Health and safety

I've just been told some H&S flunkie thinks that my office is dangerous because I'm using extension leads and have too many plugs connected to a single socket.

Sighing, I point out that it's test gear and the whole lot only takes a couple of amps.

"Aha! But what if the cleaner comes along and plugs a vacuum cleaner in as well?"

I point out that it would need an extra two and a half vacuum cleaners to get up to 13 amps. Or a vacuum cleaner and an electric kettle, or... but no - it's pointless trying to use reason in these circumstances.

"Doesn't matter. You can plug lots of thirteen amp plugs into that extension, and overload it"

I point out that it doesn't actually fucking well matter (I've skipped a bit; I'd reached very pissed off by this point) what you plug in to the damned thing because it's only got a thirteen amp fuse in the plug at the end, so the worst you could do with an overload, however unlikely, would be to blow the fuse. That's what fuses are for, for fuck's sake. That's why we have them... But no, this doesn't work either:

"All those wires constitute a trip hazard"

"Huh? It's under a fucking desk, who's going to trip over it? Pinoccio? The seven dwarfs?"

"Anyone could fall over it after the cleaner has pulled it out to plug their vacuum cleaner in..."

From there on it degenerated. Because of this fucking moron and his H&S nazi friends it is no longer possible to use extension cables in an office - not because of any real danger, but because of some inane set of pseudo-scentific rules dreampt up by some innumerate and illogical pillocks somewhere, which cannot be disputed... What the hell is the world coming to?

Olde Highscore tables

While rummaging through old files I came across the highscore tables for the last mainstream game I designed (back in 1986?)... Could anyone not have read this and realised I'd had enough of writing games?

I see children with vacant stares
I thought I heard them say . . .
Don't think sorry's easily said
The price of infamy , the edge of insanity
Talking 'bout stupid things
She is dancing away from you now
Take me for a fool if you feel that's right
Or a whipping boy , someone to despise
Please don't look at me this way

It's coming for me thro' the trees
And you may ask yourself
Wonder why . . what makes me rise so high
Surely you know-the chance has gone by
And my spirit is crying for leaving

We're not scared to lose it all
Security gone to the wall
Future dreams we have to realise
A thousand critics hands
Won't keep us from the things we plan
While we cling to the Things we prize
And do you feel scared - I do
But I won't stop and falter
And if we threw it all away
Things can only get better
Treating this as though it was
The last , the final game
Get to christmas and feel no regret
It may take a little time
A lonely path , an uphill climb
Success or failure cannot alter us

[And this text was hidden from the user in memory but followed on]

Oh well , excuse me , I have some ageing & dying to be getting on with.

Global warming

Just about every time I've looked at the news for the last few years there have been scenes of excitable foreign types burning something. Flags, cars, buildings, effigies, churches, people... No wonder we suffer from global warming.

Smoking gun

One of my amplifiers has blown up... Sob.

Quite possibly the best audio power amplifier in the world one minute, a 50V DC power supply the next... Thank the gods I have electrostatic speakers with DC blocking capacitors inside 'em or Jan would have found herself in the front garden beating off one of the cones.

Gah. I blame Bielzibabe - if it wasn't for him poking his fingers into everything I would have to put the amplifiers into a cupboard, and they wouldn't overheat.

Teach me to wind the bias current up for winter, I suppose...

Van Manisong

I was moved by an incident a while back to pen an ode to the white van man:

(With apologies to Carly Simon)

You drove onto the motorway
Like it was a parking lot
You immediately made for the outside lane
As if you'd reserved a spot

You had one eye in the mirror
But god alone knows why
Nothing you see there alters your driving
Alters your driving and...

Driving a van
You probably think that lane's reserved for you
Driving a van
I'll bet you think that lane's reserved for you
Don't you? Don't you?

You'd have had me several years ago
When I was still quite naive
Well I've learned since then you haven't a clue
And that you will always weave

Perhaps you'd give way to the ones you love
only none of them are real
Ignoring our screams
You were drinking some coffee
Drinking some coffee and....

