RPG called Polaris. It's as much a work of fiction as an RPG, and has me somewhat baffled.
The third is a hard science-fiction RPG called Shock.
As I was leaving, I was stopped and asked for my identification:
Saturday, 4 June 2011
The Casio F-91W
The other day I found my watch. It had been missing for about a week, but it was in the pocket of my trousers all this time. Unfortunately, the trousers had just been through the wash and the watch was a right-off: the strap was broke and there was water in the casing.
So I bought myself a design classic: The Casio F-91W.
Possibly the worlds most popular watch, and certainly one of the cheapest, so I bought two, just in case.
So I bought myself a design classic: The Casio F-91W.
Possibly the worlds most popular watch, and certainly one of the cheapest, so I bought two, just in case.
Thursday, 2 June 2011
MongoDB User Group Meeting
I went to the MongoDB Usergroup meeting at SkillsMatter, who run these things. The Guardian were hosting it (they are in the process of converting their Oracle DB's to MongoDB) and SkillsMatter have produced a videocast of the event.
It was similar to the one they did at the MongoUK event, but talking more about how Mongo fits into the future strategy at The Guardian.
It was similar to the one they did at the MongoUK event, but talking more about how Mongo fits into the future strategy at The Guardian.
Monday, 30 May 2011
Software Product Development
I've been giving some thought recently to the business of software development. That is, what are the factors to be considered when proposing to develop a software product.
Revenue
Lets take two examples: Microsoft and a company that sells high-end foreign currency trading systems. Both these companies sell software, but their markets are very different.
Microsoft's customer base is enormous, potentially the total number of PC's in the world, approximately 2 billion by 2012, so even charging a fairly low price of, say, £50 and you only have 25% of that market (new PC's being only a fraction of the whole) you're looking at £25 billion. Actually, MS made $62 billion revenue last year, about £37 billion, but it's still more money than I made.
For the trading system, the market is very small, about twenty customers at most so, in order to make money, you have to charge enough per unit to make it worthwhile, say, £250000. That gives you a total of about £5 million. If you also charge £100000 for an annual maintenance contract (included the price for the first year) and you get one customer per year, on average, you're looking at £350k the second year, £450k the third and so on. If you do get twenty, you make around £2 million a year. This sounds like a lot, but read on.
Most companies have a model similar to the latter, but with a lot more customers, and a correspondingly lower price.
Costs
The flip side of revenue is costs. This can be separated into operating costs and overheads.
Overheads are things like the rent of any accommodation, servicing bank loans, the costs of having an accountant or lawyer. Anything you have to pay regularly irrespective of how big you are.
Operating costs are usually wages and the taxes that go along with them, plus capital gains and corporation tax. Say a software developer or analyst or tester costs £40k a year. A team of four developers plus an analyst and/or a tester and/or a support person will set you back £280k. A software developer can write about 10 - 20,000 lines of code a year, so it will take four developers upwards of two and a half years to write 200,000 lines, which is the initial size of a system with any degree of useful functionality. Remember that there's no revenue so far (you've no system to sell) so you'll be down £700k by the time it's built.
There are things you can do to short-cut this:
Competitive Advantage
Obviously, you're not the only company selling software products, and you will be competing with other companies even before you start selling. To compete successfully, you have to have a competitive advantage. This is something that your company has that customers want that the others don't, or don't have a lot of. The classic example of this is Google, who have such a large advantage over their rivals that even the mighty Microsoft has problems competing. It's so large, in fact, that it's referred to as a "moat".
There are many different advantages, but the main ones are price, quality (both of the product and the support) and functionality.
What if it all goes wrong?
You've set up a business and you're eighteen months in. There are no customers to be seen and what one's you have already have a system which is more functional than yours but not as pretty or reliable. Your competitors outclass you at everything apart from the software and are even cheaper than you because they are big enough to undercut you and make a loss just to put you out of business. What have you got to show for your efforts apart from the bills and a load of software nobody wants?
You.
You've been running a business for eighteen months and gained an insight into what it's like to do so. You may have gained desirable skills, such as .Net, Java, PHP or Ruby which you can sell to another company, whether permanently or on contract.
This all sounds very positive, but commerce is littered with dead firms who tried and failed. If you're young, you still have a career ahead of you and the optimism of better times, but when you are middle aged, everything looks uncertain.
Revenue
Lets take two examples: Microsoft and a company that sells high-end foreign currency trading systems. Both these companies sell software, but their markets are very different.
Microsoft's customer base is enormous, potentially the total number of PC's in the world, approximately 2 billion by 2012, so even charging a fairly low price of, say, £50 and you only have 25% of that market (new PC's being only a fraction of the whole) you're looking at £25 billion. Actually, MS made $62 billion revenue last year, about £37 billion, but it's still more money than I made.
For the trading system, the market is very small, about twenty customers at most so, in order to make money, you have to charge enough per unit to make it worthwhile, say, £250000. That gives you a total of about £5 million. If you also charge £100000 for an annual maintenance contract (included the price for the first year) and you get one customer per year, on average, you're looking at £350k the second year, £450k the third and so on. If you do get twenty, you make around £2 million a year. This sounds like a lot, but read on.
Most companies have a model similar to the latter, but with a lot more customers, and a correspondingly lower price.
Costs
The flip side of revenue is costs. This can be separated into operating costs and overheads.
Overheads are things like the rent of any accommodation, servicing bank loans, the costs of having an accountant or lawyer. Anything you have to pay regularly irrespective of how big you are.
Operating costs are usually wages and the taxes that go along with them, plus capital gains and corporation tax. Say a software developer or analyst or tester costs £40k a year. A team of four developers plus an analyst and/or a tester and/or a support person will set you back £280k. A software developer can write about 10 - 20,000 lines of code a year, so it will take four developers upwards of two and a half years to write 200,000 lines, which is the initial size of a system with any degree of useful functionality. Remember that there's no revenue so far (you've no system to sell) so you'll be down £700k by the time it's built.
There are things you can do to short-cut this:
- Employing a framework of some kind will cut down the amount of code you have to write by anything up to 50%. If that is the case, you can reduce the number of programmers or reduce the time to market. It also increases the reliability, as the framework will have been used by others and a lot of the bugs will have been sorted out. Think Hibernate/NHibernate for Java and .Net. Spring for Java, etc.
- You can use CASE tools which can generate code from models. They've always been of dubious value in a project, especially where reverse engineering is concerned, but if you're starting out, it might save time.
- Open source will reduce the licensing fees, but it's worth taking into account that something which purports to be open source as a development license turns out not to be when you're rolling it out to a customer (see MySQL).
- You can reduce the wage bill by only having minimum wage for the first couple of years and offering stock options: jam tomorrow, so to speak. Minimum wage in the UK is £6.08 an hour which works out at about £13k a year.
- Working from home saves on overheads and is the basis of a lot of start-ups, plus you've always got tele-commuting.
Competitive Advantage
Obviously, you're not the only company selling software products, and you will be competing with other companies even before you start selling. To compete successfully, you have to have a competitive advantage. This is something that your company has that customers want that the others don't, or don't have a lot of. The classic example of this is Google, who have such a large advantage over their rivals that even the mighty Microsoft has problems competing. It's so large, in fact, that it's referred to as a "moat".
There are many different advantages, but the main ones are price, quality (both of the product and the support) and functionality.
- Price is a reflection of cost (see above). If you're cheaper than your competitors, your customers will come to you, not them, but you have to keep your costs down.
- Quality is how good your software is at doing it's job. Bugs will also cost you money to fix as the customer is not going to pay for you to fix them (but that should be covered in the maintenance agreement). Also the amount of knowledge your support people have counts as quality.
- Functionality is how much work your software does for your customer and how much money it saves him. If your software connects to an external system and, say, creates foreign exchange trades, it means that your customer doesn't have to spend time extracting information to a file from your system and uploading it into the other or, God forbid, creating the trades by hand.
What if it all goes wrong?
You've set up a business and you're eighteen months in. There are no customers to be seen and what one's you have already have a system which is more functional than yours but not as pretty or reliable. Your competitors outclass you at everything apart from the software and are even cheaper than you because they are big enough to undercut you and make a loss just to put you out of business. What have you got to show for your efforts apart from the bills and a load of software nobody wants?
You.
You've been running a business for eighteen months and gained an insight into what it's like to do so. You may have gained desirable skills, such as .Net, Java, PHP or Ruby which you can sell to another company, whether permanently or on contract.
This all sounds very positive, but commerce is littered with dead firms who tried and failed. If you're young, you still have a career ahead of you and the optimism of better times, but when you are middle aged, everything looks uncertain.
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Saturday, 28 May 2011
Barca, Barca, Barcelona!
Y'know, I feel so sorry for the Stretford people. I really do. They deserved so much to win the Champions League and the FA Cup, only to be outclassed by much better teams. Sad. In a way. Probably. Not.
SQL Anti-patterns
Friday, 27 May 2011
Monday, 23 May 2011
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Foundry Miniatures
Normally a company like Foundry wouldn't raise much of a blip on the modelling radar. It is after all just a small company producing a range of historical metal soldiers. However, there are two things which make it unusual.
- They have an amazing paint range, hundreds of different shades and colours, all matched such that you have the base shade, the dark shade and the highlight shade.
- To go along with this is Kevin Dallimore's painting guides:
one of the best in the market and very influential (have a look at how similar they are to GW's, which came along much later).
Friday, 20 May 2011
Inception
There are some movies which just are not really worth the effort of watching. Inception is one of them.
By the end of the film, which couldn't come too soon, I honestly didn't care for any of the characters. Some of the special effects were rather good, especially the zero-g fight scene in the hotel, but the plot was way too convoluted.
By the end of the film, which couldn't come too soon, I honestly didn't care for any of the characters. Some of the special effects were rather good, especially the zero-g fight scene in the hotel, but the plot was way too convoluted.
M.O.T. Day
Today was M.O.T. day for the car, so I took it down to the garage in Benfleet. It had a few electrical faults, one being that the washer motor didn't work and that the dashboard lights had dissappeared when I switched on the headlights. The car is a Vauxhall Corsa and one of the problems with the make is the heavy wear on the front tyres, so I had them replaced the previous weekend (one was very worn on one side and the other was getting there).
The garage services the car, repaired the washer and did the M.O.T., which it passed. The dashboard light problem was because there is a dial to one side of the lights intended for just this thing. The idea is that you can adjust the brightness so that you don't dazzle yourself when switching on the lights. I must have knocked the dial when I was cleaning a few weeks ago.
The car has done over 111,000 miles in just over eight years, which is about 14,000 miles a year average, about 50% more than normal. This is mostly because for the first few years I had it I was travelling to Kent everyday, doing a 75 mile-a-day round trip (about 20,000 a year).
As a nice, cheap car, Corsa's are great. I've had very few problems and highly recommend them.
The garage services the car, repaired the washer and did the M.O.T., which it passed. The dashboard light problem was because there is a dial to one side of the lights intended for just this thing. The idea is that you can adjust the brightness so that you don't dazzle yourself when switching on the lights. I must have knocked the dial when I was cleaning a few weeks ago.
The car has done over 111,000 miles in just over eight years, which is about 14,000 miles a year average, about 50% more than normal. This is mostly because for the first few years I had it I was travelling to Kent everyday, doing a 75 mile-a-day round trip (about 20,000 a year).
As a nice, cheap car, Corsa's are great. I've had very few problems and highly recommend them.
Saturday, 14 May 2011
FA MCFC
So after 42 YEARS!!! City have won the FA Cup and it's returned to Manchester. I cannot say that the match was a classic and since there was only one goal in it, hardly a high scoring one, but the two teams were evenly matched, with only a slight lapse in concentration by Stoke resulting in an opportunity to score, which was not wasted by Toure.
As to the future, well, we could be looking at third spot next year and there is always Europe. Better days, I think.
As for Shrews, well they didn't get automatic promotion, thanks to Wycombe, so they had to play Torquay in the playoff's, which they lost 2-0 in the first leg, so off to a bad start there. They might get through, but I think with Turner in charge, next year definitely.
As to the future, well, we could be looking at third spot next year and there is always Europe. Better days, I think.
As for Shrews, well they didn't get automatic promotion, thanks to Wycombe, so they had to play Torquay in the playoff's, which they lost 2-0 in the first leg, so off to a bad start there. They might get through, but I think with Turner in charge, next year definitely.
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Tank Overhaul
There is a TV series from Canada. It's a bit like a cross between Time Team, Scrapheap Challenge and Top Gear where these guys overhaul a tank. Whoever came up with this idea must be a genius. It's the perfect Sunday afternoon TV for middle aged blokes.
Friday, 29 April 2011
Royals Day
After spending most of the day cleaning the car, I decided to sit down and watch the Royals (the Rajasthan Royals) play the Mumbai Indians at T20 cricket.They are currently 56-2 having to beat 94. Well played, gentlemen!
