Thanksgiving news

On Thanksgiving Dubya visited some US troops in Iraq for a bare 2 hours, a gesture of thanks or a publicity stunt for the 2004 election campaign? You judge.
One of the funnier remarks was from the Alabama soldier who said on (our) TV : "At Thanksgiving this is the first time I've seen that turkey live!"

posted by Stu Savory> on 29th November 2003 at 12:58 Central European Time

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Old friends . . . keeping in touch :-)

It's a small world. Rolf, whom I haven't seen for probably a decade, emailed. He was surfing the web looking for a good used motorcycle to buy in his area, and hit on the page where my wife Cornelia is selling her current bike. Turns out, he only lives about 60 miles away nowadays, so we're going to get together this winter and reminisce :-)

When my biker friend Klacks died aged 75 over 5 years ago, I put an obituary up on the web. This week I got an Email from his widow Inge, who was surfing the web and found it. So she mailed me a nice thankyou note for the obit. (we hadn't telephoned for nigh on two years now). I just hope I'll still be surfing the net too, and mailing in 20 years time (I'll be 60 next year)! Live long, Inge!

Another motorcycling friend Matthias sent me a photo of the very rare Redrup Radial. So I knew that he had been to visit Sammy Miller's Motorcycle Museum (UK). Sammy is another old aquaintance (he of the Ariel GOV 132).

Heliskiing in the Chilcotin Mountains (Canada), Jakob writes from Gold Bridge, which is about as far north of Vancouver as Seattle is south thereof. Hey, that's only about 150 miles from where Yule lives, right Yule?

Finally, old friends Doris and Klaus, blogreaders from Alaska, had read my blog-post about better inner-rage control on monday, and sent this great anecdote as advice. I quote it verbatim.

THE MOUNTAIN STORY
A son and his father were walking on the mountains. Suddenly, his son falls, hurts himself and screams: "AAAhhhhhhhhhhh!!!" To his surprise, he hears the voice repeating, somewhere in the mountain: "AAAhhhhhhhhhhh!!!" Curious, he yells: "Who are you?" He receives the answer: "Who are you?" Angered at the response, he screams: "Coward!" He receives the answer: "Coward!" He looks to his father and asks: "What's going on?" The father smiles and says: "My son, pay attention." And then he screams to the mountain: "I admire you!" The voice answers: "I admire you!" Again the man screams: "You are a champion!" The voice answers: "You are a champion!" The boy is surprised, but does not understand. Then the father explains: "People call this ECHO, but really this is LIFE. It gives you back everything you say or do. Our life is simply a reflection of our actions. If you want more love in the world, create more love in your heart. If you want more competence in your team, improve your competence. This relationship applies to everything, in all aspects of life; Life will give you back everything you have given to it."

And the moral to this story is:
YOUR LIFE IS NOT A COINCIDENCE. IT'S A REFLECTION OF YOU!

posted by Stu Savory on 27th November 2003 at 09:18 Central European Time

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Testing, testing . . .

I am a fan of Dave Pollard's blog. Dave is interested in research reports (and saving the world ;). He writes "Blog readers want to see more: original research, surveys benchmarks, quantitative analysis, personal experiences, lessons learned, first-hand accounts, short educational pieces and useful tools and checklists" (my shortened version of his list). I disagree : I think people want to be entertained, not educated! Nevertheless Dave, here is my little contribution to your wish-list :-)

How buggy are your IT projects?

In the SW industry we are often not very good at keeping deadlines whilst at the same time delivering a quality product. Neither in Seattle nor elsewhere. So here - in very compact form - are some numbers to help you estimate how many bugs to expect in your next IT-project and how much effort to plan for testing it in every phase.

Error density is measured here relative to a thousand lines of delivered source code (=kilo-line-of-code=KLOC). Errors are counted over the whole project, from requirements, via high level analysis, low level design, code & unit-test, integration-test, system test to handover & verification test.

For a single-PC application reckon on having 40 bugs per KLOC, for an application above 10 KLOC reckon on 50, for complex graphics applications 80 and for hand-written client-server distributed apps. up to 180. My usual number is rounded to 50 personally, your mileage may vary.

If you estimate in function points (FP) rather than KLOC, you can convert by remembering that 128 lines of C are needed to implement 1 FP, or 53 lines of C++ or Java are 1 FP, or 21 lines of PERL or 13 lines of SQL or 29 lines of VB5 are 1 FP. (Capers Jones' numbers).

You should catch 24% of the bugs in the analysis phase and 19% in low-level design. Then 31% in coding and unit test; 15% in the functional/integration test; 7% in system test but only 1% in the handover test. That leaves 3% to crop up during the maintenance phase. The effort needed - and associated costs- increase as you move through to delivery and maintenance phases, so aim to plan to catch as many as early as possible. I recommend you do static Fagan Inspections in the early phases at least.

