Several bible mysteries solved.

I had an epiphany today, a profound religious insight - God, being perfect, must work in binary - after all one could hardly imagine a supreme being going round using messy decimal.

From this insight several mysteries of the bible are at once explained. Remember Moses receiving the two tablets containing the ten commandments, and how he broke them before anyone else saw them? That always struck me as suspicious behaviour.

What I now suspect really happened is that god called him up the mountain to collect the "10" commandments, but when working in binary "10" means two, not ten. Two tablets for two commandments makes perfect sense.

However, Moses (who's expecting ten commandments because he's not accustomed to binary) is a bit overawed during the meeting and doesn't notice he's only come away with two commandments until it's too late to go back. Thinking he's misplaced the rest, and not wanting to look like a complete idiot in front of the entire tribe of Israel, he makes eight commandments up on the way back down and then breaks the two tablets to cover this up.

God was understandably put out by this and sulked his way through the rest of the old testament, cheering up only after his son moved out (most parents do). Speaking of the son, Jesus is reported to have said "all of the law hangs on these two commandments"... What more proof could be required there were only two?

So, all we have to do now is work out which of the ten commandments are the real ones; then, with a bit of luck, we can safely covet our neighbour's asses and maybe even join them in a spot of adultery. This should swell the congregations, after a few months anyway, and give the choirboys a well deserved rest...


It should be noted that under this theory the eleventh commandment "Thou shalt not get caught" would be the third. But as "11" in binary is three, that works out. This cannot just be coincidence! Praise de lord!!

["Lines are open now. Dial 010-10011010 to make a donation"]

Drivelology

I'd say you couldn't make this up, but someone did...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Silicon lifeforms

Interspersed with the general grumbling today was: "The more legs a chip has, the more like the luggage it behaves..."

Modems

A month ago I was writing software for a bloody modem that didn't want to behave and I thought I was pissed off. Hah. A month ago I didn't know what pissed off really meant...

Somehow I've let myself get talked into writing the software for a complete piece of shite, yet again involving a cellular modem that doesn't want to behave, and I'm utterly sick of the whole fucking process. This project was sold to me as being a small change to an existing product, something that would only take a couple of days to do, whereas it actually turns out to be a major change with all sorts of dire consequences and awkward problems for the software to overcome. There's no way on earth I'd have agreed to do this if I hadn't been comprehensively mislead about what was going to be involved. The hardware is horrible, the modem is horrible and I'm really not in the fucking mood to wade through this sort of unreliable crap again.

What really pisses me off is that I'm now having to turn away other designs in order to make time for this joke, and I know it's not got a cat in hell's chance of ever working properly. I feel like I'm pouring my life down the fucking drain...

Accents

A friend of mine was nearly sacked last week for having his wife phone him at work to say she was stuck in traffic.

"Huh?" I hear you ask - "how does that work?"

Well, you need a few particular circumstances. First you have to work for an American company. Second, said company needs to have a system where phone calls to your works phone are automatically run through speech recognition software which turns them into e-mails and sends them out to you, and thirdly your wife needs to have an accent which causes American speech recognition software to think "stuck in" is really "fucking"... i.e. no particular accent whatsoever.

Add to that mix a company policy where emails containing swearwords get flagged up and sent to all and sundry and you're, um, fu... in the deep, ah, well, you're completely, um. Whatever.

The part I find most amazing is not that the software fu-umbled the words, but that they think he's responsible for the language used (or not as it happens) by someone who called him... And that's from people who appear to have declared war on the wrong country because they can't tell the difference between Iran and Iraq.

Sheesh.

Programmers (again, again...)

Quote of the day:

"In my darker moments I think I could print out some of my source code, eat the listing, digest it and then shit something which would have more programming competence than most of the programmers I've met... The rest of the time I think that any sort of roughage would do"

I wasn't in a good mood. After a week long battle with some anonymous programmer's bugs in a modem, or in the network, whatever, I find myself moving onto the next project and guess what that involves? Chasing problems with another fucking modem.