Driving a van
You probably think that lane's reserved for you
Driving a van
I'll bet you think that lane's reserved for you
Don't you? Don't you?

Well somehow you must have passed a driving test
Perhaps you took a gun?
And now you race your van on the public roads
Endangering us for fun

Well, you're in the wrong lane all of the time
And like as not you're right
Up the arse of
The poor sod in front
Poor sod in front, and...

Driving a van
You probably think the road's reserved for you
Driving a van
I'll bet you think the road's reserved for you
Don't you? Don't you?




However, someone called Felix Dennis, in a book titled 'When Jack Sued Jill: Nursery Rhymes or Modern Times' has done it rather better:

(To the tune of Old King Cole)

White Van Man has a very white van
And a very white van has he,
Except for the dents and the rust by the vents
And some very rude graf-ee-teeeee.

He drives in his van as fast as he can
And he neither hears nor sees,
He clings to his phone like a dog with a bone
While he steers with one of his kneeeees.
He picks his nose while the tailback grows
And yacks to his front seat crew,
But a fool so rash as to honk or flash
Will receive his fingers twooooo.

Oh, White Van Man has a very wide clan
Who profess no Highway Code,
They'll shunt your rear and yell in your ear
As they U-turn in the roooooad.
He stamps on his brakes when he overtakes
As he cuts up you and me,
For White Van Man has a very white van...
And a very white van has heeeee!

Software challenge?

While watching scrapheap challenge it occurred to me that we should do a software version so that programmers wouldn't feel left out.

Something along the lines of having them trawl the web for scraps of obsolete and buggy source code, then bodging these poorly-understood fragments together to make a flakey application that can be made to do something badly after only an hour of tinkering, and which is then thrown away as useless.

We could call it "programming"...

Who watches the watches?

Richard has just, in passing, mentioned that his watch claims to have 27 jewels.

"We're paying him too much"

"We're paying him?"

[pause]

"Hang on, it can't have 27 jewels"

"Why ze 'ell not?"

"Well, they're bearings aren't they? One at each end of a shaft? How the hell does it manage to have an odd number of the damned things?"

Richard is currently attacking the poor thing with a screwdriver...

He'd be better off clicking here...

Artificial sarcasm

It used to be the custom for mathematicians, philosophers and the like to encode their ideas and discoveries as cryptic anagrams so they could later supply the original text to establish their priority.

Today I was idly reading part of Wikipedia and was amused, and very nearly annoyed to discover a couple of places where other people were being given credit for inventing things that I'd done years before... One example was syntax highlighting in text editors, the others were in a similar vein [1]. Well, my development tools still do one or two useful things that programmers haven't yet thought of and it struck me that I really ought to get the olde anagram generator out and encode the ideas so that I can use them in my dotage to support claims of "Idiots - I was doing that forty years ago!" and suchlike profoundly unhelpful but satisfying remarks.

Unfortunately the first anagram it came up with started "Oh dear me, holier-than-thou..." (that's not the complete wording, no point decoding it) which I took as a hint and abandoned the whole enterprise.

But what the hell - here's one for you all to be going on with. Decode this and untold millions of programmers will bang their heads on their desks with cries of "Why the fuck didn't anyone else think of that?"

"Oh dear me! Damnation, the stealthier acuteness"

Mind you, it's probably easier to just get me pissed and ask nicely.


[1] Of course, I could just edit the entries in Wikipedia, but somehow changing them to "Actually, Design Design invented this in..." seems a little bit too sad. Besides, who's to say we were the first? Good ideas that give a commercial advantage are not openly discussed. The whole idea's intrinsically flawed and offensive.

The big bang?

While explaining some cosmology to my daughter:

"You have to understand that most of the astronomers involved were men. It was probably quite a small bang really"...