The test coverage can be planned as low as 66% for an experienced team with good customer contacts, through 85% (my usual number for younger teams) up to 100% for life-critical, cryptographic, or security SW.

Calculate with needing 5 or 6 test cases to find a bug, 45 mins to construct a test case and 15 minutes to execute it. Reckon with 20% of the bug-fixes themselves being buggy (recursively), so needing 25% more effort for retesting. Excessive CRs (Change Requests) will push the numbers up and the deadlines back. So be strict with CRs, maybe relegating them to a second release, to enable you to keep the first release deadline.

NB: Don't plan for more than a 6 hour day for your people, definitely not 8 (or even more). There are only 200 useful days a year for planning purposes, not 260 or even 312.

Please E-Mail me your numbers and tell me how large the sample base (KLOC , FP or number of project man-years) was the sample base you used. Any feedback that comes, I plan to blog during December; requested anonymity will be respected.

Was this a useful blog-article? Did you know this stuff already? What did you miss?

Feedback from yesterday's blog-entry : I've been asked how come I alledge that MS manipulate their search engine results. Here is my source for that. Someone else asked what the German text generated by the rand(200,99) filler was. It is Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern. repeated many times. What does it say in your language version? Michelle, please?

But the bad news is that the newest standard for text processing (indeed their whole Office bundle) does not provide any integrated support for blogging whatsoever! Bummer, huh ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 25th November 2003 at 06:02 Central European Time

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Writing furiously, as cartharsis

No, I don't think of blogging as a martial art as some do. Like Yule, I see it as letting off steam.

E-Voting : Gary and I are not the only ones to get angry at DIEBold's machinations. I was just reading the blog of Ming the Mechanic who had a good summary on Saturday, pointing out that DIEBold are being audited because they alledgedly pre-loaded Al Gore's vote count with a sizeable negative number, counted the votes before the election was over and had a bi-directional modem connection into the voting machines (Stu wonders why?), Ming wrote.

So I am pleased to read that California will become the first state requiring all electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt. Unfortunately not until 2006, which is after the next US presidential elections. The people in Tiflis, Georgia at least took action when they realised their votes had been manipulated. Well done there!

Apropos pre-loading; Meg confirms that the MS Word pre-loader I blogged about (last saturday) works in the US too. Thanks for the feedback. One wonders what other preloads there are? Perhaps code to elide every occurrence of the word Linux? Just as well I'm using a non-MS editor here and am browsing with Opera :grin: What SW can you trust? Even Google washes its search results, and MSN delivers practically only paid-for results :-(

Apropos Washing : isn't it annoying how all wash-powders seem to contain UV-fluorescent stuff too? So you light up every time you go near a UV lamp, such as a store's Euro-Note verifier?
Rage, Rage against the lighting of the dye! :grin:

Anger management : A couple of people have hinted that I might want to contain my rage at times (like when I'm blogging?). So I'll take a reading hint from Euan Semple's weblog and read Gael Lindenfield's book Managing Anger, as shown on my blog's left sidebar here. Maybe it will help lower my blood-pressure. Blogreaders may not notice if it works though, I DO enjoy a good rant ;) Fluffy Bunnies provoke no reactions.

posted by Stu Savory on 24th November 2003 at 06:12 Central European Time

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Three Anniversaries

40 years ago : JFK was assassinated in Texas. That was a shock to the whole world. We oldies often hear the question Where were you when JFK died? I was an underfed student at City University (London, UK) at the time, but given the time difference from Texas, I was probably down at the 59 Club that evening. Or down at West Ham Baths, listing to the young Eric Clapton playing with the Yardbirds at the time. So my honest answer is : I can't remember. Sorry, JFK fans.

But we all loved President "I am a jam doughnut" Kennedy. After all, in the 13 days which followed the 14th of October 1962 (the Cuba Crisis) he had saved the world from a thermonuclear war.

This led to a great love of America. Later I spent happy times in Silicon Valley, on Route 128 (=Boston, Mass.), Phoenix, Florida, Minnesota etc. etc. But during the last 3 years the US has changed for the worse, it is no longer the US I knew. I attribute this to the Bush administration, his aggressive unilateralism, corporationism and anti-environment legislation, forcing a weak-dollar economy (whilst claiming to be for a strong dollar), etc. etc. So dear US readers, when I rant about it here, it is a rant at Dubya for spoiling the US we all knew and loved, it is not anti-americanism.

