Harry Jackson

Patent Nonsense

2009-11-29T12:31:09Z

As an owner of shares in both Merck and Glaxosmithkline the
following is very depressing reading.

Patent Nonsense (Henry Mintzberg)

Surely any rewards system should be encouraging cures to diseases not relief of symptoms. The appendix of the article is very depressing, are they truly this corrupt. I wonder if any of these people actually go to prison for their actions. The Limited Company ancourages people to take risks they would not otherwise take in case of financial failure etc but surely when they start blurring the lines, especially when its peoples lives on the line, there must be some rule of law.

In 2008 Merck, Glaxo and Pfizer had a combined turnover of over $100 billion, a fine of a few million is like shooting an elephant with a pop gun, mild irritation but little cause for concern. The elephant continues on its merry way and soon forgets the sting on its ass. If you check out the first page of first page of Pfizers 2008 Annual Summary, they have a cute kid on the first page but do they give a damn about that kid or any other or is shareholder value the main driver. I know the company answer would of course being wrapped up in cotton wool and they would wax lyrical about how important people are but then why all the apparent corruption, the government fines. They cannot wash their hands of setting the wrong rewards system or crap managment, and I don’t mean crap management ie they got caught.

One of the reasons I bought shares in Merck was the story in Tom Collins Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies about them helping with River Blindness, that’s a company I want to own a stake in. Don’t get me wrong their financials are also a factor but every company has a social responsibility and Merck’s actions in the River Blindess case was good evidence to me that they take that responsibility seriously.

Pfizer talk about putting trust back on the agenda in their 2008 report but then they all talk about Corporate Responsibility but is this just lip service ie we were naughty and we are cleaning up shop but really nothing changes. Do any of them realise that Corporate Responsibility is missing a word, “Social”, it should be Corporate Social Responsibility. I personally hope that the big pharmaceuticals stop talking about Corporate Responsibility and start living it. There are few other companies that can have a bigger impact on our total well being than the big pharmaceuticals and if we let them get away with this sort of nonsense we will continues to have countries with an average lifespan under 50 for years to come.

Glaxo 2008 Annual Report

Merck 2008 Annual Report

Pfizer 2008 Annual Review

Eclipse Cannot connect to keystore

2009-11-22T16:43:02Z

If you get the following error:

An error occurred during provisioning.
Cannot connect to keystore.
JKS

You need to check what version of java you're running. I'm running Debian and hat gij installed and this is no use for eclipse. I tried the following:

apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
update-java-alternatives -s java-6-openjdk

but this failed miserably. I ended up downloading and installing a new java bundle from Sun and removing every debian package related to Java.

Mental Wanking and Premature Optimization

2009-08-30T21:57:20Z

Optimization appeals to us geeks. I am sure there is some psychological reason for this, If you happen to know what the reason is then drop me a line. I promise not about to witter on about The Fallacy of Premature Optimization either. Optimization is important but far too many of us get caught up in pointless arguments about performance. The following article deals specifically with the faster webserver, in particular serving static pages.

There's a ton of articles on Apache vs Apache2 vs lightttpd vs thttpd vs mongrel vs nginx vs litespeed vs whatever-httpd. The vast majority of these articles cater for people not adverse to a bit of mental wanking. These people have a perceived problem ie performance. They want to get an extra few percent from their machine. Off they go on their merry way Googling for a performance comparison chart that will show them some stats. These people are the unadulterated speed freaks of the computing world. A lot of them understand their... affliction, but quite a few don't.

In some organizations performance is critical ie Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, livejournal, BBC, Dozens of Universities, Any bank, etc.... I am missing hundreds here. For some it's competitive advantage ie Google. For these organizations performance is talked about all the time. It's brought up in meetings, at the bar, over lunch, out jogging and in their dreams. It has a direct affect on the bottom line.

My point is this, most people online discussing the relative merits of Apache vs Apache2 vs lighttpd are not in this select group, most are running small websites.

