Sunday 28 December 2008

accomplishments

About this time of the year, people start to think of New Years day resolutions. I don't bother, but I sort of live by that old adage that 'any day that I don't learn something, I'm dead' . and I thought that I should try and accomplish something every day, even if it is minor. Today December 28, I have observed the logs on my new computer system and seen that x.org is not loading properly, which I new, but now I have a better feel for why, and now I need to figure out why. I don't expect to complete this today, but knowing that I have taken a step further is sort of an accomplishment. I have also treated my new bicycle saddle, so that counts too.

Lets hope that I can keep it up. I don't intend to enumerate all accomplishments here, but I think that I should note them in a diary.

Wish me well.

Monday 8 December 2008

History of the world

In the beginning there was Google, but nothing to search for.

So God created the earth, and the planets, and day and night, and a myriad of other things, and on the seventh day he created the most cantankerous, opinionated, argumentative thing that he could, and that was Man, who would disagree on everything from Autocracy to Xenophobia.

Then Google found 20 definitions for everything, and now we have to teach our students not to accept anything that they find, but to do proper research and see that all facts are verified from reliable alternate sources.

(so Man built wikipedia?)

Wednesday 5 November 2008

MythBuntu

I have given up trying to get Mythbuntu working. Not because of any faults in the MythTV part of it. I have not been able to get the wirless networking link working. The version of Ubuntu that it is built on is not the latest that I am familiar with, and doesn't have the KDE GUI, so not my usual environment. Becasue my wireless link is encrypted, this has casued teh struggle getting it to work, trying to get the correct encryption statements in. My usual system works using wpa_supplicant, but because I don't have a link, I can't download this. Catch-22. And now I have the problem that teh system keeps locking up. Again, perhaps a problem that I should have been ready for, as it is built on the discarded PC from the house, which was discarded because it kept on - you guessed it - locking up.

So for now this project is on a back burner. maybe I'll try it on one of the other PC's in store.

What I would really like is to be able to add MythTV to an existing Ubuntu installation. Something to look at.

Thursday 23 October 2008

New bicycle

There comes a time in every cyclists life when thoughts turn towards replacing his trusty steed. In my case being made redundant and receiving a pot of redundancy money meant that there was the possibility of a lot more cycling for pleasure and the funds were available to buy a new cycle

The first thing to think about is the type of bicycle needed. What kind of cycling was I intending doing? I wanted to get out roaming the countryside so a 'road' bike is what I needed. For those trips into Wimborne or down to Bournemouth or other civilized places where theft could be considered a problem, my trusty 30 year old Raleigh would be beneath the eyes of any thief.

How much money was I willing to spend? Well, I am not considering training for the Olympics, I just want a reasonably good bike. I put a top limit of £500 on it. I have seen bicycles at Iron Man and Triathlon competitions that cost in the thousands. I even looked at the Cervelo web site. I have always been a fan of Raleigh and Dawes bicycles, so I looked at those first, but also looked at Trek ( Lance Armstrong rode those) and others. I visited one cycle shop in Bournemouth where their lowest price bicycle was just about in my range. I wanted a step up from that.

I came around to thinking about the Dawes Giro 400 and the Giant SCR 3, both at about £450 and also the GT range, but as I hadn't heard of these, was not enamoured of them. At a local cycle shop I sat on both the Dawes and Giant, but favoured my position on the Dawes better. This is even though the Bicycles that I tried were not my size. The shop will get in a bicycle of my size, reluctantly, if I am keen to buy. My feeling is that I want to try the bicycle, but I can buy it from another shop that advertises on the Internet significantly cheaper. As a skilled and experienced bicycle maintainer, I am not worried about needing aftercare.

Months have gone by, and I recently visited Forest Cycles down in Boscombe, and saw the 2009 range of Giant cycles, and the equivalent of the SCR3 with the very able assistance from the guys in the shop in setting me up on it, is a definite contender. I now want to see what Dawes have in the lineup for their 2009 range.

One of the problems is that our local cycle shops do not stock a large enough range of the different sizes to enable a prospective customer to go in and try the bicycles.

I still haven't got my new bike.

