Fashion Makes Doing IT Harder

Posted on 6 July 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

I’m about to start building an expert system. Or maybe I might call it a "knowledge base", or a "rule based system". It’s not an "AI", as at least in its early life it won’t have any self-learning capability, but will just take largely existing guidance from master technicians, and stick some code behind it to deliver the right advice at the right time. Expert system is a good term, or so I thought…

It’s a while since I built a rule engine, and I’ve never truly designed an expert system before, so I thought it might be a good idea to do some reading and understand the state of the art. That’s when the the trouble started. My client recommended a book on analysis for knowledge based systems, which I managed to track down for 1p + postage (that should have warned me). I got through most of the introduction, but statements such as "these new-fangled 4GLs might be interesting" and "we don’t hold with this iterative development malarkey" (I paraphrase slightly, but not much) made me realise that the "state of the art" documented was at least a generation old. The book has a few sound ideas about data structure, but pretty much everything it says about technology or process is irrelevant.

Back on Amazon, and I tried searching for "expert system", "knowledge base" and "rule based system". That generates a few hits, but nothing of any substance younger than about 12 years old, nothing on Kindle, and prices varying dramatically between a few pence and the best part of £100, both indications of "this is an old, rare book" and neither tempting me to make a punt. It doesn’t help that the summaries tend to be a list of technologies I’ve never heard of, and few seem to be focused on re-usable concepts and techniques.

OK, I thought. There’s obviously just a new term and I don’t know it. Wikipedia wasn’t much help, observing that the term "expert system" has largely gone out of use, and offering two opposing views why. Either expert systems became discredited and no-one does them any longer (I don’t believe that), or they just became "business as usual" (quite possible, but a good reason why you might write a book about them, not the opposite). No indication of the "modern" term, and few recent references.

Phone a friend. I emailed a couple of friends both of whom are quite knowledgeable in a breadth of IT topics hoping that one of them might say "Oh yes, we now just call them XXX". Nope. Both suggested AI and one suggested "cognitive computing", but as I’ve already observed, that’s a fundamentally different topic. Beyond that both were just suggesting the same terms I’d already tried.

Googling a practical question such as "rule based systems in .NET" produces a few hits and suggests that the state of technology support is pretty good. For example, Microsoft put the "Windows Workflow Foundation" into .NET in about 2008, and this includes a powerful rule engine which is perfectly reusable in its own right. So the technology is there, but again there’s not much general information on how to use it.

This appears to be a case where fashion is getting in the way. If something works, but is not "in", then authors don’t want to write about it, and editors don’t actively commission material. If the "thing" is something where the technology has improved, but not in a "sexy" way, then it goes unreflected in deeper or third party literature. Maybe that explains why Oracle seem driven to rename all their technologies every couple of years, it’s their way of attracting at least a modicum of interest even if it does confuse the hell out of developers trying to work out what has changed, and what really hasn’t.

So be it. I’m going to build a rule-based expert system knowledge base, and I don’t care if that’s not the modern term. It’s just frustrating that no-one seems to have written about how to do this with 2015 technology…

Posted in Agile & Architecture, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Does Your Broadband Beat a Carrier Pigeon?

Posted on 6 May 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

There’s a famous quote "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes bowling down a highway". Musing on this I decided to try and estimate the bandwidth of a carrier pigeon, given modern storage technology. According to Wikipedia, a racing pigeon can maintain about 50 miles an hour over moderate distances. So let’s feed our pigeon, strap a 64GB micro SD card to each leg, and send him from Bristol to London,which should take about 2 hours.

128GB in 2 hours is roughly 1GB/minute, or say 160 Mbps (megabits per second). That’s about the effective transfer rate for USB 2, and is getting on for Gigabit LAN speed. It’s about 50 times faster than the best I get from BT Broadband, and probably over 100 times faster than the sustained broadband bandwidth over a week, which is about how long 128GB would take to transfer. Plus remember that that’s the download speed, and upload is another factor of ten slower…

Now I would be the first to admit that there are some limitations to the "pigeon post" architecture, especially in terms of range. The latency also precludes chatty protocols. But in terms of sheer transfer bandwidth Yankee Doodle Pigeon has "broadband" beaten hands down!

Posted in Agile & Architecture, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Going Greener!