Here are some idle thoughts that may help the more pragmatic developers out there.

A fairly common question asked is. "What hardware do we need to sustain "N" requests per second"? Assume a static page is 25KB. If we also assume that we have an eCPM of $1.00 (and this is a small amount) we can put "N" in perspective......

1 rps == 2,592,000 rpm == $2592 per month
10 rps == 25,920,000 rpm == $25,920 pm
50 == 129,600,000 rpm == $129,600 pm
100 == 259,200,000 rpm == $259,200 pm
500 == 1,296,000,000 rpm == $1.296 million per month

500 pages per second is nearly 1.3 Billion Pages per month. This is an awful lot of pages and $1.3 million dollars is certainly an awful lot of money. On hearing 500rps as a requirement a common reaction is to jump too Google and start looking for a suitable configuration. It would be far simpler and more enlightening to do a few calculations and a small test to see where we stand.

For instance:

500 * 25KB requests per second == (500*25*1024*8)b/ps == 104Mb/s

This is a serious requirement. A 100Mb dedicated line is not cheap and would be likely to set you back several thousand dollars per month but hey we are making $1.3 Million per month, who cares!

Now, if I was to go out and spend $2000 dollars on a server just how many pages could it serve. Lets assume I own the following machine:

Dell 2850
RAM: 2GB
model name: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz
cpu family: 15
6 10K SCSI disks (2 mirrored, 4 in raid 10)

Basically a decent spec 2005/6 Single Processor Dual Core machine with the OS disks on a raid 1 array and the web server serving pages from the raid 10 array.

So, is it possible for this single machine to serve 500rps? Yes! It could, if we had enough bandwidth! The following results were taken from a base install Debian machine. I did not tune apache2 in any way whatsoever. This was done on a 100Mb Ethernet network.

debian:~# ab -n 10000 -c 50 http://farty.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev
Completed 1000 requests
.........
Finished 10000 requests

Server Software: Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname: farty.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 25000 bytes
Concurrency Level: 50
Time taken for tests: 21.877168 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 252929056 bytes
HTML transferred: 250243696 bytes
Requests per second: 457.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 109.386 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.188 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 11290.35 [Kbytes/sec] received

I know ab is not the best tool to be running benchmarks and that requesting a single file is different thatn random files etc but I am not trying to be precise.

So, a cheap machine can saturate a 100Mbit line. Yes, Easily. At no point during the tests did the server go over 0.5 load. I also ran a more long running test and the results were the same. It hardly broke a sweat and this is running an unmodified, untweaked pre-forking Apache2 server.

So whats the conclusion, is benchmarking Apache2 vs lighttpd pointless? I would say that 99% of the time, yes. If you ever have the problem were you need to be serving the amount of pages where the difference between Apache2 and lighttpd makes a big difference then you are likely able to afford more hardware or staff but I wouldn't be choosing lighttpd over Apache2 unless I really have to.

Heres a quote from a 20000 concurrent connection apache setup

... HEAnet's National Mirror Server for Ireland. Currently mirroring over 50,000 projects ..... It regularly sustains over 20,000 concurrent connections on a single Apache instance and has served as many as 27,000 with about 3.5 Terabytes of content per day. The front-end system is a Dell 2650, with 2 2.4 Ghz Xeon processors, 12Gb of memory and the usual 2 system disks and 15k RPM SCSI disks, running Debian GNU/Linux and Apache 2.x.

So the next time you hear someone discussing how fast their httpd server is at serving static content ask yourself if they are just jerking off or do they know what they are talking about.

Mental Masturbation

2009-07-19T11:31:17Z

My definition of Mental Wanking reads like a medical affliction.

Main Entry:: men·tal mas·tur·ba·tion

mental stimulation, especially of one's own mind commonly resulting in time wasting. Can be achieved by missing the point or an acute lack of realism. More prevalent in certain fields, critics ( in particular literature ), software engineers, tv buffs etc. Can occasionally be accompanied by mental fantasies, arrogance, bad temper and or delusions.