23 October -Have seen the 2009 range of Giant bicycles, But discovered that the Dawes 2009 bikes will not be released until January. And I cannot buy a 2008 bicycle because all of 58 cm frame size have been sold. So I either buy the Giant, or wait until January and hope that prices have come down.

Friday 11 July 2008

Last day of full time employment - Ever?

Well since I got that letter yesterday saying I had to take my remaining 32 days holiday before the end of July - 14 working days away - I decided that all those things I wanted to tidy up can be done by somebody else.

So I cleared my desk today and left. It's all piled up in the garage and up here in my office. I'll sort it sometime.

Of course I will be going back for 2 days a week in September, but that will not seem like working because I will not be engaged in it 7 days a week.

After all these years working it seems funny to think of not having an employer to drive me, to have achievements in my job, deadlines to meet, a feeling of satisfaction at the end of a days grind. I have always said that I want to learn something new every day. Do I still? ( Damn Right I do!)

It all depends on whether Retirement is preparation for the grave, or a new exciting phase of trying to get the best of a wearing-out body.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Saturday 7 June 2008

Electric cars

With juice running up towards 2 Pounds a litre, It's time to look again at electric cars. The G-wiz looks good , but it's about 8000 pounds new, and the batteries only last for about 2 years.

I was wondering what it would take to build one. take an old Micra...

Do you go for one large motor and a drive chain, or can you put a motor in each wheel. I like that idea. Stick supermagnets inside the rims and have the coils build on to the brake drums.

AC or DC. The G-wiz started as DC, but changed to AC. I think that the Wally wagon back in the 70's was AC.

How many poles to the motor?

I would have to go back to university to revise on my electrics in order to design the electronics.

I wonder if there are any Internet sites directed towards this.

Tuesday 3 June 2008

Marking exams - I hate it.

ANS exam Friday 30 May 16:00

Still just looking at the first question. I see an overwhelming tendency to memory dump things about wimax, without considering whether they are relevant. This is a BISM course. I don't expect the fine detail, but I expect you to consider how they are used in the business. I have many instances of Wimax base stations stuck up in places, without any indication of how they are connected to the rest of the network. Also people putting locations into VLANS, rather than considering VLAN for Public browsing, Journalists, and Olympic officals.

Some people have not considered a connection from Weymouth to the rest of the Olympics network.

Some have thought that we could build access lists for 60,000 people and devices for MAC registrations, for a two week event.

Very little (= none) thought about the amount of traffic that would flow up the line to the rest of the world.

Finished the first question for 55% - some good answers.

Now on to the 15% questions

Some students think that 6 lines of nonsense will get them marks on a 15 point question. Think of the word 'point'. I want 15 relevant points to get some marks, They should aim for a few extra in case they duplicate some or some are totally wrong. I mark by reading through checking valid points and then counting up the checks, sometimes deducting a point where they have put something so bad that I have marked it with a cross. That demonstrates that they have not learned it well enough.

The final exam is not about regurgitating what I have pointed you towards through the year, but demonstrating that you are able to think about it and apply it. It is supposed to continue stretching you.

There will be some resits, which makes me ashamed, because to me it sort of implies that I have not taught them well enough, Though, the resits are those that have not done any reading, or thinking, and do not seem to have taken anything on board. I wish that I could match up the fails to the attendance record.

Friday 9 May 2008

Making my work easier- more efficient

As Mark is fond of saying - Work Smarter, not harder.

Since your passing comments last night I have been thinking about it a lot, but what I come down to is the fact that over the years I have been working on making the teaching of technical subjects like Advanced Network Systems easier. You might remember that a year or two ago there was a big fuss from the students when I didn't do lectures, but just posted the slides appropriate to the lab.

Over the years I have reduced the number of lectures that I do from weekly to bi-weekly, But of course I have been bringing in guest lecturers, typically about 6/year. This means that the lectures dropped from 20 to 10, and are back up to about 16. In order to add value to this I extend the invitation to attend these to academics in the Business School and DEC. That has been a non-starter, in that I have only seen perhaps half a dozen academics in total over the years at these guest lectures.

At the last away day CB agreed to assign a specific time each week for academics to talk about their work or bring in guest lecturers. This never happened. What a good way of spreading knowledge that would have been.