Posted on 4 May 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Going Greener - the E Class Respray Event!
Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX8 | Date: 03-05-2016 10:19 | Resolution: 4935 x 3084 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -33/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/100s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 12.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8

After talking about it for over a year, I decided that my transport needed to be “greener”, and finally bit the bullet on the respray. This is “Vivianite Green”, actually an official Mercedes colour in the late 90s, but for some reason Mercedes seem to have almost completely abandoned cheerful colours in their factory output. Hopefully I can be a small part of rectifying that deficiency. Put your sunglasses on!

View featured image in Album
Posted in Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Review: All Tide Up

By Alex Cay

Posted on 25 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Another great farce

Like it’s predecessor, Man Up!, this is a knock-about farce based around the capable but somewhat cursed sports agent, Patrick Flynn. This time the key protegé is a nymphomaniac Russian tennis player, but otherwise the cast of gangsters, hit-men (& -women) and scam artists hasn’t changed much. So much the better for that. Several of the key characters miraculously make it through from the first book to the second, and if you want to understand how then you first need to read the author’s even more farcical short story Icy Hot.

This style of comedy writing is difficult to pull off, and can mis-fire, but Alex Cay seems to have it off pat. The body count continues to be high, but sometimes (not always) with a slapstick element which invokes a lighter cartoonish tone. The sex scenes are moderately graphic, but provide both the prime driver for several of the female characters and a fair element of the humour. However as long as you are comfortable with a fairly adult style then you will enjoy and frequently laugh out loud at this outlandish tale.

It’s always encouraging when someone takes note and acts on a review. The author personally asked me to review his first book, and I happily did so noting that I’d like to see a change of location, fewer detailed American sports references, and a couple of stylistic tweaks. He has delivered on all those requests, and that makes the book all the more readable. Thanks for listening, Alex!

A great holiday read. I look forward to the next instalment.

Categories: Reviews and Thoughts on the World. Content Types: Adventure, Fiction, and Humour.
Posted in Reviews, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Review: The Eerie Silence

Searching for Ourselves in the Universe, By Paul Davies

Posted on 23 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Enjoyable and intriguing review of the state of SETI

This book is a review, at the 50 year point, of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and a consideration of how it may evolve in the future, by the scientist who heads several of its key committees. It’s a wide-ranging discussion which provides some answers for Enrico Fermi’s great challenge (“Where is everybody?”), and prompts the reader to consider how much we really know given how much our knowledge has advanced and changed since SETI was established in the early 1960s.

The early part of the book is focused on the current evidence for other forms of intelligent life, considering what we know of its genesis, the evidence (or rather profound lack thereof) for any second start either on earth or in the solar system, and whether evolution will naturally or regularly produce intelligent, scientific and technical species. Here Davies takes a fairly negative view, although he acknowledges that we have simply failed to uncover evidence from our earth-based viewpoint, and that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

The latter part looks at the potential forms of a “galactic diaspora”, accounting for our vastly increased knowledge of alternative information carriers, information systems, machines  and engineered probes including the conventional, the biological and those based on nano-technology. Again there’s no evidence yet, but this section explains that alien signals or probes might just be too different, or too small, for us to detect. The conclusion is that we need SETI to avoid being athropocentric, and especially not “1960s radio astronomer centric”.

The final chapters explain the current state of preparation for First Contact (which seems to consist mainly of international committees sending telegrams to each other, and may not be up to the arrival of city-sized spaceships over the capital cities of the UN Security Council :)). The author also discusses what form of messages we should choose if and when we do send any ourselves. The assertion that only key mathematical and physical theorems are guaranteed to bridge all scientific species is a sound one, but maybe misses the point that the Pioneer plaques and similar are just as much an expression of our humanity to ourselves as a serious attempt to communicate with minimum ambiguity.

While the book is inspiring and thought-provoking, it’s also a bit frustrating in places. Davies asserts correctly that the Earth is progressively becoming “radio silent” to long-distance observers, but blames this entirely on the move to put major long distance communication channels into cables. A more complete explanation is that our world is full of vastly more wireless communication that 50 years ago, but as we adopt spread-spectrum and encryption technologies and get better at using low power and highly directed signals the “overspill” into space is much more difficult to detect. Similarly he presents an explanation of Galactic Inflation I haven’t read before (the absence of magnetic monopoles), but fails to present the more common justifications.