For those looking for individual definitions of the word I took the following from Websters.

Main Entry:: mas·tur·ba·tion

: erotic stimulation especially of one's own genital organs commonly resulting in orgasm and achieved by manual or other bodily contact exclusive of sexual intercourse, by instrumental manipulation, occasionally by sexual fantasies, or by various combinations of these agencies

And the following entry for Mental:

Main Entry:: ¹men·tal

1 a: of or relating to the mind; specifically : of or relating to the total emotional and intellectual response of an individual to external reality <mental health> b: of or relating to intellectual as contrasted with emotional activity

]]>

Main Entry:: men·tal mas·tur·ba·tion

Main Entry:: mas·tur·ba·tion

Main Entry:: ¹men·tal

Exim4 Unrouteable Address

2009-07-19T11:17:36Z

I have no idea when or why this started happening for me but I started getting Unrouteable address appearing for any external address.

I'm a huge fan of Debian but there are some things that really piss me off. One is the way they have completely screwed the exim4 configuration. Exim4, if you are not an administrator or mail guru is not the simplest thing in the world to configure, it's config file is fairly involved and you can do anything in it. Add DEBCONF variables to this and you have a complete nightmare configuration.I spent two days tracking this error down to the following:

DCconfig_internet=1

That was all I had to add to /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template

Why this changed I have no idea. The setting I am using in /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf is

dc_eximconfig_configtype='internet'

I really cannot make head nor tail out of this at all. I sometimes wish I had started learning Postfix instead of Exim but part of me thinks that it's not Exim but rather the way it has been packaged up thats compicated.

Losing Weight

2009-04-18T15:22:15Z

I managed to get to 108 Kgs (17 Stone) by the 5th April. This was a total weight loss of 14 Kilos or for our imperial readers 31 lbs. The resting heart rate has not been going so well though, I stopped tracking it.

Losing weight and a Sub 50 Heart Rate

2009-01-18T23:19:40Z

As usual over the Christmas I over indulged. I weighed myself and came in at 122KG (269LBS). Luckily I'm not 5' tall or I'd look rather odd. Being almost 6' 6" I carry the weight not too bad, but it still annoys me. So I decided to do something about it.

At various times in my life I've done a fair bit of training, running (I was a lot lighter then), rowing (Concept 2 only), swimming, walking etc. Any time I've started training again I've always had a goal or target to get my fat ass moving so I had to set myself some targets. A target or goal needs to be something measurable and there needs to be a carrot to make it fun.

The most easily measurable target I can think of is weight so my carrot needs to help me reduce calorie intake so I decided to stop drinking alcohol, no more beer. At around 200 calories a pint this is a good place to reduce my calorie intake. My target weight is 108KG (238LBS), I picked this weight because it will be the lightest I've been in several years, it's also approximately 17 stone and that's a nice round (prime) number. (Apologies for using Imperial and Metric, I seem to think in both).

The other target I decided to set myself may be somewhat harder to achieve. The lowest resting heart rate I've ever had is 52. I think I've had it lower but 52 is the lowest I've ever recorded it at. As far as I'm aware to get it below 50 involves some effort so that's my second target. I'm not 100% sure if I'll be able to get it as low as this but it's worth a shot.

I have a 3rd target that's not really fixed but its another thing to aim for. I'm walking up Mount Snowdon in early April so I'm hoping I can lose all the weight by then because I don't want to be carrying too much to the top.

With the targets set the next thing to do is to start working towards them.

Weight gain or weight loss although sometimes difficult to achieve is governed by a very simple rule. To lose weight you need to:

Burn more calories than you eat.