62 years ago: a Junkers JU52 trimotor crashed in the eastern tirolean Alps. Just this summer, it turned up again, uncovered by a retreating glacier. Retreating as a result of global warming, an environmental issue to be countered by those who sign The Kyoto treaty, which Dubya refuses to do, instead legislating for even more pollution, as Bobby Kennedy Jr. points out.

250 years ago: a local brewery was founded. Saturday was thus an "Open Day" at the Warsteiner Brewery. No beer cans at the bar, bottles or kegs. Just a high-throughput specially laid pipeline directly into the storage vats :-) At the other end of the user-friendly spectrum, a british cider brewery is alledgedly responsible for a bio-attack, killing people with legionnaires' disease, it is claimed. Hi Jean, we're missing you!
BTW: here is a website telling us how to survive ABC attacks; useful in these terrorist days, no?

posted by Stu Savory on 23rd November 2003 at 12:01 Central European Time

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Positive News

Happy Birthday Meg: Belatedly, I would like to congratulate Michelle over at Mandarin Design on her birthday yesterday; all the best, lass! On her birthday posting in her always great blog, she shares her Ouija board of favicon-links to the blogs she reads; it makes a nice quilt too.

I don't have anything nearly as pretty to give her, but I would like to dedicate this mathematically magical ouija board.

Here's how to use the math-ouija board:
Choose any NUMBER on the board.
Spell it out, using the LETTERS on the board.
You should ADD the numbers on the white squares as you spell.
And you should SUBTRACT the numbers on the black squares as you spell.

Neat huh? Michelle, this one is for you! Enjoy.

E-Voting : Despite the screws-up by DIEBold and others of that ilk, there are countries that do indeed get E-Voting right. Here, the Aussies show us how to do E-Voting properly.

Micro soft-headed : Instead of flaming MS today I'm gonna show you a neat freebie. I just hope it works in your language-version of Word, and not just in German. Let me know if it works in your language too, please. Open a new, empty Word-document and type in :
= rand (200,99)
then press "enter" and wait about 3 seconds . . .

Why this sudden positive attitutude and improved self-esteem? Well I just read in a GB report that low self-esteem and negativism turn you stupid! So please all look one bright side of life!

posted by Stu Savory on 22nd November 2003 at 01:05 Central European Time

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Some Jewels

Pilama Design : My wife Cornelia has taken up a new hobby, designing "green" (i.e. near-to-nature) jewellery.

Dubya's royal presents : I am not a fan of the Brit monarchy, but I do like their subtle sense of humour on Dubya's state visit. I bet Dubya didn't get the neat sarcasm :-) One of the presents HM gave GWB is a pure silver ruler, engraved with his name. I can just imagine Prince Phillip - being his usual tactful self - saying "It may be only pure silver, but at least it's a legitimate ruler!". The other presents given by HM to GWB were a picture book (sic!) about the Brit crown jewels and an empty, but very small, jewellery case. I bet Dubya asked "What's that for?" to which the Duke would have cryptically replied "It's for you to keep all your jewels in." To which Mrs. Laura Bush would have spontaneously but honestly answered "George hasn't got any jewels!"

Dirty Nozomi : On the associated subject of sterilisation - pity you forgot that, Barbara - there is some more bad news. The japanese spacecraft Nozomi will hit Mars on 14th december. Because it was designed only to orbit Mars and they assumed everything would work perfectly, the japanese did not bother to sterilise the spacecraft. What idiot is responsible for the contingency planning there? They may infect a whole planet with terran lifeforms (viruses, bacteria, rancid sushi). Sheesh, how mentally retarded can you get? The sword is over there, Eeejit-(un)san!

Apostrophe : Kate has finally added the missing apostrophe to her blog's title after I nagged her publicly about it on Wednesday. Dashed well done, Kate, old girl :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 21st November 2003 at 06:08 Central European Time

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Inside in-site insight in sight

Seek and ye shall find : By looking at my site-internal search-engine logs I see that some of you are having problems finding things on this 300+ page site. About 50/50 German vs. English. So I've added a bilingual sitemap to the left sidebar, just above my photo. I've also put a link to the internal search-engine in the left sidebar, above the photo too. The search-engine will accept words or phrases in English or German and return a list of the pages containing the search term. If you don't find what you want on my site, you can broaden the scope to web-wide too.

Sought items : So what did my website readers search for in the last 30 days? Most popular were (12) searches by students or schoolchildren, looking for paraphrases or summaries of the poems on my poetry pages, obviously with the intention of shortcutting on their homework :-) Well, tough luck, I deliberately don't do your homework for you!

Then came 7 searches for specific bulldog related stuff. Four for phrases extracted from our books. Three for phrases extracted from my German short stories. Three for crypto stuff. Three also for motorcycle stuff in German. Three in English for trivia. All of the above searches would have gotten a correct pagelist and the terms thus would have been found.