Oh, apparently there's some sort of wedding going on, but, despite contributing to the cost of the event, I didn't get an invitation, not even to the reception. I did know how it was going to end, though, so it's not like I really missed anything.
Update: Republicans have held an alternative street party in Holborn, London, where you can pledge allegiance to anything you want, rather than the current monarch. So far they have "pledges of allegiance to English beer, test cricket, Dr Who on Saturdays and cake". Sounds like my kind of country.
Oh, apparently there's some sort of wedding going on, but, despite contributing to the cost of the event, I didn't get an invitation, not even to the reception. I did know how it was going to end, though, so it's not like I really missed anything.
Update: Republicans have held an alternative street party in Holborn, London, where you can pledge allegiance to anything you want, rather than the current monarch. So far they have "pledges of allegiance to English beer, test cricket, Dr Who on Saturdays and cake". Sounds like my kind of country.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Virus
As befits an Easter weekend, I've been laid low by a flu virus, or at least a bad cold. It's taken about five days to shake it off and I'm still coughing up yellow stuff, but at least I'm on the mend. One of the many undesirable effects of commuting into London.
I'm of the belief that people are susceptible to certain viruses which others are not. Either that the viruses are keyed to us or we are keyed to the virus. We are supposed to develop an immunity, but the virus mutates slightly and we become susceptible again. "Virus Wars: This Time It's Personal"
I'm of the belief that people are susceptible to certain viruses which others are not. Either that the viruses are keyed to us or we are keyed to the virus. We are supposed to develop an immunity, but the virus mutates slightly and we become susceptible again. "Virus Wars: This Time It's Personal"
Friday, 22 April 2011
Sunday, 17 April 2011
Confused
As a Manchester City supporter, I am somewhat confused by what happened this weekend. On the one hand, I'm glad that City have managed to make it to the FA Cup Final for the first time in thirty years. On the other I'm even gladder that the Stretford team didn't make it. That it was City that beat them is just the world turned up side down. The only thing better than this would have been to beat them in the final. The final is going to be a bit of an anti-climax. For the record, the last time we played Stoke, we drew one each.
RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
One of my favourite RSA animations.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Salute 2011
I decided to go to Salute this year, which is the big wargames shindig at ExCel in the docklands area of London. What actually happens is that it ends up being a trade fair for wargamers and associated types, such as myself. As you may know, I'm an avid collector of Role Playing Games, especially sci-fi, as well as interested in the modelling hobby in general.
ExCel is a somewhat charmless concrete and steel structure next to the old Royal Victoria dock. It holds about a dozen exhibition spaces, which are just large aircraft hangers, and a long concourse joining them all together, which has seating and the usual franchised eateries.
I spent about an hour browsing the stalls and looking at the various displays. There was a particularly good diorama of one of the Gallipoli beaches and a wargame in progress of a battle of the second British Civil War, 1938 (imagine that what happened in Spain had happened here instead). I came away with a load of flyers for a steampunk wargame, called Dystopian Wars; a wargame based on 70's cult TV; a steampunk horror game and an MDF base specialist.
I also managed to pick up a few RPG's which I hadn't seen before. These are:
ExCel is a somewhat charmless concrete and steel structure next to the old Royal Victoria dock. It holds about a dozen exhibition spaces, which are just large aircraft hangers, and a long concourse joining them all together, which has seating and the usual franchised eateries.
I spent about an hour browsing the stalls and looking at the various displays. There was a particularly good diorama of one of the Gallipoli beaches and a wargame in progress of a battle of the second British Civil War, 1938 (imagine that what happened in Spain had happened here instead). I came away with a load of flyers for a steampunk wargame, called Dystopian Wars; a wargame based on 70's cult TV; a steampunk horror game and an MDF base specialist.
I also managed to pick up a few RPG's which I hadn't seen before. These are:
- Fiasco, what might be termed a party RPG, very informal and loose, based on the Coen brother movies such as Fargo and Blood Simple. Something bad happens and you have to somehow try to get out of the fix you're in.
- Diasporia styles itself as a hard sf game set in the far future.
- Spione, a spy RPG, of which there are surprisingly few. Spycraft is the only one I can think of, and there must be an espionage extension for GURPS and other games, but you'd expect more.
Sunday, 10 April 2011
MongoDB: The Future of Databases?
I've been having a look at NoSQL databases recently, to see what all the fuss is about, and have become rather enamoured of MongoDB. It's early days, but I've found it to be rather intriguing. Throw away all you've learned about data storage and start afresh, storing data structures, rather than just data.
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
The Expendables
The Expendables has introduced me to a new experience: feeling sorry for Jason Statham.
How bad is it? Everybody has a walk-on part, even Sly Stallone; Mickey Rourke acts everyone off the set, including himself; Dolf Lundgren acts in it; Eric Roberts is quite good. So, yeah, pretty bad. It makes even "The A-Team" look good, and that was awful.
How bad is it? Everybody has a walk-on part, even Sly Stallone; Mickey Rourke acts everyone off the set, including himself; Dolf Lundgren acts in it; Eric Roberts is quite good. So, yeah, pretty bad. It makes even "The A-Team" look good, and that was awful.
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Sunday, 27 March 2011
Woodbridge, Work and Blood Pressure
Woodbridge
I decided to go and see a friend of mine, Gillian, who is now manager of the newly opened Oxfam bookshop in Woodbridge, Suffolk, which is just the other side of Ipswich.
The journey was a bit dull, up the A130, onto the A12 and then via the A14, but Woodbridge is very pleasant. I'd got there a bit early and, when I asked at the shop, she wasn't on shift until 1PM, so I had some lunch and did a bit of shopping, as well as walking by the picturesque river Deben. When I got back, she'd arrived and she made me a cup of tea and we chatted about the new shop and the old one. I hadn't been to Chelmsford in a while, so it was good to catch up with the gossip.
Blood Pressure & Work
Due no doubt to work and the stress of commuting, my blood pressure has hit new highs. I test it myself on an irregular basis and I've been having a few problems, so I wasn't surprised when it hit 180/90 the other week. I decided to go and see the quack about it on Wednesday to see what he had to say. When he tested it to confirm my findings, the machine didn't work at first, but then registeres 208/100, or thereabouts. "I never trust the first reading", he said, and tried again, when it came up with the same reading I got. He's put me on Ramapril, with an initially low dose, ramping up after a week or so to 5mg a day.
Work, of course, is the main cause of it and, although I won't go into the details, I've had better jobs.
I decided to go and see a friend of mine, Gillian, who is now manager of the newly opened Oxfam bookshop in Woodbridge, Suffolk, which is just the other side of Ipswich.
The journey was a bit dull, up the A130, onto the A12 and then via the A14, but Woodbridge is very pleasant. I'd got there a bit early and, when I asked at the shop, she wasn't on shift until 1PM, so I had some lunch and did a bit of shopping, as well as walking by the picturesque river Deben. When I got back, she'd arrived and she made me a cup of tea and we chatted about the new shop and the old one. I hadn't been to Chelmsford in a while, so it was good to catch up with the gossip.
Blood Pressure & Work
Due no doubt to work and the stress of commuting, my blood pressure has hit new highs. I test it myself on an irregular basis and I've been having a few problems, so I wasn't surprised when it hit 180/90 the other week. I decided to go and see the quack about it on Wednesday to see what he had to say. When he tested it to confirm my findings, the machine didn't work at first, but then registeres 208/100, or thereabouts. "I never trust the first reading", he said, and tried again, when it came up with the same reading I got. He's put me on Ramapril, with an initially low dose, ramping up after a week or so to 5mg a day.
Work, of course, is the main cause of it and, although I won't go into the details, I've had better jobs.
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Deathwatch Latest
Fantasy Flight games have produced yet another free suppliment for their Deathwatch RPG.
You can get it here along with other supliment, free adventures and previews.
You can get it here along with other supliment, free adventures and previews.
Monday, 7 March 2011
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Top Ten
As some may know, I've been a comic book fan for getting on decades. I've been going through the collection weeding out those that can be donated to the charity shop, having read them and not thought them worthy of keeping, and it occurred to me to set out a list of the best ones (so far).
Concrete, by Paul Chadwick.
I read these stories when I was in my mid-twenties and, having now collected them in trade paperback (TP) format, they are still excellent. They move comics from the super-hero vs villains format to telling truly human stories.
The Treasury of Murder Series by Rick Geary
This true murder series, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, seem a little bit like CSI, but Rick has turned them into works of art far superior to anything on TV. The books have a truly Gothic feel to them.
100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
The ultimate comic crime series. No super-heroes, no cops, just bad, bad, people trying to stay alive. The first stories were excellent, really hard boiled, making Sin City look like a Doris Day movie. After that, it seemed to get embroiled in a dark conspiracy plot that I just found to be confusing. I've got all the TP's so I'll probably give it another go at some point.
Scalped by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra
My current favourite crime comic at the moment. Think Raymond Chandler on a Native American Reservation.
The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
Okay, if you want a super-hero comic book, I'll give you this one. This will blow your mind. It's what League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should really have been, but funny, rather than just pompous.
BPRD and Hellboy
I've included these together as they represent the work of Mike Mignola, even though he's not having much to do with them these days. Plus the movies weren't bad.
The Losers by Andy Diggle and Jock
The movie was okay, but it came out at the same time as The Expendables and The A-Team and got lumped in with them. Not only was the movie better than the others (oh, yes it was) but the comic books were better than the movie.
Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewicz [pronounced sin-KEV-itch]
A work of true genius, and I don't say that lightly. You know the saying that there is a thin line between genius and madness. Well I think that he must have wandered over the line a few times doing this. The fourth, and last, issue didn't seem to have a proper cover, it was just black, until you tilted it and it caught the light. It was gloss black printed on matte.
DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli
This is an unusual war comic book, about as far removed from Sargent Rock and Major Eazy as you could ever get.
Queen and Country by Greg Rucka
Back in the seventies, there used to be a spy series called The Sandbaggers. Not Bond or even Le Carre. It inspired this series about MI6 operatives.
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Although it tails off a bit at the end, this is Ellis's magnum opus and what a work it is. The first episode is free to download if you can find it.
Okay, eleven, but I had to include the last one. In addition, the following are ones that I think are worth an mention:
Northlander by Brian Wood
A comic book about Vikings, but see his other work above.
Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
What would happen to someone if the stories written about them became real.
The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson
Despite the ultra-violence (which is what happened to spoil Ennis' Preacher) a worthwhile attempt at the anti-super-hero genre.
Cerebus by Dave Sim
This holds the record for being the longest English-language comic book by a single team (Usagi Yojimbo has the overall record). It's also self published, no one having the patience to handle Sim for any length of time. I only managed to keep up as far as Reads, Volume 9, but I got single issues up to Going Home, Volume 13. I liked it mainly because of the art work, which always draws me into a comic and Cerebus is fantastic to look at, the high water mark being Rick's Story, which looks like a modern Book of Kells.
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Why this one and not Watchmen or V For Vendetta? It's the notes in the back of the book which make this so good. You don't realise how much research goes into a comic book like this, and this alone made it worth a mention.
Concrete, by Paul Chadwick.
I read these stories when I was in my mid-twenties and, having now collected them in trade paperback (TP) format, they are still excellent. They move comics from the super-hero vs villains format to telling truly human stories.
The Treasury of Murder Series by Rick Geary
This true murder series, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, seem a little bit like CSI, but Rick has turned them into works of art far superior to anything on TV. The books have a truly Gothic feel to them.
100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
The ultimate comic crime series. No super-heroes, no cops, just bad, bad, people trying to stay alive. The first stories were excellent, really hard boiled, making Sin City look like a Doris Day movie. After that, it seemed to get embroiled in a dark conspiracy plot that I just found to be confusing. I've got all the TP's so I'll probably give it another go at some point.
Scalped by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra
My current favourite crime comic at the moment. Think Raymond Chandler on a Native American Reservation.
The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
Okay, if you want a super-hero comic book, I'll give you this one. This will blow your mind. It's what League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should really have been, but funny, rather than just pompous.
BPRD and Hellboy
I've included these together as they represent the work of Mike Mignola, even though he's not having much to do with them these days. Plus the movies weren't bad.
The Losers by Andy Diggle and Jock
The movie was okay, but it came out at the same time as The Expendables and The A-Team and got lumped in with them. Not only was the movie better than the others (oh, yes it was) but the comic books were better than the movie.
Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewicz [pronounced sin-KEV-itch]
A work of true genius, and I don't say that lightly. You know the saying that there is a thin line between genius and madness. Well I think that he must have wandered over the line a few times doing this. The fourth, and last, issue didn't seem to have a proper cover, it was just black, until you tilted it and it caught the light. It was gloss black printed on matte.
DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli
This is an unusual war comic book, about as far removed from Sargent Rock and Major Eazy as you could ever get.
Queen and Country by Greg Rucka
Back in the seventies, there used to be a spy series called The Sandbaggers. Not Bond or even Le Carre. It inspired this series about MI6 operatives.
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Although it tails off a bit at the end, this is Ellis's magnum opus and what a work it is. The first episode is free to download if you can find it.
Okay, eleven, but I had to include the last one. In addition, the following are ones that I think are worth an mention:
Northlander by Brian Wood
A comic book about Vikings, but see his other work above.
Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
What would happen to someone if the stories written about them became real.
The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson
Despite the ultra-violence (which is what happened to spoil Ennis' Preacher) a worthwhile attempt at the anti-super-hero genre.
Cerebus by Dave Sim
This holds the record for being the longest English-language comic book by a single team (Usagi Yojimbo has the overall record). It's also self published, no one having the patience to handle Sim for any length of time. I only managed to keep up as far as Reads, Volume 9, but I got single issues up to Going Home, Volume 13. I liked it mainly because of the art work, which always draws me into a comic and Cerebus is fantastic to look at, the high water mark being Rick's Story, which looks like a modern Book of Kells.
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Why this one and not Watchmen or V For Vendetta? It's the notes in the back of the book which make this so good. You don't realise how much research goes into a comic book like this, and this alone made it worth a mention.
Vegetarian Friday
Apparently, the Belgian city of Ghent has a vegetarian day once a week, to decrease it's impact on the environment so, in order to eat a little healthier and to reduce my own environmental impact on planet earth, I've decided to have a vegetarian day, Friday. I was already having vegetable soup on Friday evening anyway, so I thought I'd go the whole hog. Lunchtime was a bit of a problem. My usual supplier, Pret-a-Manger, don't have much of a veggie selection beyond cheese and pickle, but Eat seem to be a bit better. I might try going up to Camden Lock where the food stalls are to see if there's a better selection.
A Long Ride Home
On Fridays, to break up the monotony of the ride home, instead of taking the tube to Bank and then Fenchurch Street, I get the Overground from Camden Road to Stratford and then the Jubilee to West Ham. This week, just short of Hackney Wick, the train came to a shuddering halt and we got stuck there for about half-an-hour. Turns out there was a signalling fault at Stratford and the driver didn't want to risk smashing into the train in front. I would imagine that this is due to all the work they're doing for the Olympics next year: that's going to be commuting fun next summer. When we got to Stratford, there were huge queues of people waiting for the train, a bit like a Tunisian-Libyan border post.
A Long Ride Home
On Fridays, to break up the monotony of the ride home, instead of taking the tube to Bank and then Fenchurch Street, I get the Overground from Camden Road to Stratford and then the Jubilee to West Ham. This week, just short of Hackney Wick, the train came to a shuddering halt and we got stuck there for about half-an-hour. Turns out there was a signalling fault at Stratford and the driver didn't want to risk smashing into the train in front. I would imagine that this is due to all the work they're doing for the Olympics next year: that's going to be commuting fun next summer. When we got to Stratford, there were huge queues of people waiting for the train, a bit like a Tunisian-Libyan border post.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
A Netbook Operating System
I tried to upgrade my netbook a few weekends ago. It already had Ubuntu 10.04 installed on it, but I wanted to install the latest, 10.10. It had been a little flakey with the wireless link and I was hoping the new version would sort things out. No such luck. After about an hour or so installing, all it did was keep trying to connect over and over again. I was about to go back to 10.04 this weekend, so that I would have at least a version that half-worked (I also don't like the new Unity user interface that much), but I'd read a review in Linux User & Developer magazine that recommended Jolicloud, so I installed that instead. It's not too bad, although perhaps a little too web oriented for my taste (part of the installation is for you to sign up to their web site or Facebook page, which is a bit off putting), but it did connect to the wireless router.
As a passing thought, if you want to check out an operating system on a PC, it might be worth using it from a boot drive first to see whether it will support all the hardware, etc.
As a passing thought, if you want to check out an operating system on a PC, it might be worth using it from a boot drive first to see whether it will support all the hardware, etc.
Insane on the Train
Would you risk almost certain death to catch a train?
No, obviously not. I mean you'd have to be stark staring mad, wouldn't you. Well, I saw this very thing on Friday night.
I caught a slightly earlier C2C train from Fenchurch Street on Friday evening. I'd managed to get to West Ham station via the Overground and the Jubilee and a rather crowded 18:00 train pulled up as I got on to the platform. I was stood up most of the way until we got to Basildon at around 18:20, when the vast majority of the train emptied. As the doors closed, a bloke launched himself at them, missing by a few inches, and started banging on them to be let in. However, they're electronic and once shut, you can't open them again, neither from the outside nor the inside. There was a guy stood next to the doors and he tried to open them too, but to no avail. This is where the insanity came in.
You and I would simply curse our bad fortune, kick the doors maybe, rant and rave for a few minutes and simply wait for the next train, due about five minutes or so after us. Not this bloke, oh no. He tried to open the doors by pulling at them. If he'd had some kind of jemmy or crowbar, he might have done it, but not with bare hands. Then we started to move off, so he stood on the tiny ledge outside the door, which is about two or three inches wide, as we accelerated down the platform. He hung on to the train for a good fify yards or so, screaming at the guy on the inside to pull the emergency cord, which a woman in front of me told him not to as it would stop the train (yeah, obviously), but would you have let the bloke on the train by now? The mad bloke eventually jumped from the train as we were doing about 20 miles an hour and someone said that he'd fallen as he landed.
Now whether this is commuter madness or Basildon madness or just some random nutter, I'll leave that for you to decide, but I hate commuting.
No, obviously not. I mean you'd have to be stark staring mad, wouldn't you. Well, I saw this very thing on Friday night.
I caught a slightly earlier C2C train from Fenchurch Street on Friday evening. I'd managed to get to West Ham station via the Overground and the Jubilee and a rather crowded 18:00 train pulled up as I got on to the platform. I was stood up most of the way until we got to Basildon at around 18:20, when the vast majority of the train emptied. As the doors closed, a bloke launched himself at them, missing by a few inches, and started banging on them to be let in. However, they're electronic and once shut, you can't open them again, neither from the outside nor the inside. There was a guy stood next to the doors and he tried to open them too, but to no avail. This is where the insanity came in.
You and I would simply curse our bad fortune, kick the doors maybe, rant and rave for a few minutes and simply wait for the next train, due about five minutes or so after us. Not this bloke, oh no. He tried to open the doors by pulling at them. If he'd had some kind of jemmy or crowbar, he might have done it, but not with bare hands. Then we started to move off, so he stood on the tiny ledge outside the door, which is about two or three inches wide, as we accelerated down the platform. He hung on to the train for a good fify yards or so, screaming at the guy on the inside to pull the emergency cord, which a woman in front of me told him not to as it would stop the train (yeah, obviously), but would you have let the bloke on the train by now? The mad bloke eventually jumped from the train as we were doing about 20 miles an hour and someone said that he'd fallen as he landed.
Now whether this is commuter madness or Basildon madness or just some random nutter, I'll leave that for you to decide, but I hate commuting.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Giant Gobstopper
I thought I'd buy a giant gobstopper from that sweet shop in Southend.
How anyone is going to eat it, I don't know. I suppose you'd either break bits off it with a hammer or wear it down slowly by licking it.
How anyone is going to eat it, I don't know. I suppose you'd either break bits off it with a hammer or wear it down slowly by licking it.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Beetroot and Apple Juice
Seriously. Sunraysia do a Beetroot and Apple Juice, and it is lovely. Apparently, beetroot is very good for lowering your blood pressure as well as being loaded with anti-oxidants for clearing up them free radicals.
Thursday, 30 December 2010
Seven Languages in Seven, er, Months
A week or so before Christmas, an intriguing book popped up on my recommended list at Amazon. This was Bruce Tate's Seven (Computer) Languages in Seven Weeks (ISBN 193435659X). The idea behind the book is to teach certain programming concepts through the medium of the languages that embody them the best. Object orientation and dynamic typing are taught using Ruby, a language in which Tate does most of his work; prototyping, which I'm not very familiar with, is demonstrated through Io, a language I'd never even heard of before; functional programming is through Haskell; concurrency (using actors not threads!?!) through Erlang, and so on. There is also a chapter on Scala, which I've had some experience of, so I'm intrigued to see what he has to say about that.
Saturday, 18 December 2010
New Sodastream Flavour
I was shopping the other week in Maplin when I spotted some new Sodastream flavours.
The first is American Cream Soda. Not bad, but with a slight soda water after taste. Definitely recommended, though, and very much as I remember.
The second is Dandelion & Durdock. Fantastic!!! Not as good as a Fentimans, but on a par with the better own brands.
The first is American Cream Soda. Not bad, but with a slight soda water after taste. Definitely recommended, though, and very much as I remember.
The second is Dandelion & Durdock. Fantastic!!! Not as good as a Fentimans, but on a par with the better own brands.
Monday, 6 December 2010
And The Turner Prize winner is...
A few months back, I blogged about the Turner Prize, which was exhibited at Tate Britain. Well, my second choice, Susan Philipsz, won it for her "aural sculptures".
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
Wednesday: A walk to Shoeburyness
I thought I'd take a last walk from Southend to Shoeburyness today, as with starting the new job next week I might not get the chance for a while. Unfortunately, in what seemed like a bad omen, the train line was shut down between Chalkwell and Leigh-on-Sea, due to a faulty power line, and there was a replacement bus service.
The light was very good and I took a few photos. There's been some building work going on, on the sea front all year and I noticed these:
They've got lights on the inside, angled to shine down onto the promenade.
At Southend, I visited a Victorian-style sweet shop, all very steampunk, and bought a packet of Victory V's and some cough candy (do Goths eat Goth Candy, K.T.?). It was a very nice shop and had gob stoppers about the size of my fist. They've even got a Facebook page.
The light was very good and I took a few photos. There's been some building work going on, on the sea front all year and I noticed these:
They've got lights on the inside, angled to shine down onto the promenade.
At Southend, I visited a Victorian-style sweet shop, all very steampunk, and bought a packet of Victory V's and some cough candy (do Goths eat Goth Candy, K.T.?). It was a very nice shop and had gob stoppers about the size of my fist. They've even got a Facebook page.
Friday, 5 November 2010
Friday: Signing off
There's a Judge Dredd story called "Sunday Night Fever", (2000 AD, Prog 416). In Mega City One, there's a gazzillion percent unemployed and jobs are quite rare, so instead of Sunday night being quiet, with most people preparing for the following work day, it all kicks off like a bad night in Bas-Vegas. The story concerns a guy in a bar. He says that he's lost his job as a human canary at the local Munce factory (Mega City One's equivalent of Soylent Green). Somehow, he mistakes someone at the bar for the guy who took his job and kills him in a fight. "You know what this means", says someone. "There's a job going at the Munce factory!!". The resulting job riot results in a chemical explosion at the factory, wiping out half the sector.
With that thought, I signed off at the job centre today. I got a job, starting on the 15th for a software company in Camden. The Job Centre is the only place in the world where you can say "I hope I never see you again", and get a smile.
With that thought, I signed off at the job centre today. I got a job, starting on the 15th for a software company in Camden. The Job Centre is the only place in the world where you can say "I hope I never see you again", and get a smile.
Saturday, 30 October 2010
Saturday: Surface Detail
Surface Detail
I finished the latest Iain M. Banks Culture novel, Surface Detail, last night. I'm afraid that it was a big disappointment and, for the first time with a Culture novel, I was looking forward to the end of the book.
The main problem is that the story is told from way, way too many perspectives. There is, essentially, a very thin story, or rather two intertwined stories, stretched to breaking point by telling it from several different perspectives in order to pad out the book to just over 600 pages. The main perspectives are:
In addition there were other perspectives, but these were simply walk-on parts, not even essential to the story, but adding to the confusion and tedium. I felt like shouting "For Christ's sake, GET ON WITH IT!" at regular intervals.
Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men
I thought I'd have a bash at this next, as it's considered to be a classic. Written in 1930, it's the history of Mankind written five million years in the future by the last man.
I finished the latest Iain M. Banks Culture novel, Surface Detail, last night. I'm afraid that it was a big disappointment and, for the first time with a Culture novel, I was looking forward to the end of the book.
The main problem is that the story is told from way, way too many perspectives. There is, essentially, a very thin story, or rather two intertwined stories, stretched to breaking point by telling it from several different perspectives in order to pad out the book to just over 600 pages. The main perspectives are:
- A virtual person, a disembodied consciousness, fighting a never ending war;
- Another virtual person suffering in a simulated Hell;
- A reborn person seeking revenge for her own murder;
- The person she's seeking revenge against;
- A Culture agent sent to stop her.