There is a little bit more to it than this i.e. if you just stop eating as much and don't exercise you are likely to lose Fat Free Mass (FFM) and this is generally not a good thing. This is where most diets fail miserably and people end up in the yoyo diet hell that a lot of celebrities write books about or invent some new fad diet to make a buck so some other poor smuck stays in yoyo diet hell. There is no easy way to lose weight and keep it off. It's a lifestyle change that normally involves exercise. Losing some weight in a few months or a year does not mean you found a new wonder way to lose weight. Once you've kept the weight off for ten years look back and look at what you did to achieve it and ask yourself if it was lifestyle or wonder diet. Don't get me started on people that opt for surgery over self discipline.

In life self discipline is the key to mastering many thing not least of which is health. If you're unable to master the urge to eat a chocolate or a bag of crisps then you are unlikely to succeed at keeping your weight under control. It's my self discipline that always lets me down but I also have an extremely disciplined streak in me that saves me from slipping too far. It's this streak that berates me when I see the cheddar in the fridge or the crisps near the checkout. It's this self discipline that will get me into shape, without it I would remain overweight.

I own a Concept 2 rower so its the perfect tool to start on. I've been using the Concept 2 for over 15 years off and on so am comfortable with it. I also took the Instructor course a few years ago to make sure I was using it correctly because I was worried about injuring my back with too much rowing. It's been a while since I've done any training so I intend to go easy on the rower to start and do more walking to get a base fitness level.

I intend to row three times a week for about 20-30mins duration and then to walk on Sundays for about two to three hours over the fields behind the house. I need to take it easy because my knees and back are both buggered from being in the Navy but thats another story. My knees are also why I will probably never be able to take up any high impact sport again. My knees got bad when I was significantly lighter so its not weight that caused the damage.

If anyone is actually reading this, different rules apply to different people, so don't think that anything I do is equally applicable to you. Its probably not. I will post some more details around the training plan soon.

Gaming Performance and Hardware

2008-12-30T15:47:22Z

After my Gaming Hardware post I decided to have a look at what the gaming field is up to i.e. do ping times still dominate the conversation. Is everyone still as infatuated with performance as they were several years ago. I used to do some gaming and I would still like to but I get too sucked into it and lose weeks of my life so I made a conscious decision to stop. I backslide every once in a while when a killer game comes out or if I play something somewhere and get hooked.

Caveat: I am not addressing game enjoyment in this post its game performance i.e. do you want to be the last man standing. High performance hardware does lead to more "fun" etc but not necessarily better gaming performance. When I say mid-range hardware I am also not talking about moms word processor or 3 year old hardware. It needs to be reasonably decent hardware to run the game properly.

From a casual glance around the net it would appear that hardware performance and hardware issues seem to dominate the message boards. I always found the perpetual hardware performance chasing and worrying about hardware to be a distraction.

I remember playing games on mid range hardware, for the time, and dealing out my fair share of mayhem. In general the people who were trouncing everyone were also running mid range hardware. Don't get me wrong I'm not talking PC world hardware, that's what I would call bottom of the range. The machines were mostly hand built based on bang for buck at computer fairs on Tottenham Court Road. The biggest factor I found in action games was ping times not hardware. Above a certain level of performance it seemed to matter very little what hardware you were running.

I'm not sure if this still holds but I believe ping times and player performance still dominate overall gaming performance. Slight digression... It annoys me to see how much emphasis there is on the hardware performance but it's in the interests of the manufacturers to make sure that performance is seen as a big advantage in gaming or anything. The following is a question I have heard more than once.

My PC is slow on the internet, what sort of PC would you recommend to speed it up?

The PC is most likely not the problem in this case, its the connection. You can browse the quite happily on 5 year old hardware if the connection is good. Shop owners are also selling PC's that people don't need its a bit like going looking for a Mondeo and coming out with a Ferrari.

