Scargill

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

A lot is said about UBER and what an evil monster it is. London taxi drivers like nothing more than to gripe about them (and I’m sure they do elsewhere, I just happen to have taken quite few London taxi rides in recent times – probably no more). And so it was that this Monday as I spent my first day in Boston, desperate for a ride, the taxi drivers spent (at least the morning) parading around the MIT buildings and no doubt everywhere else with anti-Uber stickers plastered over their taxis.

The problem is… they are taxis… And what do we do with taxis? Hail them, except we could not as they were too damned busy protesting.

So last night faced with a large purple bump under my foot due to walking miles with shoes not meant for walking (as my other shoes are in the bag which Iberia airlines misplaced) my colleague Swee An ordered an Uber taxi on his mobile. We got to watch a little map with his taxi superimposed as the driver firstly went the wrong way then as he tried to stop near us was harassed by an MIT police patrol which took him a block away before he managed to return for us. All good fun but I have to say everything worked smoothly and the real time monitoring feature of the app is great.

Instead of inconveniencing everyone with strikes maybe the traditional taxi companies should consider a move into the 21st century. If you can’t beat them…

Cost for me is not SO much of an issue but in a foreign country, convenience wins every time.

And so on my final day in Boston, I grabbed the app, signed up and gave them a shot. Despite the foot I’d decided I needed to get into Boston itself to take some pictures and I just walked and walked and.. by lunchtime I was fairly well beaten and after some attempts to get back to the riverside, standing in the middle of a street with no name, I gave up and opened up the app.

The app knew where I was, where the nearest car was and offered me a reasonably priced ride after requesting my destination. 2 minutes later, a nice looking car driven by an imposing black lady arrived and we headed off back – having a nice chat along the way. I packed my gear and got ready to go to the airport. Once again I contacted Uber.

Again all I had to enter was the destination and up came an approximate price. This time I had a benchmark as it had cost me $35 to get here in the first place. It cost me $31 to get back, in comfort with a very friendly driver who told me all about his experience with Uber. He’s been doing this for a while now and Uber take 20% cut of his fairs..

My web account has receipts, maps of my journeys and more – this at least on the surface is just SO much better than taking a traditional cab, I can see why the cab drivers are up in arms – maybe instead of getting together to protest they should be getting together to modernise.

Sadly it would appear they are currently banned from Spain where alternatives such as Mytaxi,  Hailo aand Cabify prevail. It seemed the Spanish government caved in to pressure from the taxi lobby. and of course you may know that in Spain you can’t just fit solar panels to your house – something to do with pressure from the electricity company… hmm.

I note there is a small push to get the movie “Interstellar” into UK schools, the basis for this being that the special effects were science-driven and as it turns out, apparently represent some of the best visualisations of what it might be like near a black hole.

The basis of the movie is simple enough – a few years into the future, we are running out of resources and nature is fighting back (a popular theme, the idea that nature is right and we are wrong – something I find a little silly being as the best nature could manage for most of time was a bunch of rocks and until we started understand nature we rarely lived past 50).

In the movie, mankind is doomed, our only hope being to colonise other worlds and the only way to do that being to use a black hole as a stepping stone to get to these very far away places. The movie focuses on various aspects of relativity, so that compared to those on the ship approaching the black hole with it’s massive gravitational pull, those back home are ageing much more rapidly. They also attempt to show visually what might happen if you approach the event horizon of a black hole (though I was always led to believe that the first thing would be you were ripped to bits). The imagery is staggering but more importantly this is as near to accurate as we know how to make it, simplifying an otherwise complicated subject sufficiently for keep it both educational and VERY entertaining.

While this is to be applauded, frankly for those of us brought up in a science-friendly environment, the leap to understanding all of this is relatively straightforward and quite exciting. Indeed part of the fun is picking flaws in the movie.

However to someone who does not have that educational background (self-taught in my case – my parents and teachers did a good job of making me want to know more), it is likely that the movie represents a lot of flashing lights, decent acting and not a lot more.

One of the big problems of science versus religion is that the latter takes almost no effort whereas the former can take a lot of effort. Simple answers are “comforting” and science at the extremes rarely provides simple answers. Attempts to explain modern science to school-kids will ultimately fail unless the teachers involved actually understand the science AND are able to relay this to the layman enthusiastically – skills which don’t always go together. Once someone becomes a teenager, if their early up-bringing and schooling didn’t give them analytical skills, attempts then to teach modern concepts in science are almost guaranteed to be doomed to failure.