In addition there were other perspectives, but these were simply walk-on parts, not even essential to the story, but adding to the confusion and tedium. I felt like shouting "For Christ's sake, GET ON WITH IT!" at regular intervals.
Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men
I thought I'd have a bash at this next, as it's considered to be a classic. Written in 1930, it's the history of Mankind written five million years in the future by the last man.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Wednesday: Shiny London and Typography
The Serpentine Gallery
After meeting with a friend up in London, I went to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. It was a bright, shiny day in Old London Town and I took a few photos.
The Serpentine Gallery is really small, only about two rooms, and contains only modern art (at the moment). One exhibit looked like the contents of someone's bed room squashed up into a really small space. Another was a set of photographs, like time lapse, being displayed on a wall. Another was a video of a bloke Moonwalking to some classical music. More intriguing was Anish Kapoor's mirror sculptres. Really simple, but rather beguiling:
Now this would get my vote at the Turner Prize.
Typography
As some may know, I have been interested in typography and fonts since I was a kid: my Dad brought home a Letraset book from work and it was facinating. There is currently a very good book on the subject called Just My Type by Simon Garfield, which is a very good read and highly recommended.
After meeting with a friend up in London, I went to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. It was a bright, shiny day in Old London Town and I took a few photos.
The Serpentine Gallery is really small, only about two rooms, and contains only modern art (at the moment). One exhibit looked like the contents of someone's bed room squashed up into a really small space. Another was a set of photographs, like time lapse, being displayed on a wall. Another was a video of a bloke Moonwalking to some classical music. More intriguing was Anish Kapoor's mirror sculptres. Really simple, but rather beguiling:
Now this would get my vote at the Turner Prize.
Typography
As some may know, I have been interested in typography and fonts since I was a kid: my Dad brought home a Letraset book from work and it was facinating. There is currently a very good book on the subject called Just My Type by Simon Garfield, which is a very good read and highly recommended.
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Tuesday: Tunng and Duxford
Tunng
Yesterday I did my usual afternoon shift at the Oxfam shop. However, John, who's normally on the counter upstairs, was on holiday and so I replaced him. Although upstairs is quiet (it's the music/DVD section, full of old LP's), it has a little music centre and I took some CD's to play. One of them was a freebie from The Word magazine with the nicest, most charming version of Guns and Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" you have ever heard, by Hellsongs.
Another CD was the latest album by Tunng, called "...And Then We Saw Land". They are a folk band, not a genre I have much to do with, but I heard them on "The Imagined Village" album, which won quite a few music awards, doing a version of "Death and the Maiden". They are a very original band, not avant garde exactly but as near as folk is ever likely to get. For instance, one song on the album ends with what sounds like someone dropping a scaffolding pole onto a concrete floor. I know it's hardly Throbbing Gristle, but we're talking folk music here, remember. The album is patchy, not all the songs work, but when they do it's quite something.
Duxford
I've spent most of the afternoon out at Duxford, photographing aeroplanes. The weather started okay, but by the time I got to the museum, it started to hack down, so a bit miserable. Still, I got to see the Duxford TSR2:
Wayne Rooney
As a long time Man. City fan, I can't help but feel sorry for the Salford Boys Club Football Team (a.k.a. ManU), and although I'm laughing on the outside, I'm also laughing on the inside. They've obviously run out of meat pies for Wayne, and there are rumours that he'll join the only real Manchester football club. City seems to get most it's players from Salford these days, anyway, and if he's as good as "El Torro", we've got the league in the bag. And even if he doesn't, it's still funny.
Yesterday I did my usual afternoon shift at the Oxfam shop. However, John, who's normally on the counter upstairs, was on holiday and so I replaced him. Although upstairs is quiet (it's the music/DVD section, full of old LP's), it has a little music centre and I took some CD's to play. One of them was a freebie from The Word magazine with the nicest, most charming version of Guns and Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" you have ever heard, by Hellsongs.
Another CD was the latest album by Tunng, called "...And Then We Saw Land". They are a folk band, not a genre I have much to do with, but I heard them on "The Imagined Village" album, which won quite a few music awards, doing a version of "Death and the Maiden". They are a very original band, not avant garde exactly but as near as folk is ever likely to get. For instance, one song on the album ends with what sounds like someone dropping a scaffolding pole onto a concrete floor. I know it's hardly Throbbing Gristle, but we're talking folk music here, remember. The album is patchy, not all the songs work, but when they do it's quite something.
Duxford
I've spent most of the afternoon out at Duxford, photographing aeroplanes. The weather started okay, but by the time I got to the museum, it started to hack down, so a bit miserable. Still, I got to see the Duxford TSR2:
Wayne Rooney
As a long time Man. City fan, I can't help but feel sorry for the Salford Boys Club Football Team (a.k.a. ManU), and although I'm laughing on the outside, I'm also laughing on the inside. They've obviously run out of meat pies for Wayne, and there are rumours that he'll join the only real Manchester football club. City seems to get most it's players from Salford these days, anyway, and if he's as good as "El Torro", we've got the league in the bag. And even if he doesn't, it's still funny.
Friday, 8 October 2010
Friday: The Wounded Platoon
The BBC showed a program a few months ago in the "This World" series about a US army infantry platoon, 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment. It's a revised version that came out in the states. The documentary describes the platoon's tour of Iraq and what happened after they came back. Two of the platoon are currently in jail for murder and attemped murder in Colorado Springs, where the regiment was based while back home. It's worth watching.
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Thursday: Pharmacopedia Domestica and Surface Detail
Pharmacopedia Domestica
In a long and otherwise uneventful day at the Oxfam Shop, I came across an old book that Andrew was valuing. It's called Pharmacopedia Domestica by Thomas Fuller M.D. written in 1739! In it there's all kinds of bizzare recipes, including "Salts of Steel" and:
For Oil of Adder's Tongue (maybe a kind of plant, not real adder's tongues) this is "To be made in the common way".
Surface Detail
The latest Culture book by Iain M. Banks is out today. It's called Surface Detail and has got some good write ups, some saying that it's his best Culture book since Player of Games. I bought a copy and started reading it this afternoon. I'll let you know.
In a long and otherwise uneventful day at the Oxfam Shop, I came across an old book that Andrew was valuing. It's called Pharmacopedia Domestica by Thomas Fuller M.D. written in 1739! In it there's all kinds of bizzare recipes, including "Salts of Steel" and:
Oil of Earth-worms
Take of Earth-worms, well washed and cut into Pieces, six Ounces; Oil-Olive, a Pint and half; boil them together till the Wine is exhaled, and lastly, strain off the Oil through a Piece of Canvas.
It's Virtues
This Oil is Penetrating, strengthens weak Nerves, corrects scorbutic Acrimony, eases wandering gouty Pains, and particularly designed for the Joins.
For Oil of Adder's Tongue (maybe a kind of plant, not real adder's tongues) this is "To be made in the common way".
Surface Detail
The latest Culture book by Iain M. Banks is out today. It's called Surface Detail and has got some good write ups, some saying that it's his best Culture book since Player of Games. I bought a copy and started reading it this afternoon. I'll let you know.
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
Tuesday: The Turner Prize
After meeting up with a friend in town, I decided to go and see the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain. I took the Thames ferry which runs between Tate Modern and the old gallery and got quite a good river side view of the city (I took some photographs) . I recommend it.
The Turner Prize is to promote contemporary art and the four artists this year are:
Dexter Dalwood
On entering the exhibition space, the first artist's work on display is Dexter Dalwood. Dexter paints canvases, which must be a refreshing change for the Turner Prize. It seems that part of appreciating the work of the artist is to know what the title of the work is and to have some knowledge of the subject matter. For example, this is quite a moody piece, a tree on a moonlight night:
But the title of the piece is "The Death of David Kelly", which puts a slightly different slant on the whole thing, Kelly's body being found in a wood, the controversy surrounding his death, etc.
The Otolith Group
This was lots of TV screens arranged around the room showing a documentary, with a larger screen showing another documentary. I think this is what is called "phoning it in".
Angela de la Cruz
Get a pile of builders rubble. Put a tarpaulin over it and cover the tarpaulin with thick paint. Then enter it into the Turner Prize. I kid you not:
One of the funnier things about this is that with a work of art, the media is listed, e.g. Oil on Canvas, Silverpoint on Coloured Paper, etc. One of the submissions was "Untitled (Hold No 1), Oil on Aluminium Box and Metal Filing Cabinet". Now that's what I call mixed media.
Susan Philipsz
The problem with this work is that it relies heavily on the location. When you walk into the room, it's empty apart from four speakers playing the artist singing an old Scottish folk song. Reading the catalogue, the music is meant to be played under some bridge in Glasgow. This seems like an original idea until you realise it's also the idea behind lift music and the songs they play in supermarkets.
Conclusion
To say which one will win the prize, I'd have to go with Dexter Dalwood, with Susan Philipsz as a close second. The other two didn't seem to be putting the effort in. However, even these two seemed to be lacking something. What I was hoping for was something which engaged the viewer on some level, like when you walk into the room, a motion detector tracked you and produced a sound depending on where you were and how fast you were moving. There's an interactive art piece in the Science Museum which does something like that and there used to be one in the Meadows shopping centre in Chelmsford. This is 21st century art.
I think the last words on the subject should go to Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin: Art isn't about ideas. It's about style. The most crucial career decision is picking a good "ism" so everyone knows how to categorize you without understanding the work.
Hobbes: You do goofy drawings on the sidewalk.
Calvin: Right. I'm a suburban post-modernist.
Hobbes: Aren't we all.
Calvin: I was going to be a neo-deconstructivist but Mom wouldn't let me.
The Turner Prize is to promote contemporary art and the four artists this year are:
- Dexter Dalwood
- The Otolith Group
- Angela de la Cruz
- Susan Philipsz
Dexter Dalwood
On entering the exhibition space, the first artist's work on display is Dexter Dalwood. Dexter paints canvases, which must be a refreshing change for the Turner Prize. It seems that part of appreciating the work of the artist is to know what the title of the work is and to have some knowledge of the subject matter. For example, this is quite a moody piece, a tree on a moonlight night:
But the title of the piece is "The Death of David Kelly", which puts a slightly different slant on the whole thing, Kelly's body being found in a wood, the controversy surrounding his death, etc.
The Otolith Group
This was lots of TV screens arranged around the room showing a documentary, with a larger screen showing another documentary. I think this is what is called "phoning it in".
Angela de la Cruz
Get a pile of builders rubble. Put a tarpaulin over it and cover the tarpaulin with thick paint. Then enter it into the Turner Prize. I kid you not:
One of the funnier things about this is that with a work of art, the media is listed, e.g. Oil on Canvas, Silverpoint on Coloured Paper, etc. One of the submissions was "Untitled (Hold No 1), Oil on Aluminium Box and Metal Filing Cabinet". Now that's what I call mixed media.
Susan Philipsz
The problem with this work is that it relies heavily on the location. When you walk into the room, it's empty apart from four speakers playing the artist singing an old Scottish folk song. Reading the catalogue, the music is meant to be played under some bridge in Glasgow. This seems like an original idea until you realise it's also the idea behind lift music and the songs they play in supermarkets.
Conclusion
To say which one will win the prize, I'd have to go with Dexter Dalwood, with Susan Philipsz as a close second. The other two didn't seem to be putting the effort in. However, even these two seemed to be lacking something. What I was hoping for was something which engaged the viewer on some level, like when you walk into the room, a motion detector tracked you and produced a sound depending on where you were and how fast you were moving. There's an interactive art piece in the Science Museum which does something like that and there used to be one in the Meadows shopping centre in Chelmsford. This is 21st century art.
I think the last words on the subject should go to Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin: Art isn't about ideas. It's about style. The most crucial career decision is picking a good "ism" so everyone knows how to categorize you without understanding the work.
Hobbes: You do goofy drawings on the sidewalk.
Calvin: Right. I'm a suburban post-modernist.
Hobbes: Aren't we all.
Calvin: I was going to be a neo-deconstructivist but Mom wouldn't let me.
Thursday, 30 September 2010
Thursday: Indepenent TV Review
The Independent newspaper has published a review of new US TV series coming to the UK soon. Mentioned are Terriers and Rubicon, two of my personal favourites.
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
The Henry Rollins Show
With having access to Freeview at the moment, which I don't normally, I've been watching The Henry Rollins Show on Film24. It's a hoot and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Terriers
A rather peculiar show on FX at the moment is Terriers. This is about two guys, one a former cop and the other a thief he gave a break to once, forming a detective agency and solving crimes. It sounds formulaic, but it's not. Sometimes the cases end badly, sometimes there's fallout from the cases that don't. They're not licensed, which adds further complications. It's been created by Shawn Ryan, who was behind The Shield. There's just something a bit different about the show which makes it worth watching.