Terry Pratchett diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's

What miserable news. Bastard fucking universe, there are plenty of other people out there you could have picked on, why did it have to be him? :(

Fragment of text

Text file found in an olde archive (28 Jan 1992):

[
Curiosity has killed many a cat, but I was killed by rationality - a less rational man would have given in to the urge to flee, to run blindly into the night - and would have been spared the horror that is contained in this house (only a small fraction of which I can report here). The light is fading and before it fails completely I will take my last chance on the stairs, though I can feel them waiting below in the hall, and the effort is futile.

It started in the last weeks of 19--, when Rodway claimed that he had discovered hidden
]

I wonder who the hell Rodway was going to be? And what had he found? Some game idea long forgotten...

Olde games

Quite possibly the best version of Space Invaders so far...

http://www2.b3ta.com/notepadinvaders/

A whale of a time?

People on TV and in films never talk during sex, which has occasionally struck me as odd. Mind you, I suppose that most of the things said during passionate moments don't bear repeating... "Lie back and think of Wales" a girlfriend once said to me in jest; I suspect she meant "You lie back - I'll think of Whales"...

Random Thought

Will mankind end its reliance on technology before technology ends its reliance on mankind?

Don't ask me, I just think these aphorisms up. Some other bugger can answer them...

(That one makes me sound like a bit of a carbon chauvinist, but I'm not. As long as something is looking at the universe with wonder and understanding I don't care if it's an over-educated monkey or a piece of technology.)

Quantum mice - a watched mouse never gets caught...

About a week ago we discovered we have mice in the eaves, a situation SWMBO asked me to remedy in my own time, or at least that's how I chose to interpret her hour of screaming hysterics...

So, following on from a design for a mouse trap Ste and I made about twenty years ago, which caught a dozen mice in its first four hours of operation, I hacked together a transparent box with some bait, an infra-red beam to detect the mouse and a solenoid operated trap door to catch it. This was then placed in a likely spot and an infra-red video camera rigged up to watch the mice being caught.

About an hour later the first customer turns up. After a cautious sniff around the outside it stuck its head and shoulders into the box and rooted about, not going far enough in to break the beam. Fair enough, perhaps mice have grown more cunning in the last twenty years... Nil desperandum - give them a chance to get used to it.

A bit later another mouse appears and goes through the same process... Perhaps they don't like plastic boxes?

Then one turns up and gets inside the box - I sit poised - surely this is it? But no, somehow the bloody thing doesn't trip the trap, and leaves. Bastard, I'll get it next time... But no, it's back, and this time it brings a friend. To cut a long story short they explore the box, they party on down on the bait, they jump about, have sex, snooze a little, and at no point does the bloody trap door close. After a bit they get bored waiting for something to happen and wander off, presumably giving the place a bad review.

Only then does it occur to me that a mouse trap that relies on the mice breaking an infra-red beak in a transparent box is probably not the best thing to watch using an infra-red camera that has about a dozen high-intensity infra-red LEDs built in as illumination... Doh!

Got 'em when they came back an while later - amazing the difference a bit of cardboard around the camera makes...

Programmers can't, part the n'th.

Grumpy crem... Shouldn't have sent this, perhaps, but there are times when the unspeakable incompetence of programmers drives me into incoherent rage... Sorry, incoherent fucking rage...

It might help to explain the annoyance that this isn't their first attempt, and I've given them perfectly good source code that would do the job, so they're playing the "not invented here" game by refusing to use it. And so wasting my time... Tossers...

> Attached is a dump of the RS232 data.
> Please check that it conforms to your specification.

No, it certainly doesn't conform to our specification. Tell the stupid bastards to try reading the fucking documentation, I've made it perfectly clear (in several places) that all the data is encoded as pairs of hex characters.

[sigh] Let's look at the bytes.

The first four bytes are OK, I suppose, though not what I asked for.

> 0D 43 41 4E

[CR] CAN - I'd rather they used KAN, it seems (slightly) cleaner to avoid using hex chars in the header, but that doesn't particularly matter.