Typos? : Interestingly, on 8 occasions people searched for exactly the same phrase several times within a few minutes. I don't understand this behaviour, the results remain the same. It wasn't a scope-change either. Maybe they thought they'd made a spelling mistake?

Four searches were unsuccessful, because the word or phrase was spelled wrongly in the search term. What to do about this to help? I've always added such misspellings (which occurred at least twice) to the keywords for the relevant pages; perhaps that will help. But generally, if you can't spell what you're looking for, you have a problem. The search engine doesn't do Soundex encoding to help with phonetically similar terms. So I suggest that you check your spelling.

Exotic things : happened thrice, someone scanned my site looking for "zex passwords" without any luck :-) Perhaps he'd like to come again :-) Someone else looked for an approximation of my name in Russian, i.e. using cyrillic letters Ctyapt Cabopu.

And one person thinks I can dereference pronouns without any context, he/she scanned for "me" but probably didn't find themselves. Sorry, but I can't help you to think clearly, folks ;-)

Searching in the blog-archives : takes two steps. Use the site-internal search-engine to find which month(s) contains the search term. The archived blog-months are usually about 64 kB long though. So then you should use the browser's "find in page" feature to scan within the month.

Off Topic : Barely has the California Gropenfuehrer been in power for a day and already there's an arrest warrant out for Michael Jackson. Be interesting to see if there are similar punishments for similar deeds. Was it John Steinbeck who wrote The Gropes of Roth, or was it Portnoy?

posted by Stu Savory on 20th November 2003 at 06:18 Central European Time

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Getting Higher

Up- and Downtown : Here in Germany we have a tiny town - Bad Schandau - split by a vertical cliff. There is a beautiful 170 ft. outdoor elevator/lift dating from 1904 (see photo) which connects the upper & lower town halves, saving pedestrians a long walk around the cliff road. It's open 9 to 5 except mondays, and costs well-spent 1.50 Euros per trip. Gives a whole new meaning to the terms Uptown and Downtown! When it opened in 1904 no-one trusted it enough to take the first ride. No-one even wanted to risk one of their dogs or even pigs to take the first ride! So they used a women instead!! And even then they had to bribe her with a Taler coin to spend in the Uptown shop!!! Pace Teresa, I'm just reporting the facts, not doing a macho-blog as du Toit did!

More High-Quality Blogs added, being Boston Blue Eyes, and an Easy Bake Coven (lotsa good anti-Bush stuff in the right sidebar), the amusing I am Eating My Husbands Soul (she hasn't discovered the apostophe yet :) , and the very readable Michael O'Connor Clarke.

posted by Stu Savory on 19th November 2003 at 06:26 Central European Time

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Moore of the same

Michael Moore : is here in Germany this week, promoting his new book, so we got to see him live. His book "Stupid White Men" has been at number 1 of the German non-fiction charts for a couple of months now. In fact one quarter of all his book-sales are made here in Germany.

Obese, ugly, ill-shaven and slovenly-dressed, as he walks on the stage he presents the Michael Moore image of working-class America. But when he writes or reads from his books or rants and rages, this bad visual impression is soon forgotten. Moore is funny, rhetorically brilliant and informative. But there are no shades of gray in his world, just black or white. Sometimes he goes too far. But all in all, I remain a fan. And my books are signed now :)

Unwelcome : London, UK, is in much more danger of being attacked this week than ever since Goering's Blitz. Why? Bush the killer is on a visit; 'twere safer for all if he stayed at home, he's merely 'officially' welcome, certainly there will be many protests.

posted by Stu Savory on 17th November 2003 at 09:26 Central European Time

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Manipulative Media

Propaganda press : I really do get annoyed about the way the media try to manipulate us. Just by choosing his camera angle, the photographer subtly suggests that not only is Dubya a man of God, but that he is also holy. Wurgh, Yeuuch.

The pro-incumbent slant of many articles I find disturbing; many countries have government-controlled media. It's more subtle than the '60's Prawda though.

Also relevant is what you get to read or don't get to read. Ever more former US government officials are saying openly that the case for war was confected. NB: that article appeared in the UK press, not the US press. Manipulated Media? When you follow the link to read the article, note how often it refers to former officials. So does the US right to free speech gets you fired? Dubyaland is not a democracy!

It is therefore important that grassroots opinion and opposition get heard too, which is where blogs are important. To quote George Orwell (he of 1984): "In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." I'd like to point you to two blogs worth reading and much more eloquant than mine, being Old fashioned patriot and Joel Sax's Pax Nortona.