I was brought up in a world if Richard Attenborough, Tomorrow’s World and Science fiction which often turned to science fact, constantly learning something new. People on my watch list include Brian Cox, Elon Musk, Craig Venter… I’m interested in world-changing projects like Oneweb and the world at Cern. 

What of those who spent their youth reciting a book, over and over almost to the exclusion of everything else? How will their thoughts contribute?

Is I get older and hopefully wiser it is becoming increasingly obvious that organised religion today is bad, VERY bad. Children are like sponges – if you tell them that fighting for the fatherland is good – they’ll suck it up. If you tell them it will be ok if they blow themselves to bits, they’ll suck it up. In countless historical examples we see how easy it is to set children off on the wrong path. There is an unparalleled responsibility put on adults to ensure that children are presented (in as balanced a way as possible) with interesting facts and our best guesses as to how everything works and ensure they understand the difference between fact, theory and fiction – yet what actually happens? In most of the world, parents and society fall over backwards to imprint their brand of religion on their children and this is just PLAIN WRONG.

Here’s a heretical thought for the future: Scrap religious education as such and take another approach. Let’s called it “Origin studies” for the sake of argument. We all want to know where we came from and where we are going (yes even those who don’t believe in fairies). Was there a beginning? Will there be and end and where do we fit in the middle? How do we define “purpose”?

Such a scheme starts with government determination (which likely won’t happen) and suitable qualified teachers (which likely won’t happen)… begin with the simple stuff… explain that in early times, people with almost no knowledge of the world and absolutely no knowledge of the universe, in order to give meaning to lives and to try to explain the unexplainable, came up with the idea of god. Explain WHY we have a tendency to form competing groups at every opportunity and how useful that was for early survival and how absolutely destructive it is today. Are those views and lifestyles still relevant? Explain that hundreds if not thousands of gods which people used to believe in have fallen by the wayside – and that there are a few left which millions of people still believe in – mostly incompatible – explain also that by and large those world regions with the highest belief levels have the poorest education – study the relationships between physical and psychological well-being, belief and education.

Then go on firstly with very simply explanations and a heavy dose of imagery, how science is filling in the gaps, giving us the opportunity to look again at those belief systems with fresh eyes and actual knowledge. Explain that it is important to split science into two areas – information which started as theory and became fact, ideas that are still theory and simple observations. For example, evolution is not just a theory, it is a well proven fact. Black holes not so long ago were theory, today they have been observed but our PRACTICAL experience of them remains low. Explain that the idea of the multiverse is just one unproven theory among many and explain WHY we have these competing theories. Explain also that leaving new discoveries to others is no good – we are all capable of contributing ideas and should not be frightened to do so.

The universe is expanding and APPEARS, extrapolating backwards to have come from a point. Is that a fact or are there alternatives? If it is a fact, what of before the big bang – or indeed is that the wrong question?

When the child becomes an adult, the sky will be the limit for them – they can then choose what to believe in, create their own beliefs and likely contribute to our collective understanding. For myself I have a mental model of how most things work but thanks to my up-bringing that model can change with time – I’m quite happy to look at new information with a view to getting a fresh perspective. Those blighted by religion from youth often cannot and will not see beyond what they were originally taught and indeed many do not even have the ability to question or have been taught that there are things you should not question, to which my response is “Bollocks” yet those beliefs are so strong that in some parts of the world they will still kill to enforce those beliefs on others. See examples where atheists (or those with competing religions) are attacked or even killed for daring not to share the same invisible friends as others. The analytical skills of some people have been utterly crippled and perhaps they wish to inflict this on others.

If we owe anything to the future it is to provide the upcoming generations with the skills to evolve and expand and not to cripple them with our own inadequate visions of how everything works or even the widely held, pathetic belief that we should not or cannot understand because “we are not worthy”. Time is running out for us to understand the world well enough to preserve it – and “praying” just won’t save us.

Science has answers for many things – yet many of those answers are full of gaps merely due to lack of time and effort. Collectively we can reduce those gaps. When all the gaps in our knowledge are gone, if such a thing is possible, perhaps then we will become the gods some people believe exist. Or… we can go the way of the dinosaur.