Anyway, back to the main point. Lets assume all ping times are equal. If this is the case then player performance really matters. To get good at something involves practice and lots of it so it pays to watch how sports teams or the military train, its drill, drill, drill. The military make you go through the motions so often you are sick of it but can do it blindfolded. There's not a huge amount of fun in this and it involves a lot of effort and mental stamina, it's also why not everyone is cut out for the military or sport. My brother played Super Mario Bros to the point where he would reset it if he lost a life and was able to easily complete the entire game with one life. It was when I seen him do this that I knew I would never be a great gamer. To be great at any sport involves this level of dedication and yes I consider gaming to be a sport.

So if you're serious about gaming stop focusing on hardware etc and start focusing on yourself. Are you fit, well rested? Do you respond faster to sound than light? Do you drink alcohol, take too much caffeine, how much caffeine is too much? What time of day are you at your best? What's your resting heart rate? How often do you practice, are your opponents as good or better than you? Drill Drill Drill....

My personal opinion is that most of us don't need to focus on hardware that much. Ping times possibly but I don't believe hardware would give me that much of an edge. It may make the game more fun or a better overall experience but this does not necessarily mean I would perform better.

High Performance PC for Gaming

2008-12-30T12:15:13Z

I need a fast desktop for development and was at the dell website when I came across the following link.
These guys do "high performance PC's". I clicked on the fastest looking offering they had and the total price for the basic package is £3008 (I kid you not). For that price I get an odd looking case (see pic on right). The case looks like it was designed as a bottle for mens aftershave (pimp my pc). You also get the following.

Alien Case (see pic on right)
Intel® Core™ i7-940 Performance 2.93GHz 8MB Cache
1GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280
1000 Watt Alienware® Approved Multi-GPU Power Supply
3GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 3 x 1024MB
Alienware® Approved Intel® X-58 Chipset Motherboard- Socket 1366 Core i7 Ready, Triple Channel DDR3 Memory
Windows Vista® Home Premium 64-bit with Service Pack 1
1.0 TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM (2 x 500GB)
20X Dual Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Writer
High-Definition 7.1 Performance Audio - Standard
Logitech® Classic Keyboard UK - Space Black
Standard Optical 3-Button Mouse with Scroll Wheel

To say I am woefully unimpressed with the above is a bit of an understatement. I have not looked overly hard at the rest of the details but those are the main parts.

I decided to put my old hat on and go shopping to see how much it would cost me if I was prepared to build it and this is what I was able to ruffle up in a few minutes.

Case	100
Intel® Core™ i7-940 Performance 2.93GHz 8MB Cache	440
1GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 280	300
1000 Watt Power Supply (multi GPU)	150
3GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 3 x 1024MB (Corsair)	91
Intel® X-58 Chipset Motherboard- Socket 1366 Core i7 Ready, Triple Channel DDR3 Memory	270
Windows Vista® Home Premium 64-bit with Service Pack 1	100
1.0 TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM (2 x 500GB)	100
20X Dual Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Writer	50
High-Definition 7.1 Performance Audio	85
Classic Keyboard UK	12
Standard Optical 3-Button Mouse with Scroll Wheel	12
	1610

I'll add another £400 in case I have missed something or made an obvious mistake. So we can save £1000, I don''t know about you but thats a lot of money. I probably get some warranty with the Alien machine and it comes packaged etc but it's not worth £1000. Seasoned Gamers can knock a machine up in a morning so I'd be surprised if many seasoned gamers are using these machines. I bet I could build a significantly faster machine for £3000 than the one above. It might look like shit but it'd be fast as hell.

The following paragraph is most likely way off the mark on what would constitute a good gaming machine. There are various reasons for this, for instance, ensuring the graphics cards work with server hardware, could the game take advantage of 4 CPU's with a total of 16 Cores, does the vista license allow us to have 4 sockets.

I could fit a rack in the attic or if I was close enough to the garage I could run a monitor cable etc through the roof, floor or wall to the PC. Add a power switch and a mini itx server with shared peripherals and then you can start looking at 4/5U machines with multiple CPU's with multiple cores. You can pick up some serious hardware on ebay with SCSI and hardware raid built in. Have a look on ebay.com for v40z or Add some decent graphics cards and things would be looking quite fast.