Microsoft Monopoly : The other manipulative Media is the Microsoft Media Player monopoly. Now the EU will be checking whether MS misuses its monopoly power. The Seattle-based company has intimidated critics into not testifying. Microsoft also pressures business partners to not come forward, under threat of cessation of partnership deals, as the link I gave above above, claims. If found guilty, MS could be subject to a fine of up to 3,000,000,000 Euro. That is only about 5% of Bill's ill-gotten gains. On the other hand, the state government of NRW here has backed down and chosen MS over Linux. At least they beat the price so far down that MS won't make much profit there. But still, Linux fan Kurt Gramlich will be disappointed.

Whilst on the subject of corporate criminality, Exxon must pay $11.8bn damages. Great!

Whence Schiehallion? : Agnete mailed asking how I came to do friday's post about Schiehallion, perceiving it to be a total departure from my usual style. Well Agnete, we were down at the pub, enjoying the local Veltins' Pils and talking about growing US-internal resistance to the Bush administration (which fired off the anti-Dubya rant above), when Edmund used the quotation Give me a lever and a place to rest it and I will move the Earth. To which I quipped "It would have to be a pretty long lever, after all the Earth weighs about six billion trillion metric tonnes!" Then I was asked how I knew that, and I answered Maskelyne weighed it in 1772-1774 by measuring a mountain in Scotland and promptly got a serious attack of homesickness, which is only curable by a few wee tots of the malt whisky. Which? Mine is an Islay pure single malt please; glad you asked, yes I will have anither wee dram please; Scots wha' ha'e!

No Comment : In another mail, Mark Bryant corrected my 42 posting, pointing out that 6*9=42 is at the end of book 2 not book 5 of the trilogy; I would claim ham-knees-yah, but I've forgotten how to spell it. He also asked why I don't do comments. Well, I don't have Comments or even a Guest Book (any more) because German law here makes me responsible for the total contents of my website, including whatever (possibly illegal) junk gets written in the Comments. I don't have - or want to spend - the time to censor the site daily.

Blogscan : I thought I was the only one to get incensed by that ex-RSA gunfreak Toit, but I'm glad to read that Teresa flips out too (her Nov 14 post). Lauren's blog of Nov 12 is good too.

posted by Stu Savory on 16th November 2003 at 07:31 Central European Time

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Schiehallion, a mountain in Scotland

Schiehallion : is a very famous mountain in Perthshire, Scotland. Isn't it beautiful, too?

The mountain of Schiehallion is very regular and almost conical in shape, so it was the location of the very first measurements to calculate the mass of the earth. Using a long pendulum the then (1774) astronomer royal Neville Maskelyne deduced the mass by the amount his pendulum deviated towards the mountain. About 15 microradians! Using a comparative method, Maskelyne's estimate was very close to the actual mass as defined by modern measurement, pretty good for 230 years ago, however his basis was wrong and his accuracy purely an accident!

The surveyor sent out to select a suitable site was Charles Mason, yes, he of the Mason-Dixon line. Charles Hutton did the the actual surveying of the Schiehallion site and in the process, invented contour lines, subsequently writing a long (100 pages!) paper about them.

You can read more about all of this in Silitto's amusing paper, presented to the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 31st October, 1990.

posted by Stu Savory on 14th November 2003 at 05:56 Central European Time

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Paranoia

Watching me from Washington : Scanning through my logfiles, I noticed my blog was being read by someone in Washington DC. Given that I sometimes rant about Dubya and vote-stealers etc, I felt a little paranoid. Maybe the NSA (not silly amateurs) reading my crypto pages (in German, already)? Maybe the CIA, as ever looking for a little bit of intelligence for Dubya (Gods know, he needs it!)? I'm not really paranoid, I say that here for all those people who follow me around! But I can relax now, turns out it was Lili who was so kind as to point me to the Beeb Beeb Ceeb Shop for the Hitchhiker stuff I blogged about on Tuesday! Thanks, Lili. Whew! What a relief!
After all, it might have been Frank Paynter with dog Fang unleashed!!!

Who're Brits? : If you are reading this in Clarence House, please note that I did include the apostrophe in this paragraph header, so now onto my actual subject.

Seems the UK is going to introduce IDentity cards, despite the traditional british dislike of the things. Traditional? Yes! Back in WW2 pieces of cardboard with your name on (but no photo) were issued, which doubled as a food rationing card. So the ID cards were associated with rationing and disliked vehemently. In 1950 a motorist called Mr. Wilcock refused to show his ID to a policeman called PC Muckle, and this was the cause of a national anti-ID uprising, which led to Churchill having to withdraw them in 1952. BTW, Muckle is a Scots word for big and well muscled. And of course, Muc is the Gaelic word for pig in case any 'Merkins are wondering about the etymological origins of their slang expression for policemen. The world is full of coincidences (pace C.G.Jung). So the new cards will have a photo, fingerprints, iris scans etc. Whatever happened to privacy? It's post-1984 and Big Brother is watching you indeed! Sheesh!