Terriers
A rather peculiar show on FX at the moment is Terriers. This is about two guys, one a former cop and the other a thief he gave a break to once, forming a detective agency and solving crimes. It sounds formulaic, but it's not. Sometimes the cases end badly, sometimes there's fallout from the cases that don't. They're not licensed, which adds further complications. It's been created by Shawn Ryan, who was behind The Shield. There's just something a bit different about the show which makes it worth watching.
Tuesday: Hunter S. Thompson
Earlier this year, Matt lent me a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. I'd tried to read it before, but never quite finished it and I think the reason is that it seems to finish about two thirds the way through and then sort of trails off, or, more likely, comes unstuck. It's an entertaining enough read though, and Thompson, like Oscar Wilde, is very quotable.
I've recently bought a copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, when he followed George McGovern in his vain attempt at the presidency of the U.S. against Richard Nixon.
Nixon eventually resigned after the Watergate scandal in 1974 which was all about a break in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington DC, part of a dirty tricks campaign against McGovern.
Thompson's book has been referred to by one of the Democrat organizers as "the least factual and most accurate" account of what happened and is quite a bit more substantial that his previous work, about 1" thick.
I've recently bought a copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, when he followed George McGovern in his vain attempt at the presidency of the U.S. against Richard Nixon.
Nixon eventually resigned after the Watergate scandal in 1974 which was all about a break in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington DC, part of a dirty tricks campaign against McGovern.
Thompson's book has been referred to by one of the Democrat organizers as "the least factual and most accurate" account of what happened and is quite a bit more substantial that his previous work, about 1" thick.
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Sunday: All Our Working Lives
In the 1980's there was a TV Documentary series called All Our Working Lives. The programes concern the history of various industries, chemicals, the aircraft industry, electronics, etc. BBC4 have updated the series and the program today was on the cotton industry in Lancashire, a story of decline and fall, with almost no industry left today.
My grandmother was a spinner in one of the smaller mills in Bury until she retired at 65. I was taken into the mill when she retired and I was about four or five. The spinning machines towered above like some kind of metal canyon. It was so noisy that all the women could lip-read.
My grandmother was a spinner in one of the smaller mills in Bury until she retired at 65. I was taken into the mill when she retired and I was about four or five. The spinning machines towered above like some kind of metal canyon. It was so noisy that all the women could lip-read.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
Tuesday: It's the 70's all over again
Hawaii Five-O
CBS have remade Hawaii Five-O. I've got some Yes LP's but I haven't got any flared jeans...
CBS have remade Hawaii Five-O. I've got some Yes LP's but I haven't got any flared jeans...
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Sunday: Bikes and Punk; Alan
Alan
I've tried to write about this before, but it's difficult.
Alan is my maternal uncle, and we've always got along well. He's very gregarious and always well dressed: I've never seen him wear jeans or trainers, always good slacks and leather shoes, a shirt.
About fifteen years ago he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised. He recovered and has been okay since until about six weeks ago when he started behaving oddly, the old problems coming back, and he was hospitalised again about two weeks ago. I've been spending the last two weeks zipping up and down the M11 and M6 to go and see him. He's in a pleasant enough ward, low security, and seems to be recovering slowly, three steps forward, two steps back.
Hollywood Doll at the NCC Custom Bike Show
On a lighter note, I went to see Keith (a.k.a. K.T. Glitz) and his band, Hollywood Doll, at the NCC Custom Bike Show. It always seems a bit weird to use the phrases "old-fashioned" and "punk band" together, but that's what came to mind, and jolly good they were too, playing with gusto and skill. It reminded me a bit of the B52's.
I took some photo's of the event, and some of the rather classy bikes on display.
Mad Men
I've been watching back-to-back episodes of the first three seasons of AMC's Mad Men, all about advertising executives in 1960's New York. It's surprisingly engaging and deservedly won umpteen Emmy's and Golden Globe's.
I've tried to write about this before, but it's difficult.
Alan is my maternal uncle, and we've always got along well. He's very gregarious and always well dressed: I've never seen him wear jeans or trainers, always good slacks and leather shoes, a shirt.
About fifteen years ago he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised. He recovered and has been okay since until about six weeks ago when he started behaving oddly, the old problems coming back, and he was hospitalised again about two weeks ago. I've been spending the last two weeks zipping up and down the M11 and M6 to go and see him. He's in a pleasant enough ward, low security, and seems to be recovering slowly, three steps forward, two steps back.
Hollywood Doll at the NCC Custom Bike Show
On a lighter note, I went to see Keith (a.k.a. K.T. Glitz) and his band, Hollywood Doll, at the NCC Custom Bike Show. It always seems a bit weird to use the phrases "old-fashioned" and "punk band" together, but that's what came to mind, and jolly good they were too, playing with gusto and skill. It reminded me a bit of the B52's.
I took some photo's of the event, and some of the rather classy bikes on display.
Mad Men
I've been watching back-to-back episodes of the first three seasons of AMC's Mad Men, all about advertising executives in 1960's New York. It's surprisingly engaging and deservedly won umpteen Emmy's and Golden Globe's.
Friday, 10 September 2010
Friday: Jobs and Job Centre
Jobs
I'm not going to say anything much about job interviews at the moment as it's at a fragile point in the development and I don't want to jinx it. I will say that taking along some of my work, as requested by the client, did have a positive affect, so fingers crossed.
Job Centre
The last but one time I signed on, I was told to attend a little seminar called a Back To Work session. A group of us all arrived a bit earlier than normal (usually 1:30PM but this was at 11:30AM), were shown into a room and given a little presentation about finding work, as well as given an expensive looking little handout. Basically, this was a shot across the bows about reviewing our achievements so far, which will take place in about a months' time in October. There is also an oportunity to gain, through a free training course, a fork-lift truck licence. This is aimed at warehouse work, of which there is rather a lot in Basildon, as we were told.
I'm not going to say anything much about job interviews at the moment as it's at a fragile point in the development and I don't want to jinx it. I will say that taking along some of my work, as requested by the client, did have a positive affect, so fingers crossed.
Job Centre
The last but one time I signed on, I was told to attend a little seminar called a Back To Work session. A group of us all arrived a bit earlier than normal (usually 1:30PM but this was at 11:30AM), were shown into a room and given a little presentation about finding work, as well as given an expensive looking little handout. Basically, this was a shot across the bows about reviewing our achievements so far, which will take place in about a months' time in October. There is also an oportunity to gain, through a free training course, a fork-lift truck licence. This is aimed at warehouse work, of which there is rather a lot in Basildon, as we were told.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Sunday: Deathwatch!!!
Deathwatch
As you may know, I have an interest in role playing games. It stems from when I was at University and was a member of the games club where I first played Traveller (I'm not a big fan of D&D). Recently, Games Workshop have collaborated with Fantasy Flight Games and produced a W40K series of role playing games, the latest of which is Deathwatch (it's best to pronounce the name with as much Gothic melodrama as you can muster: I do). Fantasy Flight have quite a good marketing strategy for these games. They produce a cut-down introductory adventure which can be played without the core rule book and just a set of percentile dice (two D10's, one for tens, the other for units). The Deathwatch adventures are called Final Sanction and Oblivion's Edge and are available as free PDF's.
Jobs
I've been a little busy recently coding in Delphi (?!?). The week before last, an agent rang me up and asked me for a copy of my most recent CV. The agent normally recruits payroll administrators, but one of his clients had asked for a Delphi programmer and he'd seen an old CV of mine on Planet Recuit. I sent him my latest CV and heard nothing more. The following week he phoned me back and asked me if I could attend an interview in London (Finsbury) on Thursday 2nd September. I'll be given a technical test but also, unusually, they wanted a sample of my existing work. The only Delphi work I've done at home in the recent past was to sort out problems at work: I'd e-mail a fragment of code to home from work and then e-mail the solution back, but I don't have anything standalone. So I've set about creating a little cryptographic application using the RC4 algorithm I mentioned previously. I've got a nice little front-end with big buttons and nice icons:
and I've used TDD for most of the class work. I'll also do a little documentation to explain how it works and the design ideas behind it.
As you may know, I have an interest in role playing games. It stems from when I was at University and was a member of the games club where I first played Traveller (I'm not a big fan of D&D). Recently, Games Workshop have collaborated with Fantasy Flight Games and produced a W40K series of role playing games, the latest of which is Deathwatch (it's best to pronounce the name with as much Gothic melodrama as you can muster: I do). Fantasy Flight have quite a good marketing strategy for these games. They produce a cut-down introductory adventure which can be played without the core rule book and just a set of percentile dice (two D10's, one for tens, the other for units). The Deathwatch adventures are called Final Sanction and Oblivion's Edge and are available as free PDF's.
Jobs
I've been a little busy recently coding in Delphi (?!?). The week before last, an agent rang me up and asked me for a copy of my most recent CV. The agent normally recruits payroll administrators, but one of his clients had asked for a Delphi programmer and he'd seen an old CV of mine on Planet Recuit. I sent him my latest CV and heard nothing more. The following week he phoned me back and asked me if I could attend an interview in London (Finsbury) on Thursday 2nd September. I'll be given a technical test but also, unusually, they wanted a sample of my existing work. The only Delphi work I've done at home in the recent past was to sort out problems at work: I'd e-mail a fragment of code to home from work and then e-mail the solution back, but I don't have anything standalone. So I've set about creating a little cryptographic application using the RC4 algorithm I mentioned previously. I've got a nice little front-end with big buttons and nice icons:
and I've used TDD for most of the class work. I'll also do a little documentation to explain how it works and the design ideas behind it.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Digital Ciphers
Digital ciphers have become very important due to the Internet and the desire for secure communications. They break down into three distinct types:
Public Key Ciphers
Up until the 1970's, most ciphers, both stream ciphers and block ciphers, involved the use of a single key to operate. You use the same key to encrypt the message and to decrypt it. The problem with this is that the key becomes critical to the security of the system: if a third-party gets hold of it, the security is compromised. In the 70's two groups, one in the UK working for GCHQ and some academics at MIT in the US, came up with the idea that you can have one algorithm that encrypts using one key, a public key, and another algorithm that decrypts using another key, a private key.
The mathematics behind public/private key cryptography is complex, involving a branch of mathematics called number theory, and involved the use of huge prime numbers. This gives rise to the problem that public key ciphers are generally slower compared to the equivalent block or stream cipher.
Stream Ciphers
As explained before, stream ciphers operate on a bit stream, one bit at a time, XORing the plain text stream with a stream of pseudo-random bits to produce the cipher text stream:
Stream ciphers are extremely fast, much faster than block ciphers, but are less secure. For this reason, they tend to be used where speed is a critical factor, such as mobile phone telephony. The clever bit about stream ciphers is in the design of the algorithm that produces the key stream, as it must be able to produce a stream of bits which looks random, but is seeded from a unique key. I'll discuss the design of a simple yet surprisingly strong cipher, RC4, at a later date.
Block Ciphers
Instead of working on a single bit at a time, a block cipher works, as the name suggests, on a block of bits, encrypting the same block over and over. The most common way of doing this is using a design known as a Feistel Network. This splits the block into two halves. The right half gets swapped with the left half and the left half is encrypted using a function of the right half and part of the key:
Block ciphers are, generally, more secure than stream ciphers and faster than public key ciphers, so they are used for encrypting large quantities of data, such as files and web pages. Also block ciphers can support different modes of operation, such as cipher block chaining, which can enhance strength of the encryption even further.
- Public key ciphers, or asymmetric key ciphers
- Stream ciphers
- Block ciphers
Public Key Ciphers
Up until the 1970's, most ciphers, both stream ciphers and block ciphers, involved the use of a single key to operate. You use the same key to encrypt the message and to decrypt it. The problem with this is that the key becomes critical to the security of the system: if a third-party gets hold of it, the security is compromised. In the 70's two groups, one in the UK working for GCHQ and some academics at MIT in the US, came up with the idea that you can have one algorithm that encrypts using one key, a public key, and another algorithm that decrypts using another key, a private key.
The mathematics behind public/private key cryptography is complex, involving a branch of mathematics called number theory, and involved the use of huge prime numbers. This gives rise to the problem that public key ciphers are generally slower compared to the equivalent block or stream cipher.
Stream Ciphers
As explained before, stream ciphers operate on a bit stream, one bit at a time, XORing the plain text stream with a stream of pseudo-random bits to produce the cipher text stream:
Stream ciphers are extremely fast, much faster than block ciphers, but are less secure. For this reason, they tend to be used where speed is a critical factor, such as mobile phone telephony. The clever bit about stream ciphers is in the design of the algorithm that produces the key stream, as it must be able to produce a stream of bits which looks random, but is seeded from a unique key. I'll discuss the design of a simple yet surprisingly strong cipher, RC4, at a later date.