If I was gaming in the states from the UK I would also look at tunneling my traffic to the states from the UK over a compressed line. You can get dedicated servers in the states very cheaply that would make excellent end points for the tunnel. The closer you can get to the server in the states that you are playing your games on the better.

I'm off to look at desktops now.

Don't publish with IEEE!

2008-12-22T13:36:50Z

Please see DJB's article on this topic.

Quite often while searching on Google I find something that looks interesting and I am led to the IEEE where I am presented with a short synopsis and a link to a pdf. To get access to the pdf I have to join IEEE or pay a fee.

There are numerous organizations that do this and they're making good money at it. What I'm worried about is that for the less fortunate that don't have group access or who can't afford membership then we will never be able to access this knowledge. If we want to increase our body of knowledge globally then closing access to papers stands in the way of this.

The IEEE are asking people to sign away their copyright. The only reason for doing this is so they can profiteer from it by denying access to the papers. Because they're big and have thousands of papers means they can get away with it.

I took a look at their home page and their logo has the following sound bite.

The world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology

I think this needs to be changed to

The world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology among the wealthy

To be published somewhere like the IEEE can impact your career. Signing away copyright to the IEEE to get a paper published may mean a budding scientist gets noticed and this is the problem. Until either the IEEE carries less weight or there is another way for people to get their work noticed then people will continue to sign their copyright over to the IEEE. Of course the IEEE could also decided to accept public domain papers and publish them for free.

I believe in free access to knowledge for everyone and this is why I am opposed to these kind of tactics. Google has the right idea! (the first line)

Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I just wish they'd hurry up ;)

Learning Computer Science

2008-12-17T22:52:33Z

This is an update from to my earlier Self Taught Computer Science post.

I've started working on the SICP Exercises and so far so good. I'm finding Scheme, the variation I'm using, frustrating but thats to be expected. It's frustrating because there appears to be no actual standard implementation of Scheme. It's also perverse that, because it appears so simple, and there's no standard implementation, people try and create a compliant version of Scheme. Perhaps this is testament to how hard it is to follow a standard as opposed to blazing your own trail the way a lot of popular languages do. There's another blog post in here somewhere comparing languages that follow standards and languages that .... evolve!

I'm using the DrScheme IDE and I love it for its simplicity. Even though Scheme is frustrating I'm finding it easy to work with. I know Functional languages are based on Lambda Calculus but until I started working in Scheme I hadn't realised how easy it is to think in functions. This can probably be attributed to the SICP exercises being heavily slanted towards computation and interesting mathematical functions like the Wallis Product or the Fibonacci Sequence. Regardless, I'm finding it easier to think mathematically in Scheme than Perl or Java.

I've done one exercise in Haskell so far and its been painful. This is not because Haskell is painful it's just that almost every tutorial on Haskell I find first wants to teach me how to use the Haskell calculator (my derogatory term for the interpreter), as opposed to telling me how to get the thing to compile a standalone executable. That last sentence is a rant, as I'm digging into Haskell I'm finding more material. I really don't know what it is about this language that I find so appealing. I've seen some really negative reviews of Haskell online but I cannot bring myself to hate it even though it's driving me a bit mad learning it. Only time will tell if Haskell and me are meant to get on.

So far I'm finding SICP time consuming but digestible. I'm noticing a marked increase in complexity, I'm just hoping I can get through enough during my holidays to learn something.

Self Taught Computer Science

2008-12-07T21:04:13Z

Over the last year I've felt as if I've reached a plateau. I cannot put my finger on why this is or why I feel like this but regardless of what programming language I use C/Perl/Java I feel like I'm just moving boxes. This is not the first time I have felt like this either.

I don't think this is a problem with the languages I'm using I think its more of a problem with me and the applications I tend to be working on.