In considering alterative technologies Davies binds himself with our current science, despite the fact that there is significant evidence (the failure to unify General Relativity and Quantum Physics, the lack of any real explanation for Dark Matter and Dark Energy) that there are things about the Cosmos we just don’t understand, and which an alien civilisation (or a future humanity) may exploit. While Davies correctly advises against wishful thinking, it would be prudent to accept that just as our own understanding has changed vastly in the last 100 years, it will likely change again in the future, perhaps opening up valid options for, for example, super-light speeds.

However, those criticisms aside, this is an enjoyable, intriguing and well worth-while book. In the final few pages Davies himself observes that there is a contention between the official views of Davies the relatively cautious scientist and Davies the philosopher, human being and SETI enthusiast, and some of the challenges come from presenting and navigating those different viewpoints, which overall is done very well. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and recommend it.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Book, Physics & Cosmology, and Science.
Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Creating 3D Images for On-Screen Display

Full Article ------ Permalink and Comments
Posted on 18 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

There’s a significant dearth of information on the internet regarding how to create high-resolution 3D images for display on a suitable TV. While many of us regularly enjoy watching visually stunning 3D movies both in cinemas and also on television, if you try and research creating your own 3D images you are led either into the highly technical space of professional production, or at the other extreme you end up reading a lot of rubbish about squinting at pairs of postage-stamp images to "try and get a 3D effect".

While I don’t want to be unkind, the latter is completely out of touch with our target environment, a 3D-enabled large screen television. Such devices are now relatively common, and there ought to be a recognised process for creating suitable images for them. As it turns out, it’s perfectly possible and relatively easy to create stunning 3D images which will display at the full resolution of the target television. With a little discipline and practice you can do so reliably with any camera, and even hand-held.

Read my article to learn how.

Read the full article
Posted in Photography | Leave a comment

Review: Influx

By Daniel Suarez

Posted on 15 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Enjoyable romp, but largely familiar plot

Daniel Suarez is billed as the new Michael Crichton. While a few of his novels have come onto my radar, this is the first I have read. Based on this showing there’s a great deal of promise, but the fairly derivative nature of the plot suggests that at least for now the pure inventiveness of Crichton has yet to be matched.

The basic precept is this: imagine that many of the key inventions we have been patiently awaiting for the last 50 years – controlled fusion, quantum computing, reliable cloning, a generic cure for cancer – have actually been found, but are hidden from the world at large. What warped power and societal structures would that drive? It’s a great precept, although here it’s turned into a recognisable and predictable plot, with a heroic inventor on the run, while dark forces try to suppress inventions on behalf of the status quo. In some ways it’s reminiscent of Chain Reaction, and by pure coincidence I had also just read Catalyst by Boyd Morrison, which while markedly less futuristic tells a similar tale.

My other slight gripe is that this suffers in a few places from “techno-babble”, short sections which appear to just be a dumping-ground for a large number of technical terms, which just about boil down to “magic”. I know the author is trying to establish the BTC’s technological superiority, but that’s adequately done by the more detailed examples in the main flow of the text.

That said, this is a clever piece, challenging preconceptions and frequently, even literally, turning them on their heads. As a techno-thriller it’s well written, keeping the reader’s attention fully engaged from the first page, and I will certainly be reading more of Suarez’s books.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Adventure, Book, Fiction, and Science Fiction.
Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Review: Mother Tongue

By Bill Bryson

Posted on 13 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Very amusing, but needs a refresh

This is an amusing and enjoyable romp through the history of the English language, and a delight for closet linguisticists like myself. Bill Bryson takes us on a fascinating and funny tour of the history of the English language, how it became a (arguably the) world language, how its usage, spelling and grammar vary with time, location and context, and how it continues to develop. However like this reader it’s older than you think…

Amazon have been pushing this book hard recently, and I downloaded the book in Kindle format in the expectation that it was a relatively new work, with an apparent publication date of 2009. However reading the opening chapter I got a strange sense of deja vu, and realised I had read it before, but evidently long before the advent of either e-reading or publishing and cataloguing my own reviews. I reckon I last read this not long after its original publication in 1990, so about a generation ago! It has rewarded a re-read, but has left me thinking how much better a book it might be for an refresh.