No more 'C' : No, I'm not recommending switching to C++, Java or Perl (certainly not Richard Perle!), I'm just noting that the head of the UK's Ml6, Sir Richard Dearlove, is to become the Master of Pembroke College (at Cambridge) next summer.
Spies at Cambridge? Doesn't sound too unlikely, does it?

Linda's Hints : Linda scanned through my recommended reading list (English) and, being a Pterry fan herself, pointed me to some similar books that she thinks I might like. She wrote :- you might enjoy James Morrow's "Towing Jehova" and sequels, and Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" (Wizard of Oz from the Witch of the West's perspective) and "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" was also good. Looking at my list, I see I haven't updated it since April, merely showing book-cover links in my blog-bar instead. Guess I should update the recommended reading list sometime; sorry folks!

posted by Stu Savory on 13th November 2003 at 05:55 Central European Time

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42

Crash : Crash, Bang, Wallop. We had a 3 minute power outage last night, but it took me a further 39 to discover which files had been corrupted, restore them from sunday's backup, redo subsequent data entry, and correct the corruption at the other end of the FTP I was doing at the time. Total time lost? 42 minutes. The magic number 42. But at least I didn't have the stress that Teresa Nielsen Hayden has been having with data corruption. BTW: Power is usually good here, 1.3 outages per year, totalling 22 minutes annual average. Haven't invested in a UPS for the PCs yet, although I do have a little 1 kW Honda power generator which is for the deep freeze, pumps, etc.

Return of the Vogons : The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy will be back on UK radio soon, thanks to the BBC. I do hope that a tape or CD or DVD will become available. 42 was of course the answer given by Douglas Adams (RIP). In book 5 of the trilogy we learned that the question was What is 6*9?, from which we deduce that the questioners counted to base 13, wherein 6*9=42, OK?

Other magic numbers : Of course if you prefer your numbers written in longhand, e.g. to be spelled out as forty-two, then you'll like playing with my magic square.

posted by Stu Savory on 11th November 2003 at 05:42 Central European Time

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Honey Moon

Party Time : This has been a party week :) First, a birthday celebration at Irina and Viktor's place; friends from Kazahkstan. That's where the Baykonur Spaceport is located, where cosmonaut acquaintances take off for orbit. Russian rockets are stronger and simpler than the US shuttle, so more reliable too. They are the sole transport to the ISS these days until NASA gets its act together again.

Then Berhard's 25th jubilee party, where he did a great flashback show via notebook and beamer. He and I worked in the same AI team some 20 years ago, so it was good to remember old times. Half a dozen of my old AI team were there too. Super do!

And yesterday, we got a new brother-in-law - Klaus - when sister-in-law Celli remarried. The party was timed to peak with the eclipse of the moon of course. Congratulations to both; we wish you health, love and a long life :)

Who are you? : There has been some legal hassle recently, wherein pseudonymous blogging came under a subpoena threat. The aim was to force all bloggers to declare their identities. A later report stated that pseudonymous blogging is safe (for now), but I expect there'll be more of this later, at least from the Dept. of Homeland Insecurity. It's easier for them than catching either Bin Laden or Saddam!

More on Security : There is already a snag in next-gen Wi-Fi security which makes it very susceptible to weak-password attacks. Bummer. And yesterday I got an 'offer' from the telephone company, offering to let me pay all my bills via an internet account. The payments would then be added to my telephone bill. And I need only use one easier to remember ( = weak) 6-digit password. Which THEY chose for ME!! There didn't seem to be any limit to the number of attempts any hacker could make to access my account. So I wrote them a RUDE note, telling them to read ANY introductory text on computer security, or even Bruce Scheier's book on security Beyond Fear. Sheesh! When will these idiots ever learn? Just as bad as the MS Passport scheme, eh?

Pentium upgrade due? : Gary Williams stated somewhere in his blog this week that the latest huge solar flare comes from area 486. Let's just hope that Angry Mama Sun doesn't upgrade to a Pentium in the near future!

I dunno : Friends in the UK emailed, asking what it was that Clarence House denied this week. Buggered if I know!

... and so to bed: A cup of cocoa is 3 times richer in powerful antioxidants than tea or red wine, a study says. I should cocoa! We'd prefer the 3 glasses of red wine, thanks.

posted by Stu Savory on 9th November 2003 at 22:22 Central European Time

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Improbabilities

Micky-taking : Go here to read all the fine print about MS Linux. Realistic huh? Sent shivers all the way down my spine (to the MS end).