Since coming back from Galera in Spain in the summer, life has been hectic – Maureen went back to school for a while, was recently off again but is now back in action. Hollyberry Cottage has been packed but we managed one day to get some essential maintenance in. I’ve been to Brussels for meetings and managed to fit in a trip to the Mini-Europe, I’ve been back and forth to Blackpool for FSB meetings, visited Jodrell Bank, been on a cruise just off Guernsey and next week we’re taking a short trip to Cornwall to go see the Eden Project, something we’ve been meaning to do for years but somehow never gotten around to it. We will of course post pics in here and on Facebook – I’m just hoping we get something remotely like decent weather.

The rest of the time has been filled with day to day emails and phone calls. I’m sitting here surrounded by new technology, trying to get a little WIFI board working and my friend Jonathan has brought me a wonderful tiny blue display which we’re considering right now to be a wonderful idea like the laser was – magical product but what can you do with it – well we certainly found plenty of uses for the laser!

Of course no blog entry is complete without a decent size photo – so here’s a picture of breakfast at a wonderful little cafe in Bellingham – good healthy stuff.

Several of you have asked where I’ve been this week and what I’ve been doing – so here it is..

On Wednesday I flew down to Southampton (from Newcastle) in the morning to embark on what is now the second Richmond event I’ve attended… the annual IT Director’s Forum.  The journey consisted of the flight and a train ride to Southampton Central station.

Thanks to flight times etc., I ended up with some time to burn and went for a short visit to the West Quays Shopping Centre, nothing to write home about but a pleasant and modern centre with a decent mix of the usual imagination-less chair restaurants, the only exception in my view being Pizza Express who do a pretty good imitation of a real pizza – and that’s where I had lunch.

Looking at the street signs the docks didn’t look that far away so rather than taking the planned shuttle bus as per the previous year, I walked down to the docks. Won’t do that again,the weather was nice but it was quite a hike and I arrived at Dock 10 late afternoon in time to board the Aurora with utterly flattened feet.

Once safely on-board the Aurora (a P&O ship able to handle 1200 passengers – the smallest of the fleet) I attended the opening talk by the proprietor of Richmond events who broke the bad news that the broadband was going to be crap throughout the event.

This was swiftly followed by a keynote speech by Mary Portas who described her experiences and views on everything from the smallest stores struggling to come into the 21st century through to the largest supermarket chains.

Considering that Mary’s website describes her as “the UK’s foremost authority on retail and brand communication, I must say I didn’t entirely agree with everything she said, especially on supermarkets  and didn’t consider her that inspirational but non-the-less she managed to entertain everyone. With all on-board, mid-evening we set off on our journey to the channel Islands which was to take most of the night. Dinner was a casual affair and our hosts were pleasantly un-commercial – we all had a nice time.

Shortly after arriving on the board, I’d met up briefly with Elle who is one of the organisers and it’s really nice that she’s been reading my blog since last year and keeping up with what I’ve been doing so I hope she likes this.

With the ship under way to our destination just a few miles docked off the channel islands, dinner was fine if a little pretentious (“Braised Pave of beef” and other strange titles such as “Baked Tartiflette Potatoes littered the menu) but the important point of course was that the hopeful suppliers paid for the drinks. The night was interesting – I’ve no gripes about my room, balcony view of the sea and sizeable area for a ship, the room was comfortable, the movement in the face of considerable sea-power was not. Everyone commented next morning that the night was “rough”.

So the way this works is simple enough – 3-night cruise, sponsored by sales organisations – IT directors and professionals get the decent rooms around the outside of the ship, the sales people get the inner rooms – they pay, we don’t – simple enough. In return we agree to meet them in short matchmaking sessions in between insightful seminars – obviously they hope we’ll do business and in many cases that works.

All in all though it takes a bit of stamina, a worthwhile two whole days of which I’ve just finished the first. Saturday morning we disembark – I’ll be taking the coach this time to the central train station which is then just one stop to the airport. Should be back by lunchtime Saturday which is great as I’ve some R&D to do before we have friends over for the evening.

Thursday morning we started bright and early, breakfast sponsored in my case by a company called Capita. Breakfast was ok but it’s the one meal of the day I’d rather  have a buffet.  I went on to participate in a discussion on BIG DATA which was more than useful followed by another REALLY interesting discussion on mobile access and security. In each case a facilitator enabled maybe a dozen of us to collaborate and share ideas. 

I facilitated a couple of these discussions the previous year and it was gratifying that some folk remembered me! I then listened to a talk by John Amaechi MBE, a psychologist who is notable by his basketball background and the fact that he stands 6ft 9 inches and 23 stones in weight (and has size 15 shoes) – very interesting as he described the difference between good and bad management.