> 47 00 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 [etc]

But after the first four bytes they go into a bit of a decline. All the rest are garbage - they've completely failed to grasp the idea (god knows how) that ALL the raw bytes are encoded as pairs of hex characters... They're not allowed to send any bytes other than the ASCII characters for "0" to "9" and "A" to "F"

Let me quote from the fucking documentation: "Data bytes are encoded using pairs of hexadecimal characters."

Is there anything even vaguely unclear about that? It's the second fucking sentence... Can't they read? Did they get bored after reading the first sentence and give up? If that isn't clear then what about this?

"After a valid marker field ALL machine-readable data will be represented as octal bytes encoded as pairs of hexadecimal ASCII characters (0123456789ABCDEF or 0123456789abcdef)."

What sort of moron do you have to be read that and not grasp the idea we encode data as "pairs of hexadecimal ASCII characters"?

I don't need or intend to waste my time on drivelling fucking morons like this... The documentation is perfectly clear, tell them to get someone in off the fucking street to read it to them if they can't understand simple bloody english. Pillocks...

[polite but irrelevent bit removed]

I've given them source code that does the encoding, why can't they just use it? If they don't want to use it then what sort of pillock doesn't at least look at it to see what it's doing? Christ, where do you dig these people up?

Here is the relevant bit of the protocol document, in case they haven't even bothered to look at the fucking thing.

I've made bold (assuming your email client understands this) the places where I made it absolutely fucking clear how the data are encoded... Perhaps you can see why I'm pissed off at having to deal with some jerk who can't read?

Haven't they even got the fucking common sense to look at the examples I've included and see that they're nothing at all like the drivel they're sending? There are times when I despair at the sheer unbelievable moronic stupidity of programmers.

[first line of documentation]

Messages use standard ASCII encoding. Data bytes are encoded using pairs of hexadecimal characters.

[section deleted]

After a valid marker field ALL machine-readable data will be represented as octal bytes encoded as pairs of hexadecimal ASCII characters (0123456789ABCDEF or 0123456789abcdef). These pairs may optionally be separated by SPACE characters to increase human readability. Any character aside from (0123456789ABCDEF or 0123456789abcdef) and SPACE will be treated as a terminator. Normally upper case should be used for hexadecimal numbers, but lower case may be used.

[section deleted]

Following the marker field there may be an arbitrary number of space characters, then there must be two hexadecimal characters representing a single byte of "message length" information.

[section and some examples (FFS!) deleted]

Following the length field there may be an arbitrary number of space characters, then there must be two hexadecimal characters representing a single byte of "message type" information. This contains a single byte representing the type of the message. This field must be present in a valid message.

[section including another example deleted]

Following the "message-type" field there may, or may not, be message data. If there is it must be an even number of hexadecimal characters representing a number of bytes. These may be separated by any combination of space characters but ONLY between pairs of hexadecimal digits.

[section deleted]

Following the message data, or the message-type field if there is no data, there may be an arbitrary number of space characters, then there would normally be two hexadecimal characters representing a single byte of "checksum" information.

[etc, etc]

The Moving Cursor

The Moving Cursor writes; and, having writ,
Microsoft Word crashes: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall save the file,
Nor all your Tears recover a Word of it

Everything is getting far too complicated

The universe has run out of simplicity. Be warned...

Frustration

According to Dick Francis there's an evocative phrase in the racing world for the situation where a jockey is replaced against their wishes - "jocked-off".

Pity there isn't a similar phrase for designers - "designed-off" doesn't quite catch the "fucked-off" feeling...

The dangers of abstraction

Apparently there is an offence under British law of "abstracting electricity", which covers tampering with an electricity meter. Abstracting? I imagine outstanding warrants exist for Messers Ampere, Volt and Coulomb, not to mention Faraday and Maxwell.

Personally I think they're abstracting the urine...

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