After a while (not a very long while) developing CRUD applications loses its appeal. Developing network apps, GUI's etc.... they all start to look dull when you've done them a few times. My experience with GUI's is very limited so the above statement is an assumption in that regard.

I have no idea why this is but I'm sure that the more experienced programmer could probably shed some light on this. I personally think that unless something stretches your ability it will eventually lose it's novelty.

Though, surely as a programmer who loves to program I should be able to entertain myself in almost any application I write but for me this does not seem to be the case. I've never been one for mental wanking and I would prefer not to start. Over complicating an application just to keep it interesting doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. I watch programmers fall into this trap all the time and its sad to see them commit this cardinal sin. The worst thing is having to watch them explain their contraption as if it's a simple solution when it's obviously a complicated mess of a thing. Don't get me wrong I've been guilty of this sin and in quite a few cases been oblivious of it. Its almost as bad as the Not Invented Here syndrome so prevalent in our trade.

I personally think my main problem is that I do not feel as if I am getting any better. I look at old applications and where I would normally see a dozen ways to improve it I see two or none. I know I've not learnt all there is to know and I know I will never learn all there is to know about this subject so why have I hit this wall. Have I reached the limits of my ability or is this a normal phenomenon that programmers go through?

My opinion is that I am seeing things through the wrong goggles. Most of my education has been self taught so its been led mostly by interest as opposed to formally taught. I've been studying with the Open University for several years now in order to get some background mathematics etc but I still think there are areas that I need to improve on in particular around Computer Science.

Unfortunately the Open University computing courses are more geared towards popular topics, Java etc in order to attract more students. Having done a few of their computing courses I wish I hadn't bothered because I gained more from my own work than I did from the taught courses. I cannot say the same thing about the mathematics though. I decided to start mathematics because I knew that whatever I learnt would be applicable regardless of the current fashion or trends in industry.

Having looked around this for some time I have decided that what I need to do is to start my own computer science program to build on the mathematics I'm doing with the Open University. The areas I'm really interested in is how to go about writing my own computer language, compiler, virtual machine etc so I've been looking around to see what other universities are doing and what books they are using in this area.

Having done a fair bit of looking I spotted a definite trend towards functional languages and the further I looked into this the more I noticed that All Roads Lead To Lisp. Or to scheme or to some variant thereof. Abstracting a bit further I am being steered towards learning a functional language. The two languages that interest me the most in this area are Scheme and Haskell. Now all I need to do is decide what books and resources I need to start a course in this area. Most resources online point towards Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) in order to get started so I am looking at this now. I am not sure if I'll try and tackle Haskell until I get a bit more familiar with scheme although having looked at Haskell the language is appealing to me.

Watch this space for more installments on my self taught Comp Sci education!

Reading

2008-12-07T16:41:13Z

I love reading. When I was a kid I read mostly fiction, in particular Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Now I read almost no fiction at all compared to how much non fiction I read. Over the last few years I have noticed a trend ie

I spend as much time choosing a book as I do reading it!

I think like a lot of things in life "You Only Get Out What You Put In" or (YOGOWYPI). I prefer my own version, its shorter and has a certain ring to it "Shit in Shit Out!" (SISO) or if you want to make it sound more exotic (SHISHO).

There is a part of me that wants to read more and faster (with comprehension). In fact I went so far as to buy a book by Tony Buzan on speed reading and this turned out to be a disaster. I keep trying to convince myself that its quality that matters not quantity and that reading one book a month is more than enough if it's a classic in the field. The feeling still doesn't go away though, I still want to read faster.