Lunch was great – I met a couple of people I’m sure to keep in touch with as we have similar interests. After a couple of business meetings in the afternoon, I attended a talk by David Smith – economic editor of the Sunday times who made some predictions for the future and described the on-going effects of the recession – interesting that China is now the leading economy and the entire wealth of the world is steadily moving in that direction.

We had a great session with Clive Panto who put us through some intelligence tests which I have to say my group failed miserably but had a REALLY good laugh in the process (If I tell you that one of the tests was to drop an egg from the ceiling to the ground without breaking it – within 5 minutes we’d broken our first egg and when it came to the presentation of results, which I did – we had the perfect solution, sadly as I was just about to climb the ladders to the ceiling (yes, on a moving ship) the egg fell out of my hands and smashed on the floor which resulted in lots of laughter..

That evening after celebration drinks (as these events have now been going on for 25 years) we had the first of two Black-tie dinners – interesting as I didn’t bring a black tie.

Well, it’s an IT director’s event – I figured open neck might be more the norm – that’s what I get for thinking. I was not however alone by any means.

Friday and more business “dating” meetings, some talks including one about the automation of life and work in the age of smart machines (in which I’m particularly interested of course as someone deeply entrenched in the “Internet of Things”) and the question in one talk was asked “are we innovating ourselves out of the door. The last session of the day was a wine and cheese tasting event, I found time to go soak in the pool, visit a short cheese and wine testing and then the second formal dinner.

Meanwhile I’ve been asked whether I will chair and present at a major Intranet event next year which gives me something to ponder over the next few days.

And that, in a nutshell, is that. Hope you found the blog interesting. And just for that… here’s a picture of some cows I took on the way home and a map showing where the ship was docked for the duration.

Jodrell Bank was opened in 1945, a mere 11 years before I was born. Today I’d been at a long meeting which had finished earlier than expected and so I headed off in search of the radio telescope.

For the scientifically uninitiated, radio waves are like light but at a much longer wavelength, well beyond our ability to see as is infra-red and ultraviolet light – but all of these are used when surveying the heavens as they each have their benefits.

Jodrell Bank was in it’s time a world leader by some way – so much so that both the Americans and amazingly the Russians requested use of it during the space race! As you’ll recall the Russians were first up with Sputnik and then a dog – all of this was monitored by Jodrell Bank.

Ignoring for a second the sheer size of the dish and supporting framework (which turns in any direction) there’s a great visitor’s centre with old Pathe film about the space race right from the beginning and there are a host of things for kids to play with.

It’s a kind of strange mix –on the one hand you have harmless experiments and on the other you’re exposing them to mind-blowing information on Black Holes (it’s not that long ago there was no proof they existed – just a theoretical concept – now it’s all over the place).

Anyway, assuming the weather is half decent it’s worth the £7 entrance fee – there are some gardens there as well and a cafe.

Well worth a trip.

Lots of info on Facebook and the blog over at www.bedrock.es – right now, Maureen is off with her bad foot to Pilates down in Galera village – we managed a nice trip to Lake Negratin yesterday and last night I did the usual G8 thing, meeting the Brits down at the bar in the village – we had a very nice evening.

Today I’m sitting here catching up with emails, organising websites (I have them all over the place and I’m consolidating to eventually get to one provider) and working on my home control system so it is reliable over the winter.

I’ve had more than my fair share of problems with the home controller kit here…

1. The heat is generally far more than you’d see in the UK so it’s no unusual to see my office here at 28c – way higher than the UK – this and less than perfect mains power has taken out a number of cheap power supplies. Now I’m using higher rated supplies with success.

2. It seemed like a good idea at the time – as we have wireless Internet here (by which I mean a dish pointing down to the town centre) and the cave is not well suited to drilling holes for wires – I put in an over-the-mains setup with little TPLink units plugged into the mains. Turns out they are not AT ALL reliable and the quality varies for numerous reasons including the amount and type of data you send over them. So – I’m putting everything back onto either WIFI where sensible or hardwired. Thankfully network cable and connectors are dirt cheap here in Spain. Just a matter of drilling holes.

3. My home control coding took a leap forward a little while ago with proper wireless networking – unfortunately like many others I’d not realised quite how sensitive my little NRF radios are to interference, especially from cheap Chinese switched power supplies. That is now resolved and the radio network is working a treat.