Even more unlikely : My one-in-a-million blogreader Richard (see Wednesday's blog entry) tells me even that was an underestimate: "Million to one eh! Probably even more remote, in that I could have stumbled across your blog on any day since you started it, but happened to do so on the day you mentioned your birthday. Mind boggleth!"

Hallo Sailor : Some gay friends recently asked me about the origins of this English expression. I told them that it had nothing to do with male-only maritime adventures, but was started by Napoleon (Boney). When he was imprisoned on Elba, he was allowed each noontime to go for a walk along the beach, accompanied by a guard. He looked forward impatiently to these walks, and would summon the guard haughtily with the French expression: "A l'eau! C'est l'heure!"
N.B: This is a Jacques.E.Doc story :-)

For Brian : The aforementioned friends also complained about the vagaries of English spelling, e.g. how do spell "fish"? Well, it's "GH" as in enouGH, "O" as in wOmen, and "TI" as in staTIon. GHOTI spells "fish" :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 7th November 2003 at 06:00 Central European Time

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Heavenly Bodies

Halley : Been getting some Emails about the scale model of the solar system about which I blogged last Sunday, in particular asking about those slow (about 200 mph) comets in the Oort Cloud /Kuiper Belt and the chances (perhaps a million to one?) of a serious Lucifer's Hammer event. The talk got onto Halley's comet. Please take note, that's Halley the astronomer, not Halley the bloggerette , who's a star////heavenly body in her own write (sic!).

Talking of Halley Suitt, I read in her blog that she is getting into Scotsmens' Kilts (be careful how you interpret that). Jings! Crivvens! Help Ma Boab! Join the queue, lads.

Meg : has invited me to The Women and Tech Blog Prom. I am honoured, and in great company too. Guess I'll have to learn to behave now :(

Pocket Enigma : Back on October 7th I blogged my online review of Brian Hargrave's crypto toy. Now Brian has sent me a well thought out response to my article, partly explaining, partly rebutting and partly agreeing with my review. To be scrupulously fair, I'm posting his reply (unaltered) here. Later this month I will provide a revised review of his invention, the Pocket Enigma, interspersing both points of view, on it's own page, to make it easier to bookmark.

New Quality Blogs : After tracking them for a while, I've added Betsy Devine, bmoeasy, Dave Pollard, Doug Alders, and Making Light to my list of Quality Blogs. I won't name the ones I've dropped.

posted by Stu Savory on 6th November 2003 at 06:11 Central European Time

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Million to one chance

It really IS a small world : In his many books, the fantasy humourist Terry Pratchett always states that a million to one chance is the one that is bound to happen. He calls this the narrative imperative. Well, it's happened here in Blogaria too! What are the chances that one of your blog-readers has the same surname as you do? Let's say 100 to 1; after all Savory isn't a common name (except in northern Norfolkshire, UK). But a couple of days ago, I got an Email from Richard Savory and his wife Linda from Oxfordshire, UK. Not only that, but Richard discovered from my Sunday blog entry that we share the same birthday, 8th June. Odds against this are 365 to 1. Not only that, but Richard is (fairly) bilingual in German too. Statistics show that one in 27.4 Brits can read or write (some) German. Now multiply all these odds together, and what are the chances of a German-speaking Savory having the same birthday as I do? Dead right! It's a million to one! Confirming Pterry's narrative imperative, it just had to happen!

Fireworks : Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. The UK celebrates Guy Fawkes night tonight. So there will be lots of bonfires and fireworks. Be careful with them folks, not like this silly twunt, the hilarious Alistair Coleman.

posted by Stu Savory on 5th November 2003 at 06:13 Central European Time

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Ladies' things

Belated Halloween horror story : I actually wrote this first paragraph on the evening of Monday 3rd November. It is World Men's Day, and I am surprised, nay, astounded, nay, shocked, nay, disgusted! to see that I am being discriminated against merely on account of my gender! Read the entry in the Mandarin Design Blog for Halloween (the night the evil witches are abroad). You will see a coven for females-only blogs! Gender discrimination! I protest (to Gorby the patron of World Men's Day). In a civilised country like Germany here, it is not allowed to discriminate by gender. I had always assumed (Dubya notwithstanding!) that the USA was a civilised country too. Now I know that this is not the case :-( And it can't be because of the trousers, because Gary Turner and I are true Scots, proudly wearing the Kilt. (Recently, I was asked again what I wear under my Kilt, so I replied Shoes and socks, Madam!. Shame on you ladies of the bloggerettes' coven! I demand equal rights!