"Quick - blow your raspberry!"

"Thhhuuruurruurrrppp... ThuuUUUUuUuUURRRRRPPPP! THHHURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPHHH!"

Orange GPRS

I'm going to start swearing in a minute, read no further if the phrase "[expletive deleted]" offends you... Oh, sorry, too late.

For the last week I've been running round in circles trying to sort out the problems we've been having with GPRS modems on a design that had to be working for an exhibition - the usual last minute panic sort of thing. I finished the software for this project last Thursday and it was working well. I tested it a few times on Thursday morning without problems, then, just before I was due to pass it over to the customer that afternoon it stopped making GPRS connections. Since then I've had embarrassing meeting with them, spent all day at their site trying to find out what the fucking problem was, had to write support for a completely different type of packet radio carrier so that they could demonstrate the product and generally been stressed to fuck and made to look like a complete amateur.

On Friday we asked Orange technical support if they knew of any reason why their GPRS enabled SIMs should stop working, and they said no. Nor did the modem supplier, who looked at our setup strings, etc, and couldn't see what we were doing wrong.

Today I find out that Orange rolled out a change to their network software on Thursday afternoon, and guess what? We were the first, but other people are now reporting that their GPRS modems no longer work with Orange sims...

So, thanks Orange, you stupid, useless [expletive deleted]. I feel like killing someone. It's bad enough that they break GPRS, but there is no fucking excuse whatsoever for denying that they knew what could have caused the problem.

The last week has been hell. I'm so pissed off with these arseholes I can't really express it.



On mature reflection I removed the term [expletive deleted] and replaced it with [expletive deleted]... Oh, poot.

PIGO

Programmers Involved; Garbage Out

Says it all, really.

Discordant

I was catching up on the messages on a conferencing system by flicking through the unread messages when I came across the following comment:

> Isn't C -> C#m a bit of a wrench?

Which had me wondering what the hell the computer language C#m was and why the hell anyone would think the world needs yet another flavour of C to contend with when I realised that it was a music conference and they were talking about chords...

Overworked

I'm fucking fed up. Very fucking fed up, in fact. So utterly fucking fed up that I can't be bothered to write about it...

Fuck.

Jodrell Bank

Oh, wonderful - some bunch of idiots have decided that rather than stump up an extra few million quid, probably less the amount our politicians spend each year on prostitutes, they'll close Jodrell Bank... Brilliant.

When I heard this I naturally assumed that this piece of stupidity had to be down to the technophobic luddites in power, but no, it appears that the decision was made by a bunch of scientists forced to assign priorities to research... Hmmm.... I smell a rat - why would anyone with a brain pick on something so noticeable? Something we actually do that's still world class?

Ah - I see, I was being a bit dozy there; the public probably won't stand for Jodrell Bank being closed, when they might well have ignored the demise of a few less well known projects, so choosing it makes sense. Bet the money appears from somewhere fairly soon...

They're watching, Pt2

Another story idea I might as well throw away, having sat on it since 1990 (had it while reading T.Pratchett's Moving Pictures)...

(Bloody IE crashed and lost this, so this version is terse, sorry)

Postulate a benign galactic civilization. They watch but don't interfere with primitive civilizations. Prime directive, etc, etc.

They're ethical, for values of... never mind.

Postulate that the only basis of currency exchange for any large scale civilization is information.

Postulate that they've solved the digital rights issues for information, and because they're ethical they don't just steal cultural items from primitive cultures but let the credits gained from recordings, or whatever, be held in trust until such time as the civilization becomes sufficiently advanced to join the community.

So, what sort of information would they gather? Or value? The equivalent of popular entertainment? Cultural items? Great plays, works of fiction and the like may translate well and be popular in the rest of the universe. For all we know the whole multiverse is busy watching Neighbours... No, that's going too far. Back to reality...