I now have the control unit sending me TWEETS reliably when certain events occur – and that’s great. Just need now to get a whole boatload of supplies from the UK

Right now we’re in Spain (pop over and have a look at our Spanish blog or follow us on Facebook)  and as such I recently, reluctantly agreed to shave off the beard (it’s grown back since). In the picture on the left you will see Simon – who convinced me after a few beers that we should shave the lot off.

I got up the next morning and the first thing Maureen said, after months of pestering me to modify the beard, was… she doesn’t like this new look!!!!

You just can’t win. Anyway, right now we’re with friends in Galera – by all means go take a look.

Here I am in sunny Brussels again, this time for two different bodies, I came here at the start of the week to continue the work on ESCO with colleagues from around Europe – and I end the week at Microsoft HQ here in Brussels.

I’ve been staying at a very weird hotel called the Mozart near Grande Place – and I mean 2 minutes near. The rooms are a tad small but as you can see below they make up for it in sheer elegance – the whole place is done out like this…

I arrived Monday evening in time to meet my friend Kenneth from Sweden at the local bar, before heading into 2 days of intense meetings which finished last night. I headed back to my hotel and had a drink outside with another colleague George and we talked about data security which is his field – it really didn’t occur to me before but all this friend “tagging” we do on photos is giving the security forces tools they never before dreamed possible! The evening ended on a fine note as I met up with a friend who long ago was the FSB’s Policy Chairman, Brendan Burns (and now a member of the EESC) and he introduced me to a fine Thai restaurant a short walk down from the square – he has a flat here and spends a lot of time in Brussels so I always learn a lot of local info when we meet up.

Today I’d planned a trip to the Atomium and thereabouts but I simply didn’t manage to get out ofbed early enough and so decided to do the up-hill walk to Avenue Des Arts to attend a meeting put together by ESBA and SEAP to discuss the Transatlantic Trade Agreement – met some interesting characters there including one who gave me a whole new way to think about open source and who’s views on the future of 3D printing are similar to mine.

We had the American Ambassador to the EU there as well as a host of other relevant people and there was a very lively debate on the subject, including an amazing attack by an MEP who came over initially as quiet and announced he had no idea why he was here – then promptly launched a vicious and somewhat effective attack AGAINST the TTIP.

Great afternoon and many of the guys are meeting up tonight for a meal.

Tomorrow an AGM (I’m merely an observer in this case) then back home to see my wife and her broken foot.

Ok, Brussels is a big, noisy city – but given that, this is a nice place to be….back here in a month for another round of ESCO meetings.

In the last blog entry I mentioned we were off to buy a Chinese mobile for Maureen. As is often the case that turned into a fiasco. We arrived at the guy’s house armed with cash and he presented the phone in a nice case and quickly demonstrated it – pointing out that the app store was in Chinese but would be no problem to go through. Of course, on reflection that was easy for him as he was Chinese.

I asked about the regular Play Store and he said it could be downloaded from the Chinese version – and so as we were in a rush with Maureen heading off to the states, I said ok and off we went.

Of course the reality was, half the apps were in Chinese and though some version of the Google Play Store indeed appeared – it immediately crashed on trying to run on the phone.

Thankfully that brand of Chinese phone come ready rooted and so if you know where to look you can find complete operating system replacements. Several hours later Maureen had a brand new dual-sim phone in English. Not only that but it Looks like a Samsung S5 and their cases fit! Not at all stripped down the phone has a high res display, a quad core processor, 32gig of memory with the ability to add a MicroSD card (which we did) and for under £100 (not tied to any contract) I have to say, worth the money easily. Maureen is currently in the USA and I’ve already had Skype video calls from her using the phone.

Lots of meetings the last couple of weeks but I’ve had a little time to work on the thermostat – now fitted into Hollyberry Cottage (along with a sparkly new HD Freesat box). It managed to die overnight but I now know why (spikes) and I’ve a solution which I’ll implement on all my boards this weekend and for those interested will do a write up shortly thereafter. I’m going to have my first shot at using the “watchdog” on the chip.

But now… two more meetings then I’m off home.

Yes, it IS raining – first time since we got here and probably the last. In general – it’s been around 36c mid-day most days – absolutely LOVELY in other words…  if you want to keep up with us while we’re in Spain – meanwhile we have friends looking after the house and I have my CATCAM to keep an eye on the kitties.

Spent the day at Puebla De Don Fadrique – a nice little town with a decent Friday market! More on this and everything else at our BEDROCK SITE