Another thing I tell myself is that I need to be reading in a certain direction and I am not talking about left to right top to bottom I mean that I should at least try to have some theme or direction to what I'm reading. For instance: don't read esoteric collections of books just because they're classics. I recently read some Greek classics and when I came back to reading mathematics etc it took me a while to shift back into that mode. A part of me wants to believe that its counter productive to read with no direction and another part of me believes that the constant gear changing keeps me on my toes. The esoteric reading method I'm currently employing is driving my sensible side to distraction, for instance over the last month I have been reading books on:

Probability Theory
Functional Programming
Sophocles
Java
Physics
Stock Market

I am not saying I have finished any of these books yet but I have been reading them and this leads me to another problem. Reading non-fiction is easy but finishing a non-fiction book is very hard depending on your definition of finishing. A loose definition for reading a fictional book is that you have read and understood the plot and read at least 95% of all the content. I would say that with non-fiction if you applied a similar definition ie "read and understood 95% of the material in the book" then I think I'm failing miserably.

For instance, I've read Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month, cover to cover (twice) and I think I grasped a lot of it but I do not believe I've grasped anywhere near 95% of whats in that book. The same goes for "The Intelligent Investor", "Peopleware", "Free To Choose", "Daily Drucker" and the list goes on.

The other startling thing I've learned is that rereading a book does not necesarily mean I get a lot more out of it. Unless I've had a chance to study my environment for some time after I've read a book I don't think it has fully sunk in. So rereading does not really benefit me that much unless I've had time to digest the first pass. I'm sure there's some scientific reason for why this is. When I reread a book a year or two later I see things differently etc so can get more out of the book.

Using what I know about my reading habits it didn't take long to decide what to do. From the following thoughts:

T1.
Assume I get 20% from a non-fictional text on each pass.

T2.
Each pass of a book cannot be within a year of the other. (I must have had time to study my environment ).

T3.
I have a limited amount of time on this earth.

It was easy for me to see that the most important rule I could possibly follow is "Shit In Shit Out!" (SISO).

In conclusion the only firm rule I have and have been able to follow to date is (SISO). I'm not saying I no longer read trash but I'm conscious of it when I'm reading it. Armed with this rule even if a small percentage of what I read sticks then I'll be OK. I've been applying this rule for almost eight years now and I think it's working. I don't believe I will ever be a really fast reader and I do not beleive I will ever grasp 95% of any non simplistic non-fictional text in a first pass but I believe that if I apply SISO throughout my reading career I will achieve a lot. My search for other ways to improve how much I can get out of my reading goes on!

Lockhart's Lament

2008-12-06T17:32:23Z

I have to thank Philip Wadler for spotting the Lockharts Lament article!

If you are worried about how mathematics is being taught today then read the following article Lockharts Lament. The first few pages describe the problem perfectly. Our education system is being designed by people who have little or no understanding of the task at hand.

Perhaps mathematicians are being arrogant and calling what they do an art. I personally think it's as much an art as painting, sculpture or poetry. Its quite sad that Wikipedia doesn't have mathematics listed as an art. Surely there is nothing more expressive than mathematics. Have a look at some of the images here. Anyone with a little mathematics and a lot of people with no mathematics will find these images beautiful.

If art has anything to do with expression then for some there can be nothing more expressive than an equation. Mathematics is fundamentally about describing the world around us and more besides. Physicists use mathematics to as a tool to understand the world around us. This practical applications does not mean that it's not an art. Ask a physicists if they consider mathematics to be an art and I would bet that most think it is. The most famous equation today is E=MC^2. The beauty in this is astonishing but its not the most beautiful equations to some, F=MA may be more beautiful depending on your point of view. The fact that these equations are of huge practical importance seems to make some think that mathematics is not an art but merely a tool. Mr Lockhart's article puts it well

"Music can lead armies into battle, but that’s not why people write symphonies."

The sooner we start treating mathematics more like an art and making it interesting the better, until that day almost every student being churned through our education system will hate the watered down shadow of a system our educators deem to call mathematics.

Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0' - please check.

2008-11-29T16:47:29Z

I always get this error when I am working i a chroot trying to use screen. In the past I have fixed it using the following command.

mount -t devpts devpts /usr/CHROOT/dev/pts

When this fails another alternative is the following:

script /dev/null
screen

Its a bit of a hack but it gets the job done.