Block Ciphers
Instead of working on a single bit at a time, a block cipher works, as the name suggests, on a block of bits, encrypting the same block over and over. The most common way of doing this is using a design known as a Feistel Network. This splits the block into two halves. The right half gets swapped with the left half and the left half is encrypted using a function of the right half and part of the key:
Block ciphers are, generally, more secure than stream ciphers and faster than public key ciphers, so they are used for encrypting large quantities of data, such as files and web pages. Also block ciphers can support different modes of operation, such as cipher block chaining, which can enhance strength of the encryption even further.
Monday, 23 August 2010
Monday: Christmas at Oxfam
I only did a short shift today at Oxfam, just enough that Claire was able to do some book sorting instead of having to be on the till all the time.
We also got our first delivery of Christmas cards, about thirty boxes, so Merry Christmas, everybody, for when it comes.
We also got our first delivery of Christmas cards, about thirty boxes, so Merry Christmas, everybody, for when it comes.
Sunday: A Rainy Day in Lewes
I dislike being in the flat for more than a day so, for a change, I decided to go on a trip to Lewes in East Sussex. Lewes lives, to some extent, in the shadow of it's neighbour Brighton so there tends to be fewer tourists, especially on a wet day. The town also has a more business-like feel to it, being the county town, and I've always liked it.
After a two-hour journey (with a twenty minute stop-over) I was glad to pull over in a nice little car park. I walked around aimlessly for an hour or two, taking photographs, when it started to rain quite hard. I ducked into the local Cafe Nero, bought a cappuccino and did a number puzzle for a while. The rain didn't seem to be letting up, so I went back out, umbrella in hand, and wandered a little through the town and back to the car.
I got lost going back and ended up going through East Grinstead before ending up back at the M25.
After a two-hour journey (with a twenty minute stop-over) I was glad to pull over in a nice little car park. I walked around aimlessly for an hour or two, taking photographs, when it started to rain quite hard. I ducked into the local Cafe Nero, bought a cappuccino and did a number puzzle for a while. The rain didn't seem to be letting up, so I went back out, umbrella in hand, and wandered a little through the town and back to the car.
I got lost going back and ended up going through East Grinstead before ending up back at the M25.
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Java and C#
A recent conversation reminded me of the debate about Java and C#. The subject is not as clear cut as might appear and there are things to consider beyond the purely technical reasons for using either.
Java's Age
Java has been around for a while now, since 1995, and was one of the first major commercial object-oriented languages designed as such. C# is relatively new, released in 2002, and has features, such as reflection, that have been invented since Java was released. Java has either only partially included these new features or not at all. The reason for this conservatism in language design is that Sun has been focused on backward compatibility, even at the byte code level, and has been reluctant to implement new features that break this. Microsoft has had a reputation for being somewhat careless about backward compatibility, although this has changed somewhat as they've tried to promote .Net as an open standard.
Java's age, however, is also a head-start and there are many application frameworks and tool suites for Java, such as Spring, Hibernate, and the Apache Jakarta project, which are very mature. C#, or rather .Net, equivalents are only just starting to develop, and some of those that exist are actually ports of Java systems, such as Spring.Net and NHibernate.
Web Enabled
From the start, .Net has been designed for use in web applications. The effect of .Net on ASP, for example, has been almost revolutionary. In particular, .Net has libraries which make the development of web services and SOA much easier than before. Java, on the other hand, has had web services introduced retrospectively, through changes to J2EE and frameworks like Spring and languages like JSP.
UI Applications
Like web applications, .Net has been geared up to produce Windows applications right from the start, although not to the degree that Delphi has. Java has the Swing library, which, although cross-platform, produces very poor applications. It may be worth noting, however, that Vuze, one of the most popular bittorrent clients, is implemented in Java.
Cross Platform
From the start, Java was designed to be cross-platform. The Java slogan has always been, "build once, run anywhere" and Java applications can be built on a Linux box and run on Windows. .Net applications can only be run on Windows and .Net web applications only on IIS, Microsoft's web server. There are ports of .Net to other platforms, such as Mono, but these are not compatible with .Net to in the same way that different implementations of Java are.
The cross-platform limitation of .Net also makes it easier to take advantage of features only available in Windows and nowhere else. This is particularly true of Windows applications.
Politics
Java has evolved in a very open culture at Sun, Java going open source in 2007. Even though Sun held the licences to Java, it included interested groups in it's decision making process, what Sun called the Java Community Process. This is probably because the focus at Sun was hardware, which is where it made the bulk of it's money, rather than software. With the buyout of Sun by Oracle, this may change as Oracle are a software vendor, like Microsoft, although not development tools.
In contrast, .Net is very proprietary. Microsoft have not developed a port for .Net to Linux, for example, because of the licencing problems involved with the GPL and because Microsoft has no control over the development of the Linux operating system. In other words, if you want to use .Net, you are stuck with Windows and Microsoft. In anti-pattern terms, this is known as "vendor lock-in".
Conclusion
The choice between .Net and Java is not an easy one. There are a lot of technical factors to be considered, as well as the one's I've listed above. I tend to go for Java, but this is based on the cross-platform nature of Java, in addition to it's maturity and the vendor lock-in aspect. There are good arguments for .Net, however, including Microsoft's considerable support for it for the for the foreseeable future, and it's close relation with the Windows operating system. It also depends on the nature of the work being done. If it's going to be mostly Windows applications, then .Net is the obvious choice. With web applications, it's more complex, but, again, if it's going to be based on Windows, .Net seems to be the right choice. There are other choices than .Net and Java for the web, however, Ruby and PHP for example.
Another consideration is how much is it going to cost to move to these development languages from wherever you are now. Java and C# are syntactically very similar (the claim that C# is a clone of Java has some truth), so the jump from, say, Delphi or Visual Basic, would be the same to some extent.
A good idea is to look at other companies and see the choices they made, but understanding why they made those choices. For example, why do Google use C++, Java and Python, especially Python? Wikipedia is made using PHP, which is also cross-platform independent.
And, of course, the worst choice is one made from blind ignorance.
Java's Age
Java has been around for a while now, since 1995, and was one of the first major commercial object-oriented languages designed as such. C# is relatively new, released in 2002, and has features, such as reflection, that have been invented since Java was released. Java has either only partially included these new features or not at all. The reason for this conservatism in language design is that Sun has been focused on backward compatibility, even at the byte code level, and has been reluctant to implement new features that break this. Microsoft has had a reputation for being somewhat careless about backward compatibility, although this has changed somewhat as they've tried to promote .Net as an open standard.
Java's age, however, is also a head-start and there are many application frameworks and tool suites for Java, such as Spring, Hibernate, and the Apache Jakarta project, which are very mature. C#, or rather .Net, equivalents are only just starting to develop, and some of those that exist are actually ports of Java systems, such as Spring.Net and NHibernate.
Web Enabled
From the start, .Net has been designed for use in web applications. The effect of .Net on ASP, for example, has been almost revolutionary. In particular, .Net has libraries which make the development of web services and SOA much easier than before. Java, on the other hand, has had web services introduced retrospectively, through changes to J2EE and frameworks like Spring and languages like JSP.
UI Applications
Like web applications, .Net has been geared up to produce Windows applications right from the start, although not to the degree that Delphi has. Java has the Swing library, which, although cross-platform, produces very poor applications. It may be worth noting, however, that Vuze, one of the most popular bittorrent clients, is implemented in Java.
Cross Platform
From the start, Java was designed to be cross-platform. The Java slogan has always been, "build once, run anywhere" and Java applications can be built on a Linux box and run on Windows. .Net applications can only be run on Windows and .Net web applications only on IIS, Microsoft's web server. There are ports of .Net to other platforms, such as Mono, but these are not compatible with .Net to in the same way that different implementations of Java are.
The cross-platform limitation of .Net also makes it easier to take advantage of features only available in Windows and nowhere else. This is particularly true of Windows applications.
Politics
Java has evolved in a very open culture at Sun, Java going open source in 2007. Even though Sun held the licences to Java, it included interested groups in it's decision making process, what Sun called the Java Community Process. This is probably because the focus at Sun was hardware, which is where it made the bulk of it's money, rather than software. With the buyout of Sun by Oracle, this may change as Oracle are a software vendor, like Microsoft, although not development tools.
In contrast, .Net is very proprietary. Microsoft have not developed a port for .Net to Linux, for example, because of the licencing problems involved with the GPL and because Microsoft has no control over the development of the Linux operating system. In other words, if you want to use .Net, you are stuck with Windows and Microsoft. In anti-pattern terms, this is known as "vendor lock-in".
Conclusion
The choice between .Net and Java is not an easy one. There are a lot of technical factors to be considered, as well as the one's I've listed above. I tend to go for Java, but this is based on the cross-platform nature of Java, in addition to it's maturity and the vendor lock-in aspect. There are good arguments for .Net, however, including Microsoft's considerable support for it for the for the foreseeable future, and it's close relation with the Windows operating system. It also depends on the nature of the work being done. If it's going to be mostly Windows applications, then .Net is the obvious choice. With web applications, it's more complex, but, again, if it's going to be based on Windows, .Net seems to be the right choice. There are other choices than .Net and Java for the web, however, Ruby and PHP for example.
Another consideration is how much is it going to cost to move to these development languages from wherever you are now. Java and C# are syntactically very similar (the claim that C# is a clone of Java has some truth), so the jump from, say, Delphi or Visual Basic, would be the same to some extent.
A good idea is to look at other companies and see the choices they made, but understanding why they made those choices. For example, why do Google use C++, Java and Python, especially Python? Wikipedia is made using PHP, which is also cross-platform independent.
And, of course, the worst choice is one made from blind ignorance.
Friday, 20 August 2010
Friday: A Trip to the Science Museum
It's been a while since I went to the Science Museum in London. They've got an exhibition called "Who am I?" all about human beings. I remember something about it a few years ago, but it was a very small exhibit at the time. They've now expanded it and it's huge, covering an entire floor. It was quite interesting, but there were hundreds of kids milling about and you couldn't get anywhere near any of the interactive suff, which was a shame.
The Space exhibit was quite fantastic and they had a J2 rocket motor, used to power the giant Saturn V Apollo rockets:
Brilliant!! They also had the Apollo 10 re-entry capsule:
While there, I also bought some CyberClean to get rid of the gunge on my laptop keyboard.
The Space exhibit was quite fantastic and they had a J2 rocket motor, used to power the giant Saturn V Apollo rockets:
Brilliant!! They also had the Apollo 10 re-entry capsule:
While there, I also bought some CyberClean to get rid of the gunge on my laptop keyboard.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Ciphers
Running on from the previous article about codes, I thought I'd write some more, this time about ciphers.
A cipher differs from a code, in that a cipher replaces letters, or numbers, with another, whereas a code can replace many letters or words with just one. For example, the phrase "Meet me tonight" can be replaced by the code 1254, or "blue", or whatever. If we encypher the message, however, by replacing the individual letters with the key to the right on the keyboard we get "<rry ,r ypmohjy". This is known as a substitution cipher. The other type of cipher is called transposition. This is simply taking the letters of the message and re-arranging them, as in an anagram:
Reading the letters vertically produces the message, with a little extra letters to make a square number. Horizontally produces the code, MMNT EEIX ETGY TOHZ.
Digital Ciphers
Instead of working on letters of the alphabet, digital ciphers work on bits, or blocks of bits, usually using an XOR function. For example, convert the message to ASCII:
The XOR function changes the bits such that unequal bits produce a 1, while equal bits produce a 0. If we now use an ASCII key phrase:
The result of XORing is a series of mostly unprintable ASCII characters, but the stream now bears no relation to the original message. For example, the three "e"'s in the message are now all different, 0, 11, and 13.
The mechanism above is roughly how a Stream Cipher works. Instead of a key phrase, the cipher generates an endless stream of seemingly random bits which are XOR'd with the plaintext stream to produce the cipher stream.
A cipher differs from a code, in that a cipher replaces letters, or numbers, with another, whereas a code can replace many letters or words with just one. For example, the phrase "Meet me tonight" can be replaced by the code 1254, or "blue", or whatever. If we encypher the message, however, by replacing the individual letters with the key to the right on the keyboard we get "<rry ,r ypmohjy". This is known as a substitution cipher. The other type of cipher is called transposition. This is simply taking the letters of the message and re-arranging them, as in an anagram:
| M | M | N | T |
| E | E | I | X |
| E | T | G | Y |
| T | O | H | Z |
Reading the letters vertically produces the message, with a little extra letters to make a square number. Horizontally produces the code, MMNT EEIX ETGY TOHZ.