Heil Blueye : On Sunday I was reading Yule Heibel's blog. She is an American, a Canadian too, born in Germany and claims in her blog header I am a mongrel with a really neat anagram Oh Ma, a Gremlin. Being doubtful, I scrolled down the right sidebar to her photo, but found it to be a normal image. Further, I read that she lives on an island, near the sea, and has children, so her blog must be a marine Ma log. Of course, had she been blogging in German, it would not even once be a digital blog, but rather immer analog. And she knows that, in Bavaria, when Bush stole the election in Florida, they sighed despondently Nimma Al Gore :-(

posted by Stu Savory on 4th November 2003 at 06:12 Central European Time

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Astronomically speaking

Northern Lights : This past week those big flares from the Sun reached our Earth and led to there being northern lights visible as far south as we live (latitude 51.5981 North). Sadly, we ourselves had have cloudy night skies, so the picture on the left is scanned from our local paper, who took the red/green photo at about 2a.m. just 40 miles NNW of here.

My Birthday Treat : Next year I shall be 60 on 8th June. So to celebrate the event, there will be a transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. There hasn't been a transit of Venus for over 100 years (there were none at all in the 20th century), then by a fluke, another comes in 2012. But it's a pretty rare event, which we'll watch out for during the birthday celebrations. That's assuming I make it that far. Chances improve as I do the Glycemic Index diet. There was a great posting about this on 31st Oct. by Yule Heibel.

It's far out, man! : Have you ever thought about the size of space? It's huge, really gi-normous! Back in my schooldays, when one day the PT teacher was ill, our physics teacher took us out for a walk. During that walk, we made our model of the solar system. A scale model. We represented the Earth with a pea, and did everything to this scale. Jupiter (the gas giant) was over 300 meters further along the path. And Pluto? Pluto was about a mile and a half away! And when we got there, we couldn't see it anyway, because on the chosen scale it would have been about the size of a bacterium! So we were marched back the mile and a half to school and shown a bacterium under a microscope, just so we could appreciate the scale. I've never forgotten it. It was my first astronomy lesson! Later, I learnt that Pluto is not the "edge" of the solar system, there is also the Oort Cloud (where the comets usually reside) which stretches out to 2 light years distance. By the way, Gary has great astro-photos as the head of his blog, which are changed regularly. Go look!

Matrix ? : Looking forward to seeing the new Matrix film/movie, on simultaneous release world-wide on 5th November (their marketing company having failed to realise that Brits all go burn effigies on that Guy Fawkes night). Scientific American has a 6 page article about the information universe. BoingBoing summarised it thus . . . the universe is actually a 2D plane packed with information, and the 3D universe we perceive is nothing but an expression of that information. Matter and energy and life are, in fact, holograms. . . If the universe is a vast 2D plane of information -- then it can be hacked. That sound a bit like Matrix to you?

Halloween again : This morning I'd like to point you belatedly to another nice horror story, told in a Pratchettlike way, called South of the River and written by the very talented Alistair Coleman.

posted by Stu Savory on 2nd November 2003 at 07:32 Central European Time

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Halloween Horror Stories.

Witch Bitch : "Oooooh Hoooooo! Aeiiiiiii! Aaaaaargh!" Have you ever wondered how the whole Halloween hullabaloo affects your pets?

It started off with all those fascinating activities in the kitchen. Could be that something edible falls off the worktable, so the dog gets underfoot whilst you're carving out the pumpkin. You can put some antlers on the pumpkin, this is called making pumpkin mousse :)
Stand the result on the floor, insert candle, light up and stand well back. Dog waddles over, sticks his nose in for a sniff, and promptly gets his whiskers singed! Rapid leap backwards, nearly knocking a hole in the floor length glass window!

When it got dark, trick-or-treat children rang incessantly at the door, wailing and moaning in their hollywoodesque versions of ghostlike noises, not realising that there was a territorially assertive bulldog on the other side of the door! "Open up!". So I did. Rapid and confused retreats, accompanied by much more realistic wailing, followed by the triumphant return of the Hellhound, exceedingly proud of having chased the poor kids off down the road! We still seem to have a lot of candies left this saturday morning, I wonder why?

A Toe Curler : That stupid evil bastard, Les Jenkins, has written an excellent horror short story. Just what you needed to scare yourselves for Halloween. Please, please do go read it ! I never cease to be amazed at the sheer amount of writing-talent that there is on the web, particularly in the blogs!

Cybercrimes : It's not just DIEBold who are tring to cover up their E-Voting messup tracks (read more about anti-DIEBold civil disobediance via Gary Williams' blog last thursday). Now another company's E-Vote software has been leaked online. Ultimately, all these leaks are good though. It gives us the chance to inspect their stuff for weaknesses, maybe getting it changed before the usual vote thieves use the exploits (no names here, I'm beating about the bush as usual). To end on a positive note, the UK is planning to extradite spammers. That's a move in the right direction. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect 200 pounds.

posted by Stu Savory on 1st November 2003 at 05:59 Central European Time

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