A lot has changed in the last 25 years which directly affects our use of language, and particularly English. Foremost in my mind are the end of the Cold War, the rise of the Asian economic powerhouses presenting relatively direct services to the rest of the world, and, above all, the development of the Internet and mobile technologies. The latter have brought the expectation that pretty much any two humans, anywhere, may have both the wish and the technical means to communicate, and across national boundaries will usually use English to do so. Technology has both led and enabled big changes to how we use language, and we increasingly design our messages and evolve our language around the constraints and possibilities of the transmission and consumption platforms. “Thanx”, “R U OK” and “GR8” don’t appear in this book, but they belong there.

It would be great to understand whether the wider use of English is driving greater homogenisation of usage and acceptance of obvious simplifications, or whether we are just further “baking in” the idiosyncrasies, and adding a new layer on top. Does the availability of online resources such as dictionaries and thesauruses drive the wider adoption of correct usage, or is this outweighed by the need for simplification of the message? Do tools such as spell checking,  predictive text and automated translation increase or decrease individual language skills?

In fairness to Bill Bryson, he does recognise some of these challenges in his final chapter, and makes many of the right calls on general direction, but the book itself is now a period piece the other side of major technological and geopolitical changes.

Despite the fact that Bryson wrote this book when he had been living in Yorkshire for many years, it has a bit of an American focus, typically assuming that the reader knows the American usage but needs the British explaining. Once you’ve tuned into this it’s fine, but it can throw British (and I suspect other) readers slightly at first. Other slight downsides are that like some of Bryson’s other books it’s arguably a bit too long, and in the last third some of the examples get a bit repetitive, and also some other reviewers suggest that the fact checking, especially around non-English languages, is perhaps a bit suspect.

Having said all that, the books remains highly readable, full of wonderful anecdotes and nuggets of knowledge, and if you accept its horizon, well fills a role which I don’t think is met by any other book which I have read. Enjoy it, but acknowledge and forgive that it’s slightly showing its age.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Book and Linguistics.
Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Twin Tales of Sporting Daring-Do

Posted on 4 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

The 1988 Winter Olympics brought us not only one, but two heart-warming stories of sporting heroism by unconventional outsiders. The story of the Jamaican Bobsleigh Team was told promptly in the wonderful 1993 Disney picture Cool Runnings, but we’ve had to wait nearly 30 years to see the other tale, that of Eddie the Eagle, on the silver screen.

Part of the challenge is that the dramatic conventions of such films force their screen renderings to be quite similar. In reality the situations were somewhat different. Until the wheels (or at least the runners) literally came off the Jamaicans had built up a real prospect of a good place, powered by a team three of whom could run 100m in less than 10s. Eddie Edwards had his utter determination to take part, and had built up a decent competition record on skis, but was only ever likely to come last. The new film acknowledges this, but otherwise echoes the earlier one in many ways, with the same drunk and disgraced former athlete as coach, the condescending officials who see the outsiders as challenging the dignity of their sport, parents who are split on whether to support their sons or not, fellow athletes who are initially rude but who come to respect the outsiders’ determination, and so on.

When two films, by co-incidence , tackle the same subject at the same time it’s inevitable that they are compared and one (Deep Impact, Olympus Has Fallen) falls into the shadow of the other (Armageddon, White House Down). While I get the impression that the makers of the new film didn’t want to wait nearly a generation to make it, maybe by doing so they have both reduced this effect (except from old codgers like yours truly), and will perpetuate these great sporting tales into a new audience who might not otherwise have been aware of them.

Comparisons and conventions aside, Eddie the Eagle is an excellent film. It captures both the flights and thumps of ski jumping, and modern filming techniques allow you to be there on the skis with the jumpers. However it excels in telling the human stories, with Edward’s determination against the odds beautifully portrayed, as is the growing admiration of those who both supported and opposed him. I have two abiding memories of the Calgary Olympics. One is of four black guys carrying their broken bobsleigh over the finish line, and the other is of an interview about Eddie with the slightly cold and aloof Finnish ski-jumping champion Matti Nykänen who the reporter was expecting to be rude and dismissive. Instead the young Finn was warm and supportive of Edward’s right to be there, and pretty much put the seal of approval on his attempt at the 90m hill. In the film that same support is portrayed in an elevator conversation between the two men, and brought my memories flooding back.

