Who's Depressed?

This is something that I have been thinking about for awhile.

I heard yesterday a study that said that many pensioners are depressed.

My sister has been claiming depression for years, and even posted on Facebook about it, which is a bit funny in itself.

I have been in a state of mind for these last few months where I cannot get stuck into anything. I keep thinking of projects that I could do, but I can't get up the enthusiasm to start them. I have umpteen things on my desk in progress, but I can't be bothered to pick them up. I haven't done anything on Family History for quite some time now, just occasionally poking in and looking at somebody.

Yet my wife tells me that she thinks that I never suffer from depression, I am always cool and upbeat. And my brothers are the same. I know that V does sometimes get a bit down about things.

I know that the best cure for depression for me a is a good cycle ride - The bike is ready, but it is cold outside, and with being told not to go too far, and be back in half-an-hour, it hardly seems worth the bother.

I have even considered that if I was not here, the government and all my pension providers could save some money- quite a bit. And what difference would it make to the world? No one would miss my contributions as they are.

That's enough.

Beating the scammers

I have just watched a recorded program about beating the scammers, and it showed about 4 methods by which people have been scammed. It was a good program, sponsored by NatWest Bank.

The last part of it had our presenter meeting a security expert who tested various passwords, that were hash-encrypted to see how easy that were to unencrypt. And it seemed very easy.

After the program I got on the computer and downloaded one of these programs to test out some of my passwords, but then realised that I would need a program to hash encrypt my plaintext password.

A bit of a think and I went looking for a password strength tester and found http://www.passwordmeter.com/ and  tested a number of my passwords on it. They all fell short.   As a matter of fact the only password/phrase that gave 100% strength  was "Then out spake brave Horatio"  and that is without numerals or symbols (aside from spaces).

The question is how good are these password checkers that compare your password against defined parameters in comparison with hash crackers?   They both rate poorly easy words and simple words with substitutions and rate highly difficult phrases such as words of a  song or poem, but does the comparison hold?

More thought required, so I'll come back to this later.

Computing in schools

Recently I have heard of a new As or A level computing course that I want to try and find out more about as a Governor with a special interest in Engineering and Technology.

Today 8 July 2015 I read about an announcement of a new BBC computer  using Scratch from MIT I think. I will have to see if my school has a link with a middle school where I can get involved and learn about this.   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33409311

5 January 2016:
This new BBC Micro Bit has been delayed yet again.

4 April. Maybe it is out now:
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/bbc-micro-bit-10-things-you-need-to-know-1298581

Data comm-s packet Switching in Bournemouth

I was talking to my friend Russ ( http://btckstorage.blob.core.windows.net/site8867/Journals/2006/J06%20Pg%2037-39.pdf)  at Stewarts (http://www.stewarts.co.uk/our-garden-centres/coffe-shop/coffee-shop-broomhill/)  the other morning about my  life  in Data Comms, and he was telling me that there had been an early meeting about something to do with the development of Packet Switching in Bournemouth. I am trying to find out something about that. So far, because of my reading about Turing  after we had seen the movie about him, I did come across a reference to one of the pioneers in packet switching who also worked on the ACE machine in Manchester with Turing:  http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article040101.html#davies
Donald Davies is acknowledged to be the inventor of packet switching.

Russ mentioned a guy called Ray Henville at Blandford Camp, but as yet I cannot tie them together.
I have found a Kevin Ray Henville born 1959 who is interested in Antique radios as Russ is, and one who worked on early computers at Irton Moor, who must have been significantly older.

So, keep digging.


http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_packet_inv.htm

from Wikipedia:

The concept of switching small blocks of data was first explored independently by Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation in the US and Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK in the early to mid-1960s.^{Abbate 2000}

Leonard Kleinrock conducted early research in queueing theory which proved important in packet switching, and published a book in the related field of digital message switching (without the packets) in 1961; he also later played a leading role in building and management of the world's first packet-switched network, the ARPANET.

Baran developed the concept of message block switching during his research at the RAND Corporation for the US Air Force into survivable communications networks, first presented to the Air Force in the summer of 1961 as briefing B-265^[3] then published as RAND Paper P-2626 in 1962 and then including and expanding somewhat within a series of eleven papers titled On Distributed Communications in 1964. Baran's P-2626 paper described a general architecture for a large-scale, distributed, survivable communications network. The paper focuses on three key ideas: first, use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points; and second, dividing complete user messages into what he called message blocks (later called packets); then third, delivery of these messages by store and forward switching.

Baran's study made its way to Robert Taylor and J.C.R. Licklider at the Information Processing Technology Office, both wide-area network evangelists, and it helped influence Lawrence Roberts to adopt the technology when Taylor put him in charge of development of the ARPANET.