Also the labs have been reduced from 2 hours/week to 2 hours/fortnight, with better documentation of the procedure to help make them easier. It still needs someone to assist in talking through the work and the configuration of the equipment, which has now fallen on to the academic as the demonstrators have been eliminated.

I have been thinking how I could apply the academic version of IT guru as a simulation tool before the labs, but that is an extra level of complexity, not a quick win. I think that if the simulation were to replace the actual lab, the student experience and learning would be reduced.

Having taught on a similar course in DEC, and seen how the labs have been reduced to a trivial task, and the loss of interest from the students, I do not want to go that route.

Ideally I suppose, it would be to give them access to IT Guru, create a bunch of exercises, and post some questions to be answered and a discussion forum on Blackboard, and never see them. Of course, In the networks environment this is not a static exercise as the rate of change of technology would require the reworking of some of the work every year. Are you aware of how far ANS has come in the years that I have been teaching it? How much work actually goes in to staying current so that our students are leaving with insights in to the current state of business technology and not a a snapshot of 10 years ago?

I think that Advanced Database Systems also needs the actual technical work to stimulate and seal the learning. As far as I know there isn't a database simulator, though each student could have their own environment. Here there are copies of DB2, Oracle, MySQL that the students could obtain for free to work with, but it still needs an Academic to guide the learning and advise of efficient methods of use.

I would appreciate a discussion to help me generate ideas of how to do it. I'll even buy the coffee.

advice to a young man contemplating university

from my Facebook conversations with MM.

When you guys are considering universities, you should ask the question about how much 'contact time' you will have with your tutors. All universities in the UK are reducing this, so you do much more of your work on-line and on your own. A better university will have more contact time and smaller classes. BU is now aiming to have classes of up to 100 students and then on-line assessments and tutorials, so you will hardly ever get one-to-one help.

Is Uvic like UBC was - first year general science, second year general engineering, later years specialising?

Lot of EE's in the family - Me, Michael, Ben, AJ(?) - petroleum engineers - Rona's other son and husband.

I found that the structure of the course at UBC so many years ago where it was as I said above gave me a good insight into other types of engineering. EE is not just about electronics/electricity, but how you convert it into mechanical work - or light (ref Vivian). I suppose it could be argued that Mechanical Engineering in some cases is about how you turn mechanical stuff into electricity ( Madeleines previous boyfriend Simon was a mechy and worked with wind turbines. )

Just don't become a Civil - Could we bear it!!,

Just joking - because of course a lot of your fathers work is applied civil engineering. If you are good at maths I suppose it is OK.

I remember in second year we did a lot of stuff with trusses and compression/extension forces, and tensile strengths, that come into both mechanical and Civil engineering. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't my main interest.


Have you thought about looking at a Rhodes scholarship?

Friday 2 May 2008

About the car

Yes, like I was broken up last year when my Volvo, which I had driven from new because it was the company car that I had with Telxon, finally was not worth repairing. Volvos go on forever, but why did mine only mange 143,000 miles. When I was made redundant it had done 120k, and I bought it for 1400£ from the company. A year or so before that I could have traded it in as the company usually traded in cars at anywhere between 60k and 80K, but because it ran well and didn't cost anything in repairs I asked to keep it. Carl I remember had a big bill for replacement cars that year so was pleased when I offered to keep it.

But the cost of repairs to keep it legal on the road was more than the value of the car, so the garage scrapped it for me. It was an old friend, very comfortable, even if the air conditioning didn't work, one of the headlampp washers had been ripped off by vandals, many of the dashboard lights were dead, and the rear wheel well was rusting out. Poke the pedal and it jumped. It had taken me all over the country and had done so many trips to universities carting Madeleine's and Michael's goods back and forth.

Well, the replacement Toyota Yaris is also automatic, has a CD player, no boot to speak of, and is also silver. The air conditioning works. I won't need it if I get made redundant.

I actually look forward to getting back on the bicycle. The Yaris can stay in the garage except for important occasions.