The film is also very funny, and that triggered another personal element. We went to see it yesterday in Guildford, and a large extended family had clearly block-booked the central seats next to ourselves. I noticed that when the same writer’s name was shown twice in the credits, there was a little Mexican wave by the kids, and thought "oh, that Simon Kelton must have someone in", but then sat down to enjoy the film and laughed as loud as I normally do when so entertained. Afterwards, one of the family group came up to me and asked "was it you who was laughing so loudly?" I confirmed that it was, and he introduced himself as the writer. It’s not often I can personally express my thanks to an entertainer, and it was great on this occasion to get the chance.

It’s a good film. Go and see it. And afterwards, try and catch up with Cool Runnings.

Posted in Reviews, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Does a Photograph Portray the Subject, or the Photographer?

Posted on 28 March 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Three youngsters in Cienfuegos
Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 20-11-2010 18:54 | ISO: 200 | Exp. Time: 1/400s | Aperture: 11.0 | Focal Length: 15.0mm (~24.3mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

Mike Johnston (no relation) over at The Online Photographer has recently run a number of articles discussing the extent to which the photographer adjusts the “look” of a photograph (see What Should a Photo Look Like?) His primary examples were a set from a recent New York Times online photo essay, Cuba on the Edge of Change.

While it’s a fine article, the photos, with one slight exception showing a bride on the way to her wedding, all portray a dark, crumbling, slightly grim Cuba. The following is a good example:

Image from New York Times, photographer not identified

There’s nothing wrong with this photo. Some might say it’s a very good image. However it has been deliberately selected, as have all the others in the article, to show and reinforce the image of a struggling, poor, backward Cuba which is the common American image of the country. The low-key lighting is part of this “story”, and the look of the photos has been adjusted to enhance that.

I went to Cuba in 2010. Yes, I saw decay, old buildings which had not been well repaired, and I certainly saw poverty. I did see a few, not many, people surviving by begging. But that’s not my enduring memory of the country, and doesn’t fit the best of my images. I saw a country full of happy, reasonably healthy and well fed people who were managing to stay cheerful in a difficult economic situation. My pictures are full of smiles, kids running around, and, yes, lots of bright colours and a high key look. That reflected the Cuba I wanted to portray.

The picture at the top more accurately portrays the Cuba I saw than the NYT one, but I’m a positive sort of chap, and I was on a very enjoyable holiday. I don’t know whether the NYT journalist and photographer (or photographers, it’s not clear) had had a worse experience, or were just trying to illustrate a narrative that was already in their minds, but I’m willing to bet the latter.

So to my mind the question is not “what sort of look do you want in your photos”? Your photos will reflect a composite of the subject, true, but also the photographer’s own outlook. Inevitably the photographs will be both taken and prepared coloured with the effects of that outlook just as much as, maybe even more than, the original beams of light.

View featured image in Album
Posted in Cuba Travel Blog, Photography, Travel | Leave a comment

My Travel Page

Posted on 10 March 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
The Devil's Garden, near Escalante, Utah
Camera: Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL | Date: 13-10-2007 15:08 | Resolution: 3468 x 2308 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 11.0 | Focal Length: 38.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM

Some things don’t scale. You start off doing something, but before you know it it’s outgrown its usefulness and needs to change. So it is with website design…

I started off with lists in a couple of places on this site of blogs or albums related to trips I’ve done. However as the list has grown they were getting a bit unwieldy  and out of step with one another. I have therefore practiced what I preach, and "re-factored" them to a new "index" page, at www.andrewj.com/travel

Take a look, and let me know what you think.

View featured image in Album
Posted in Photography, Travel, Website & Blog | Leave a comment

Camera History Update

Full Article ------ Permalink and Comments
Posted on 16 February 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
My camera fleet in early 2016 - note how the GX7 has gone from "almost smallest" to second largest
Resolution: 19440 x 3391

As part of a general tidy-up, I’ve updated my camera history page, with a new photo of the "fleet". It may amuse you, especially as the count has crept back up again! "Photography" is a combination of many separate hobbies, and I’m definitely engaged in the "buying and selling cameras" sub-division.

Read the full articleView featured image in Album
Posted in Photography | Leave a comment