Baran's work was similar to the research performed independently by Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory, UK. In 1965, Davies developed the concept of packet-switched networks and proposed development of a UK wide network.^[4] He gave a talk on the proposal in 1966, after which a person from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) told him about Baran's work. A member of Davies' team (Roger Scantlebury) met Lawrence Roberts at the 1967 ACMSymposium on Operating System Principles, bringing the two groups together. Scantlebury urged Roberts to use the highest speeds possible to reduce latency.

Davies had chosen some of the same parameters for his original network design as Baran, such as a packet size of 1024 bits. In 1966 Davies proposed that a network should be built at the laboratory to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching. The NPL Data Communications Network entered service in 1970. Roberts and the ARPANET team took the name "packet switching" itself from Davies's work.

The first computer network and packet switching network deployed for computer resource sharing was the Octopus Network at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that began connecting four Control Data 6600 computers to several shared storage devices (including an IBM 2321 Data Cell^[5] in 1968 and an IBM Photostore^[6] in 1970) and to several hundred Teletype Model 33 ASR terminals for time sharing use starting in 1968.^[7]

In 1973, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote the specifications for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet-switching among the nodes.

And Lawrence Roberts  I recognize, I think it is possible that he was in Telenet corporation. Here is his writeup on it: http://www.packet.cc/files/ev-packet-sw.html

This report is US biased I think: http://ethw.org/Packet_Switching

This report is about the UK Network  created at NPL:
http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/Computer.org/ComputingNow/computingthen/atty/1988/CT_1988-1_DataCommunications.pdf
It used the Plessey XL-12 initially  whose successor was built at Plessey Christchurch, so there may have been discussions in Bournemouth.

Here's more about Donald Davies: http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Donald_Davies_%26_Derek_Barber
I like this comment from here:
Donald would probably know more about that,  But what I was trying to say was that because of that coming together of one big department, they wanted to focus amongst other things the computing industry. And that's why, when we tried to use the Plessey latest machine [for the NPL network], which just would have been ideal, we were told, "No, the Ministry policy is: we want to support ICL, you will not use that, you don't have to use that, etc." And of course when we wrote down the spec and looked around, the next best machine was a Honeywell 516. If we had gone for the Plessey XL-12, which was actually a much better machine, architecturally, than the 516, the whole story could have been quite different. But such is the way decisions are made in ministries.


 A last compendium:   http://rogerdmoore.ca/PS/

From the book  "Intercept" about computing, cryptography and spying, it states that Donald Davies wrote a paper on packet switching and when the US designed theirs for Arpanet, his document was well thumbed and worn.

To Annabelle

I had to write a poem
But I couldn't do it at home
So I went to the playground
And thought as I spun round and round
I've got to write a poem
but I can't do it at home.
This poem is going round and round
so home and to bed
and it goes around in my head.

More Merchant Family History

This family history is intriguing. From Rootsweb for Essex I recently saw that someone was looking for the Linnet family and responded. Sarah Linnet(widow) is my Great-great-grandmother. She married William Marchant in 1808.

What has come out of Rootsweb and other sources is that she was born Sarah Smyth in about 1782, and married Joseph Linnet (or Linnot) in 1802. He died in January 1807. Meanwhile she had a son William in early 1802, and we can only assume that Joseph was the father. Later they had a daughter Phoebe in 1806.

I wonder if young William died, because in 1815 Sarah and William had a son who they called William.

I have found a Pheba Sargeant age 30 in the 1841 census living only about 10 miles away, and I wonder if this was Phoebe.

It's a shame that I can't find anything more about the family in the early 1800's, because that would be nice to flesh them out a bit. Did Phoebe grow up a Merchant, or remain a Linnet?

Does this mean that I have more branches of relatives around?  

Consider this an unfinished blog, because I will flesh it out (Hah!) as I learn more.

2020 More

When William and Sarah went to Hockley I surmise that Phoebe went with them, as she married John Smith on 18 October 1824 in Hockley.

John and Phoebe had three children

Elizabeth (1832

Phebe ( 1839

Ann (1843 -

Elizabeth married William Walley on 4 April 1856

Phebe married William Camper in 8 November 1863

After the death of William Merchant, (1770-1853) Sarah (1782-1863) lived with the Walley family until her death.

In 1891 Phebe Smith was living with the Walleys as a Widow. (Age 83)

Thinking about God

I was thinking about God this morning. It probably was because I was speaking to my old Friend Ed G. last night and he seems to be quite religious. It started when I was getting the car out of the garage and looked at the wheels. They have 5 (or 6) spokes and they were designed by someone somewhere. They are not beautiful. And I thought of all the things in nature that have repetitive geometry and how beautiful they are, as works of God. Even down to the hated dandelion, it has a beautifully shaped puffball of seeds, and if you look at each individual seed it is a work of art.

Then I looked at my bicycle because that is what I was really going for. It looks so good. It is a wonderful fusion of engineering, craftsmanship, and art. The person who put it together must have sat back and had a tremendous rush of satisfaction, a real feeling of being with God.

So I went for a ride and thought about those thoughts, and the sun beaming through the trees, and came home and wrote this.