Digital Ciphers
Instead of working on letters of the alphabet, digital ciphers work on bits, or blocks of bits, usually using an XOR function. For example, convert the message to ASCII:
| M | e | e | t | m | e | |
| 77 | 101 | 101 | 116 | 32 | 109 | 101 |
| 1001101 | 1100101 | 1100101 | 1110100 | 0100000 | 1101101 | 1100101 |
The XOR function changes the bits such that unequal bits produce a 1, while equal bits produce a 0. If we now use an ASCII key phrase:
| Plaintext | M | e | e | t | m | e | |
| ASCII (Decimal) | 77 | 101 | 101 | 116 | 32 | 109 | 101 |
| Binary | 1001101 | 1100101 | 1100101 | 1110100 | 0100000 | 1101101 | 1100101 |
| Keytext | S | e | n | d | t | h | |
| ASCII (Decimal) | 83 | 101 | 110 | 100 | 32 | 116 | 104 |
| Binary | 1010011 | 1100101 | 1101110 | 1100100 | 0100000 | 1110100 | 1101000 |
| XOR Result | 0011110 | 0000000 | 0001011 | 0010000 | 0000000 | 0011001 | 0001101 |
| Decimal | 30 | 0 | 11 | 16 | 0 | 25 | 13 |
The result of XORing is a series of mostly unprintable ASCII characters, but the stream now bears no relation to the original message. For example, the three "e"'s in the message are now all different, 0, 11, and 13.
The mechanism above is roughly how a Stream Cipher works. Instead of a key phrase, the cipher generates an endless stream of seemingly random bits which are XOR'd with the plaintext stream to produce the cipher stream.
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Tuesday: Ergo Proxy
Tuesday being a quiet day, I've been watching DVD's.
I picked up a DVD from the shop the other day. It's an anime TV series from Japan called Ergo Proxy and I got sold on the blurb on the back of the DVD case:
Unfortunately, the plot's a little turgid and it's been stretched thin in order to make a TV series, and I've only managed to find the first four episodes.
I picked up a DVD from the shop the other day. It's an anime TV series from Japan called Ergo Proxy and I got sold on the blurb on the back of the DVD case:
"The domed city of Romdo is an impenetrable would-be utopia where humans and robots coexist, and everything is under complete government control, or so it appears."It had me at "would-be utopia". Normally I wouldn't touch manga/anime with a barge pole, it's just too manufactured for me, but this seemed a little different from the norm, plus the image on the back of the case helped:
Unfortunately, the plot's a little turgid and it's been stretched thin in order to make a TV series, and I've only managed to find the first four episodes.
Monday, 16 August 2010
Monday: Drupal
Drupal
I've been playing around with Drupal over the past few days. Actually, it's taken so long to sort out the LAMP stack that I haven't had chance to do any real development yet, so it's very much a work in progress. I had a look at Drupal a few years ago when I was looking at developing a Wiki. In the end I found MediaWiki, which handled all the problems for me, but I quite liked the idea of a web development framework which didn't require any real programming. When I did it, it was Drupal 5, but Drupal 7 is about to come out and there was recently an article in Linux User & Developer magazine which sparked my interest again.
I've been playing around with Drupal over the past few days. Actually, it's taken so long to sort out the LAMP stack that I haven't had chance to do any real development yet, so it's very much a work in progress. I had a look at Drupal a few years ago when I was looking at developing a Wiki. In the end I found MediaWiki, which handled all the problems for me, but I quite liked the idea of a web development framework which didn't require any real programming. When I did it, it was Drupal 5, but Drupal 7 is about to come out and there was recently an article in Linux User & Developer magazine which sparked my interest again.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
Friday: Job Interview
Funny. I never thought I'd be sad about a job interview.
I went to an interview for a web developer job at South Essex College. The job title was actually "Informations Service Analyst", but you read the job spec. and it was HTML, ASP, JavaScript, VBScript, etc. and Oracle. None of these skills I have in abundance, other than a bit of Oracle I did many years ago when I was a contractor. How I managed to get an interview I don't know, but the money was a bit low (£20k) for anybody experienced.
So if I got the interview, why was it sad? There was another candidate for the job, a chap called Frank. He was about late forties, early fifties, a bit dishevelled, hadn't shaved properly, so nervous his hands were shaking and was generally a bit of a mess. As we talked throughout the day (the interview process lasted about three hours) it turned out that he'd been made redundant from some firm that specialised in pharmaceutical software about two years ago and hadn't had an interview since November.
It's the first time I'd been interviewed like this, at least as far as I can remember. Mostly, you are interviewed on your own and, although you are aware that you are not the only candidate, you don't normally see the others face-to-face.
We were both shown around the place, although the job was in Thurrock, not Southend, and given a technical test. Most of the SQL was straight forward enough, although there was some Oracle I just guessed at. There wasn't really much web stuff, no HTML for example, and there was some basic object-oriented design questions I could do in my sleep, but obviously no Delphi or Java. We were sent to lunch while they marked the test and then afterwards they told Frank that they wouldn't be interviewing him. Why they couldn't have done so, I don't know: it wouldn't have cost them anything other than time, and he may have shined in the interview.
My interview went OK, but was over in about twenty minutes. They asked me a few stock questions, actually written out in front of them. Although it was all very professional, it did seem like they were going through the motions: I clearly wasn't the guy they wanted, but I was the only to survive the technical test.
The punchline is, I didn't get the job. It did strike me that Frank was me in two years time, assuming that I don't find anything. He'd worked faithfully for a firm for twenty years and here he was scrabbling around for a job. A sobering thought.
On a different tack, I re-applied to the FTSE, but instead of doing it through the job site, I did it through the company web site. This gives me a bit of feedback.
I went to an interview for a web developer job at South Essex College. The job title was actually "Informations Service Analyst", but you read the job spec. and it was HTML, ASP, JavaScript, VBScript, etc. and Oracle. None of these skills I have in abundance, other than a bit of Oracle I did many years ago when I was a contractor. How I managed to get an interview I don't know, but the money was a bit low (£20k) for anybody experienced.
So if I got the interview, why was it sad? There was another candidate for the job, a chap called Frank. He was about late forties, early fifties, a bit dishevelled, hadn't shaved properly, so nervous his hands were shaking and was generally a bit of a mess. As we talked throughout the day (the interview process lasted about three hours) it turned out that he'd been made redundant from some firm that specialised in pharmaceutical software about two years ago and hadn't had an interview since November.
It's the first time I'd been interviewed like this, at least as far as I can remember. Mostly, you are interviewed on your own and, although you are aware that you are not the only candidate, you don't normally see the others face-to-face.
We were both shown around the place, although the job was in Thurrock, not Southend, and given a technical test. Most of the SQL was straight forward enough, although there was some Oracle I just guessed at. There wasn't really much web stuff, no HTML for example, and there was some basic object-oriented design questions I could do in my sleep, but obviously no Delphi or Java. We were sent to lunch while they marked the test and then afterwards they told Frank that they wouldn't be interviewing him. Why they couldn't have done so, I don't know: it wouldn't have cost them anything other than time, and he may have shined in the interview.
My interview went OK, but was over in about twenty minutes. They asked me a few stock questions, actually written out in front of them. Although it was all very professional, it did seem like they were going through the motions: I clearly wasn't the guy they wanted, but I was the only to survive the technical test.
The punchline is, I didn't get the job. It did strike me that Frank was me in two years time, assuming that I don't find anything. He'd worked faithfully for a firm for twenty years and here he was scrabbling around for a job. A sobering thought.
On a different tack, I re-applied to the FTSE, but instead of doing it through the job site, I did it through the company web site. This gives me a bit of feedback.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Codes
In both Rubicon and Sherlock last week, by bizzare coincidence, the plots involved the use of something called a Book Code (in Rubicon, one of the characters refers to it as "old school"). The method is simple.
Say you want to communicate with someone secretly. You both buy the same copy of a book, To Kill a Mocking Bird, by Harper Lee. It has to be the same edition, identical. You want to send the message "Meet me tomorrow at the station". "Meet" is on page 31, and is the second word on line 33, "me" is on page 183, the fourth word on line 7 (this is not the first occurance), and so on. "Station" doesn't occur in the book, but "stationed" does, page 112, line 5, fourth word. It'll do. You end up with a string of numbers:
31, 2, 33; 183, 4, 7;...
In Sherlock, these are translated into ancient Chinese numerals; in Rubicon, a string of letters by splitting the numbers up into groups that add up to less than 26. In the example:
3, 12, 3, 3, 18, 3, 4, 7, ...
which becomes:
CLCC RCDG...
In Rubicon, the protagonist figures out straight away that the letters represent numbers, probably because of the number of C's, D's etc. The receiver of the code reverses the process. The strength of the code is that without the book, the code is meaningless.
The KGB and GRU (Russian Army Intelligence) used a similar method. They had a purpose designed code book using four figure numbers, so "meet" would have been 5268, "me" 171, and so on. If there was a word that wasn't in the code book, the letters would have specific numbers, "a" 358, "b" 1051, etc. Encoding the example would, again, give a string of numbers:
5268, 171, 5454, ...
The agents had what was called one-time pads. These had random numbers printed on celuloid, which burns very quickly, and which were unique to each agent. These numbers would be added to first string, only being used once, thus the name. If we add the random numbers 8235, 2760, and 6473, modulus 10000 to give us four figure numbers, to the example we get:
3503, 2931, 1927...
These can then be translated into letters as before to make transmitting in Morse easier.
Say you want to communicate with someone secretly. You both buy the same copy of a book, To Kill a Mocking Bird, by Harper Lee. It has to be the same edition, identical. You want to send the message "Meet me tomorrow at the station". "Meet" is on page 31, and is the second word on line 33, "me" is on page 183, the fourth word on line 7 (this is not the first occurance), and so on. "Station" doesn't occur in the book, but "stationed" does, page 112, line 5, fourth word. It'll do. You end up with a string of numbers:
31, 2, 33; 183, 4, 7;...
In Sherlock, these are translated into ancient Chinese numerals; in Rubicon, a string of letters by splitting the numbers up into groups that add up to less than 26. In the example:
3, 12, 3, 3, 18, 3, 4, 7, ...
which becomes:
CLCC RCDG...
In Rubicon, the protagonist figures out straight away that the letters represent numbers, probably because of the number of C's, D's etc. The receiver of the code reverses the process. The strength of the code is that without the book, the code is meaningless.
The KGB and GRU (Russian Army Intelligence) used a similar method. They had a purpose designed code book using four figure numbers, so "meet" would have been 5268, "me" 171, and so on. If there was a word that wasn't in the code book, the letters would have specific numbers, "a" 358, "b" 1051, etc. Encoding the example would, again, give a string of numbers:
5268, 171, 5454, ...
The agents had what was called one-time pads. These had random numbers printed on celuloid, which burns very quickly, and which were unique to each agent. These numbers would be added to first string, only being used once, thus the name. If we add the random numbers 8235, 2760, and 6473, modulus 10000 to give us four figure numbers, to the example we get:
3503, 2931, 1927...
These can then be translated into letters as before to make transmitting in Morse easier.
Tuesday: Rain! Rain! Rain!!
It's finally raining after what seems to be weeks of dry weather. It started lashing it down about six this morning, hard enough to wake me from my slumbers. I've checked the weather on the Met Office web site and it looks like it's in for most of the morning.
Oxfam
I did my shift at the shop yesterday and worked from 8:45AM to 4:45PM, with a half-hour break for lunch. It was mostly sitting behind the counter and shifting large boxes full of books into and out of the little lift that we have. We got the delivery from the book bank, based at Sainsbury's in Springfield, a suburb of Chelmsford, which was huge, in addition to a couple of house moves, so, as you can imagine, I was knackered yesterday evening.
I did manage to listen to some tunes in the morning, though. I got through the latest Mojo freebee CD, which had a selection of old blues numbers selected by Robert Plant. Not bad, plus I got part way though the previous months as well which was also quite good.
We also got shop-lifted. I was out at lunch, but apparently a customer saw someone slip books and a few records into his bag while in the shop. Everyone got a code red (we had to change the bulb), Gill phone the police, and Mark, who'd turned up for the afternoon shift, tracked him through the shop and out into the high street. He'd twigged that he was being followed and put a sheaf of records that he'd nicked back onto the shelf and scarpered. The cops came round and took descriptions off people. They said that they would look on the CCTV footage for the shopping area to see if they could find anyone of fitting the description we gave them. Good luck with that, boys.
Jobs
Half way through the morning, I got word from an agent about a Delphi job at the London Business School. This started a few weeks ago, but they've only just put together a shortlist, so here's hoping.
Also I've applied for another £65k/year job that's just popped up on the web, so you never know.