Following on from that we have the story, a pair of Crysteel and Danstor types[1] arriving at Terry Pratchett's door one night to tell him that because of the popularity of The Diskworld books, translated into a few tens of thousand languages and distributed across the entire multiverse, he now owns roughly half the entire universe and if he doesn't come along quietly and spend some of it the galactic economy is going to crash... Sir.



[1] Characters from an amusing early Clark first contact from the aliens POV story.

They're Watching

Assume for a second there are alien technological civilizations and they're so bored that they watch us. Low probability but not quite zero.

How do you find them? Large radio telescope arrays? Nope - dustpan and brush... Find somewhere they'd be sure to be interested in, sweep the place and have a damned good look at the debris you find... If they're using nano-technology some of the dust will be, ah, 'interesting'... (Why assume nano? Because if it's larger we'd see it, and smaller probably wouldn't resolve wavelengths they'd be interested in. I suspect it'd be hard enough to pick up sounds with anything too small to see with the naked eye, let alone nanoscale, for example).

But there'd be a lot of dust to look at and a lot of false positives to eliminate, so ideally you'd want to know roughly where to look in order to concentrate the effort, so then I wondered if a world conspiracy of intelligent and enlightened governments[1] couldn't get together to create an international event of such magnitude that any thinking creature would be unable to resist monitoring it - and voila - as if by magic we arrive at the only plausible explanation for the Eurovision song contest.

Maybe not...


(I had the basic idea a while back as the first part of a spoof SF story where we start out looking for alien monitoring and wind up inventing very bad tempered and belligerent artificial intelligence as a result of the code that was written to perform the data analysis on the garbage collected getting smarter... Don't worry about it. It was going to be one of set of paradoxical solutions to the Fermi paradox, but I'll never get round to writing any of them... My favourite was health and safety (H&S) - and if you don't understand the connection between H&S organisations and the reason why there are no advanced civilizations out there count yourself lucky. While you're still allowed to do anything as dangerous as counting, that is...

I've been pondering some ideas for spoof stories about H&S bods coping with a multispecies future society, shades of James White's Sector General stuff... But they're something else the world will have to struggle to get along without, I suspect.)

[1] Spot where the surrealism takes over.

Cthulonic irrigation

My subconscious (which is often a lot less sub than I'd like it to be) just dumped the phrase "cthulonic irrigation" into the buffer and then retreated, giggling quietly sotto voce... If you don't who/what Cthulu was, or why you wouldn't invite it in the back door, count yourself lucky.

I have no context for this at all, and Google doesn't appear to recognise the phrase, though that could be the work of the old ones. Or my spelling.

I worry myself, sometimes...

Lurgy

Having just tried this 'ere winter vomiting disease out I can say without any doubt that it is not worth having - just say "NeuuurrrggGGggghh-h-h-h"

Busy as hell and two days down the drain feeling as bad as I ever have, urgh. Normal grumpyness will be resumed as soon as I can work up the energy...

Oh, speaking of energy we found out last week a certain Tokamak research reactor is currently off-line because some of our electronics failed[1], oops. And me a strong advocate of nuclear fusion. Bollocks... Not a good week, considering :(

[1] Not our fault, just a batch of shitty capacitors that fail when used well within spec. I suspect even Richard could manage to blow one of these useless bastards up.

Ah, the sweet innocence of newly stuffed boards...

... I love it. That happy and carefree feeling the first PCB's of a new project have when they arrive on the desk, populated and ready but so far unsullied by the ravages of software. I like to enjoy a moment of quiet contemplation with them, a brief interlude of peace and sanity before battle commences.

But it can't last, and - oh - how quickly they lose that innocence and acquire an air of malevolent cunning and sublime evilness when you start having to make the damned things work.

Cover me, I'm going in!