Peter

________________________________________
From: V.E. Merchant
Sent: 01 May 2008 22:05
Subject: Fw: thoughts

The Deed is done! For the first time in forty-two years I don’t have a car. Wives and girlfriends and lovers will come and go, and we get a hurt a bit and we recover, but a man forms a true sentimental attachment to his car. The car that I just sold took me to Virginia where I worked for four months, it took me twice to Charleston South Carolina to visit my daughter, and twice to Jacksonville Florida for exciting technical conferences. Then we traveled together over the rugged Appalachian mountains to Dayton, and a while later westward again through St. Louis, past all the poor dust farms in Oklahoma and Northern Texas, over the Mojave desert to Southern California. From our California home, there were numerous trips to the Anza Borrega Desert State Park, the rarefied atmosphere of Mount San Jacinto, and the Santa Anna Ecological Preserve. Then we went together, the car and I, northward through California, up the windswept Oregon coastline, and through the Orchards of Washington and the Okanagan valley to Vernon.

The trip to Kamloops where the car was sold gave me time to reflect about other cars that I’ve owned. The very first one was when I was one of three University students that contributed thirty dollars each to buy a ninety dollar 1956 Pontiac. I had a blow-out near Hedley while driving over the mountains to Vancouver; getting the tire replaced more than doubled my investment in the car. I had that car when I overcame my teenage shyness and actually went out with girls, with sweet Cathy and sensible Glenys and sensitive Leslie. Then while in Graduate school, I bought the Ford Cortina in which we went on many camping trips to Lake Huron, and a vacation to Cape Breton island. We crossed the country in that sturdy machine, but then the faithless car left me along with my first wife. It was replaced by a zippy Ford Fiesta, and an unreliable Honda Lemon - my young daughter asked, it that’s a toe truck, where are its toes? There was a short term fling with a $300 red Dodge Dart with rusted out floor boards. After more adventures, I bought the bright red jeep that my wife called the "second childhood car", taken from me in a devastating accident. The car that I just sold was bought from the resulting insurance money, seven years ago. And now it is gone.

Not just gone, but sold for a few lousy dollars. I feel degraded, like a pimp, selling off my companions for a little bit of money.

Like goes on. My wife will have to use her great and wonderful powers of tenderness, comfort, and affection to help me get over the loss of my companion for these last years.


Vivian

Wednesday 5 March 2008

Do I still have a job?

I guess that I will know friday. I went and had coffee with the dean today. He's a nice bloke, and interesting, but I wonder how much of what I discussed with him made an impact. He implied that he didn't know any of us well enough ( well you wouldn't want to get to know people if you were going to get rid of them, would you?) and that the letters would come from HR. The question is, was he involved in teh decisions? He acknowledges that Information Systems should be a core to any Business School course, But also that he doesn't need a department full of Information systems people.

I wait and see. I won't go down easily.

Thursday 14 February 2008

Too many things pressing for attention in my brain

Yes, and I just hit Enter and posted the blog empty. Got an apron on so I am preparing supper, but need to note the things that I am working on so that I can get back to them all.
- suggested to a challenge group alternate forms of VMware - done
- Need to know how to use Partimage and write scripts for it to save XP images. These won't fit into a FAT (2G partition) using Ghost. Thought - Using Partimage I am not restricted to FAT! brilliant!

- Lecture on Wireless Net management to prepare.

- Lecture on remote Monitoring.

- changing Raddle IP config to fit lab network. just an effort to learn ifconfig.

concentrate on these now that I have written them down. I think that I have forgotten what one or two more are. That's the way the brain works.

Sunday 10 February 2008

Book on Hair

There's a lot of skin heads around these days. It seems that once it starts thinning, many men shave it all off. It looks rough and tough to me. It made me start thinking about if anyone has written a book, in the lines of Brave New World, about the earth, or some community when people are divided by their hair. Those with hair are the upper class, and they worship Tarzan Heseltine, the skin heads are the workers. Those with a full dose of facial hair but shaven skulls (or maybe tied back in ponytails) are the upsidedown heads - maybe scientists?

Probably would be a bomb.

Saturday 9 February 2008

fishy thoughts

As I was swimming this morning I wondered why some sea creatures have vertical tail fins and why some (Like Whales) have horizontal fins.