Oxfam
I did my shift at the shop yesterday and worked from 8:45AM to 4:45PM, with a half-hour break for lunch. It was mostly sitting behind the counter and shifting large boxes full of books into and out of the little lift that we have. We got the delivery from the book bank, based at Sainsbury's in Springfield, a suburb of Chelmsford, which was huge, in addition to a couple of house moves, so, as you can imagine, I was knackered yesterday evening.
I did manage to listen to some tunes in the morning, though. I got through the latest Mojo freebee CD, which had a selection of old blues numbers selected by Robert Plant. Not bad, plus I got part way though the previous months as well which was also quite good.
We also got shop-lifted. I was out at lunch, but apparently a customer saw someone slip books and a few records into his bag while in the shop. Everyone got a code red (we had to change the bulb), Gill phone the police, and Mark, who'd turned up for the afternoon shift, tracked him through the shop and out into the high street. He'd twigged that he was being followed and put a sheaf of records that he'd nicked back onto the shelf and scarpered. The cops came round and took descriptions off people. They said that they would look on the CCTV footage for the shopping area to see if they could find anyone of fitting the description we gave them. Good luck with that, boys.
Jobs
Half way through the morning, I got word from an agent about a Delphi job at the London Business School. This started a few weeks ago, but they've only just put together a shortlist, so here's hoping.
Also I've applied for another £65k/year job that's just popped up on the web, so you never know.
Friday, 6 August 2010
Friday: Jobs
Since being made redundant from City Financials (the web site still exists, I noticed, even if the company doesn't), I've been casting around for a job.
I've been interviewed by JHC, a big firm up near London Bridge who were looking for an experienced Delphi developer. After three interviews over four or five weeks, they withdrew the job vacancy. Although this was a bit disappointing, I get the feeling that the job would have been quite a tough one and I'd have been on a learning curve for the next few years, although it would have been quite a rewarding role. Their attitude toward software development is very professional, plus I would have been doing Java as well as Delphi, which is the direction I want to go in. So mixed feelings about that one.
However, two other roles have sprung up at the same time. The first is another (Senior) Delphi role at the FTSE. This is for the unbelievable amount of £65k. So, obviously, I applied for it and just for good measure, I applied for the team leader role as well.
The other role my sister found me. It's a Senior DotNet Developer role at the NHS hospital where she works (she called it "DotNot", which was unintentionally funny. Or maybe dotnot), right in Basildon. I might not suitable for it: there was lots of web stuff, which I've avoided these past years, but there's enough connectivity stuff which is my speciality, so you never know. Plus it's local. Even if it was in Chelmsford or Southend, it would be a reasonable journey. I filled in the online application form and I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Finally, I got an interview at South Essex College for a Information Service Analyst, a sort of support/programmer job, at Thurrock (cheers, Pete). A good mix of different technologies and answering the phone. It doesn't pay much, but it might be just the thing.
I've been interviewed by JHC, a big firm up near London Bridge who were looking for an experienced Delphi developer. After three interviews over four or five weeks, they withdrew the job vacancy. Although this was a bit disappointing, I get the feeling that the job would have been quite a tough one and I'd have been on a learning curve for the next few years, although it would have been quite a rewarding role. Their attitude toward software development is very professional, plus I would have been doing Java as well as Delphi, which is the direction I want to go in. So mixed feelings about that one.
However, two other roles have sprung up at the same time. The first is another (Senior) Delphi role at the FTSE. This is for the unbelievable amount of £65k. So, obviously, I applied for it and just for good measure, I applied for the team leader role as well.
The other role my sister found me. It's a Senior DotNet Developer role at the NHS hospital where she works (she called it "DotNot", which was unintentionally funny. Or maybe dotnot), right in Basildon. I might not suitable for it: there was lots of web stuff, which I've avoided these past years, but there's enough connectivity stuff which is my speciality, so you never know. Plus it's local. Even if it was in Chelmsford or Southend, it would be a reasonable journey. I filled in the online application form and I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Finally, I got an interview at South Essex College for a Information Service Analyst, a sort of support/programmer job, at Thurrock (cheers, Pete). A good mix of different technologies and answering the phone. It doesn't pay much, but it might be just the thing.
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Thursday: Oxfam, The Design Museum and Lizard Men
Oxfam
Today was supposed to be me at Oxfam most of the morning, but the person I was supposed to be covering for turned up unexpectedly, so no music this morning. After a few hours sorting through books in the basement, I decided to call it a day and leave early. Gill was okay with it as about five other people had turned up as well, so it was a bit overcrowded. At one point there was NINE of us in the shop. As I said to Andrew, there were more staff than customers (we had three customers at the time).
The Design Museum
I was up in London on Tuesday and went to The Design Museum, which is on the South Bank near Tower Bridge (over the road from Boris Johnson's current residence). It's modern structure right on the river bank:
It's more of an exhibition space than a museum and the current major exhibition, for which I got a catalogue and a free T-shirt, is Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award, the winner being a folding three-pin plug, which I thought was very innovative. Also on display was an electric aeroplane, component furniture made from bamboo laminate and some hurricane-proof architecture for Mississippi, my personal favourite.
Lizard Men
I've started to paint the Warhammer Lizard Men I assembled and basecoated a while ago. The aim is to get them looking something like this:
A long, slow process, knowing me.
Today was supposed to be me at Oxfam most of the morning, but the person I was supposed to be covering for turned up unexpectedly, so no music this morning. After a few hours sorting through books in the basement, I decided to call it a day and leave early. Gill was okay with it as about five other people had turned up as well, so it was a bit overcrowded. At one point there was NINE of us in the shop. As I said to Andrew, there were more staff than customers (we had three customers at the time).
The Design Museum
I was up in London on Tuesday and went to The Design Museum, which is on the South Bank near Tower Bridge (over the road from Boris Johnson's current residence). It's modern structure right on the river bank:
It's more of an exhibition space than a museum and the current major exhibition, for which I got a catalogue and a free T-shirt, is Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award, the winner being a folding three-pin plug, which I thought was very innovative. Also on display was an electric aeroplane, component furniture made from bamboo laminate and some hurricane-proof architecture for Mississippi, my personal favourite.
Lizard Men
I've started to paint the Warhammer Lizard Men I assembled and basecoated a while ago. The aim is to get them looking something like this:
A long, slow process, knowing me.
Monday, 2 August 2010
Sherlock and Rubicon
There have been two TV programmes recently which have caught my attention. One is very popular, prime-time fare and the other is obscure and possibly the best I've seen in a while.
Sherlock
Most of the people I've spoken to have complimented the latest adaption of Conan-Doyle's creation, transporting the Victorian sleuth and his companion into 21st century London. I've now watched it and I have to say that it's a very slick, knowing production. A sincere homage, from the Afghan War parallels to references to Study in Scarlet. The actors are good and well cast, from Martin Freeman's Doctor Watson and Mark Gattis' Mycroft Holmes to the lead played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who makes a very good Holmes. Even 221b Baker Street looks like the Victorian original.
I think that it will do until an original drama comes along, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. BBC drama seems to like grave robbing at the moment, ripping off The Sweeney (Life on Mars), A For Andromeda, Doctor Who, Quatermass and now Sherlock Holmes. They do it very well and it seems aimed for consumption by the American market.
If you look at the BBC web site from outside the UK, you get a totally different perspective on the organisation. Click on the TV section from outside and you don't get a list of the UK channels, what programmes are on when and how the licence fee is being spent. You get a (large) list of the commercial channels the BBC provides. The bedrock of BBC funding is the licence fee (£145 per household, per year), but the rest of the funding is increasingly coming from abroad, particularly the USA and Canada. The BBC is becoming a player, albeit a minor one, in the lucrative commercial American market. That's why Sherlock Holmes has been turned into CSI London.
Rubicon
So after that little rant, it seems a bit much for me to go on about an TV series just starting in the States. Rubicon is something you don't really get in the US, and something we used to do rather well. It's a paranoid conspiracy thriller, and a very good one it is too. The premise is very similar to an old Robert Redford film, Three Days of the Condor, but updated for the 21st Century and with a Grand Conspiracy, like the Illuminati, thrown in for good measure. It's got Peter Gerety, from Homicide and The Wire, and even Miranda Richardson (Queeney from Blackadder 2). I like it already.
Remember, you heard it here first.
Sherlock
Most of the people I've spoken to have complimented the latest adaption of Conan-Doyle's creation, transporting the Victorian sleuth and his companion into 21st century London. I've now watched it and I have to say that it's a very slick, knowing production. A sincere homage, from the Afghan War parallels to references to Study in Scarlet. The actors are good and well cast, from Martin Freeman's Doctor Watson and Mark Gattis' Mycroft Holmes to the lead played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who makes a very good Holmes. Even 221b Baker Street looks like the Victorian original.
I think that it will do until an original drama comes along, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. BBC drama seems to like grave robbing at the moment, ripping off The Sweeney (Life on Mars), A For Andromeda, Doctor Who, Quatermass and now Sherlock Holmes. They do it very well and it seems aimed for consumption by the American market.
If you look at the BBC web site from outside the UK, you get a totally different perspective on the organisation. Click on the TV section from outside and you don't get a list of the UK channels, what programmes are on when and how the licence fee is being spent. You get a (large) list of the commercial channels the BBC provides. The bedrock of BBC funding is the licence fee (£145 per household, per year), but the rest of the funding is increasingly coming from abroad, particularly the USA and Canada. The BBC is becoming a player, albeit a minor one, in the lucrative commercial American market. That's why Sherlock Holmes has been turned into CSI London.
Rubicon
So after that little rant, it seems a bit much for me to go on about an TV series just starting in the States. Rubicon is something you don't really get in the US, and something we used to do rather well. It's a paranoid conspiracy thriller, and a very good one it is too. The premise is very similar to an old Robert Redford film, Three Days of the Condor, but updated for the 21st Century and with a Grand Conspiracy, like the Illuminati, thrown in for good measure. It's got Peter Gerety, from Homicide and The Wire, and even Miranda Richardson (Queeney from Blackadder 2). I like it already.
Remember, you heard it here first.
Monday: W40K books
When I read books, I tend to go through phases of reading. I read very intensely for a few weeks and then read hardly anything at all for about a month or so, and so on. When an intense phase ends, it's usually because I get distracted by this machine (programming) or because the book I'm about a third of the way through starts getting a bit difficult. I think at the moment I'm entering an intense phase. This is helped by reading Warhammer 40,000 books (W40K), published by The Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop.
W40K books are pulp military science fiction, but this is no indicator of quality as there are some very good authors, specifically Gav Thorpe, Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett. I've just finished Thorpe's Path of the Warrior and I'm about a third of the way through Abnett's Ravenor omnibus, having read the Eisenhorn omnibus previously.
Mostly, the books are from the human perspective, but Path of the Warrior has an Eldar, an ancient humanoid race, as it's protagonist.
Gav Thorpe does a very decent job of conveying the "otherness" of the Eldar, but the book takes a bit to get going and there are too few battles in it for my taste. How the protagonist progresses from warrior to "exarch" (leader) after only two battles isn't sufficiently explained, plus the novel, which is meant to be part one of a series, concludes with the death and transformation of the character.
Ravenor is much more mainstream, part of Abnett's Inquisition series.
In W40K, human religion is based on a semi-dead God-Emperor, opposed by demons, aliens and heretics. The Inquisition is intended to oppose these forces, and the novels are a bit like a kind of baroque sci-fi spy/horror novel. Sort of advanced steampunk, but without the steam and with a bit of Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. And they're great. The plots are a cut above the average W40K Space-Marines-kill-everything novel but there's enough shooty stuff so you don't get to miss it too much.
W40K books are pulp military science fiction, but this is no indicator of quality as there are some very good authors, specifically Gav Thorpe, Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett. I've just finished Thorpe's Path of the Warrior and I'm about a third of the way through Abnett's Ravenor omnibus, having read the Eisenhorn omnibus previously.
Mostly, the books are from the human perspective, but Path of the Warrior has an Eldar, an ancient humanoid race, as it's protagonist.
Gav Thorpe does a very decent job of conveying the "otherness" of the Eldar, but the book takes a bit to get going and there are too few battles in it for my taste. How the protagonist progresses from warrior to "exarch" (leader) after only two battles isn't sufficiently explained, plus the novel, which is meant to be part one of a series, concludes with the death and transformation of the character.
Ravenor is much more mainstream, part of Abnett's Inquisition series.
In W40K, human religion is based on a semi-dead God-Emperor, opposed by demons, aliens and heretics. The Inquisition is intended to oppose these forces, and the novels are a bit like a kind of baroque sci-fi spy/horror novel. Sort of advanced steampunk, but without the steam and with a bit of Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. And they're great. The plots are a cut above the average W40K Space-Marines-kill-everything novel but there's enough shooty stuff so you don't get to miss it too much.
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