[Five processors to programme, the boards arrive after the deadline has already elapsed, estimated six weeks of software required, it's dark and I'm wearing sunglasses]

"Then take the fucking sunglasses off, crem"

"Oh. Sorry"

Neuron Free Zone

Came across a book today called "The case against nuclear power", or somesuch. "Hmmm" I thought, "I bet such a case could be reasonably made, but not as much as I'd bet this book doesn't and if I open this at random I'll find some fear-mongering total bollocks on the first page I read".

Tsk, Crem, very pessimistic - didn't need to read the whole page - the first line I read was "the noble gasses are dangerous gamma ray emitters"... Wrong.

I read the paragraph, and a few others, just to see if they understood about isotopes and were qualifying this absurd statement in some way, but no. Pig-fucking-ignorant...

Flicking through the book showed that the author was both functionally innumerate (no sign they had a clue what half-life even meant, or even that longer half-lives imply less intense radiation, not more) and ignorant of even very basic chemistry and physics, so why the hell they thought they were qualified to write on the subject escapes me... But isn't that always the way? I don't mind the fact that people can (if they so choose) remain ignorant of fundamental, trivial mathematics and physics. I do mind them casually turning their stupid prejudice into disinformation... The really annoying thing about all this is the way this sort of self-satisfied ignorance and stupidity is going to kill us all in the name of environmentalism. Gah...

Dumb xians

Turn the news on - first mistake. Second mistake was watching; the god-botherers were out in force.

Started with a report on the 'miraculous' survival of an 11-month old baby caught in a tornado. "It was a miracle. God sure was looking after him" says some red-neck moron completely overlooking the fact that the very same god had just brutally murdered his mother and torn him from her arms... Ineffable? Very fucking effable if you ask me.

This was then followed by a report of the head of the Church of England advocating the adoption of sharia law in the UK. Well, not all of it, perhaps - we'll pick and choose and leave the stoning and beheading part out for now. Maybe keep the killing of princesses bits, I suppose, that seems to resonate with the national character.

Gah. I wondered dimly what the head of the C of E is doing advocating Islam, but I suppose it makes sense, after all they're really all on the same side - sky fairy worshipping nutters all.

Hmmm. So we should be allowed to choose which laws apply to us now, should we? Fine. I do that anyway, to be honest; it'd be nice to have it formalised... Programmers could choose a legal system that expresses everything in hexadecimal:

"Can't nick me for speeding, ossifer, I was only doing 5F and it's a 70 limit..."

Mind you, I think I'd rather be nicked than declare myself a programmer. No, it'll never work.

Turned the news off before I could get even more depressed...

Sexy xians

I've just half-convinced someone that "the sermon on the mount" is so-called not because it took place on high ground, but because the original (unexpurgated) text makes reference to the delights of the female form.

And that "doggy position" is nothing to do with dogs, but a corruption of "dodgy position" (I won't go into why)...

Bad Crem. Naughty...

Hacker foxes

Recently I've become involved with the design of the control electronics for a device that speeds up the process of turning food waste into compost - let it not be said that my life is entirely dull and uninteresting - but before I arrived on the scene a previous incarnation of this hardware managed to fail (a fuse blew and stopped a heater from working) and instead of turning garbage into compost, it then did a very good job of turning garbage into flies. Lots of flies. Lots and lots of flies...

Since this particular machine was sited in the grounds of a hospital this wasn't seen by everyone as an entirely good thing, and eventually the fact that the hospital was overrun with flies came to the attention of the health and safety people who then lept into action to find some way to assign the blame. Eventually a report emerged, which amongst other things suggested the cause of the failure could possibly be hackers. Or foxes. Or (presumably) hacker foxes.

Now, foxes aren't usually noted for their hacking skills, so it rather surprises me that they could manage to hack their way into the software on this machine, which doesn't have any connection to the outside world at all. There's very little software, and it's not changeable. There's no network interface. There's no serial port. There's no keyboard. There are a couple of buttons, but press them as much as you like and you won't find a way to blow the heater fuse... So beware the hacker fox, 'ees a clever bugger...