Mostly HarmlessJohn Alderson's Blog |
Wednesday Aug 13, 2008
In The Badlands
I went for a walk around the lake this afternoon, to rest my eyes after accidentally pointing them at a perl program. Throughout I was observed by the heron, who seems rather fat and complacent these days. The water was conspicuously devoid of fish. Because that hadn't taken long I pushed on into the undergrowth behind the Lake. I began to feel strangely exposed and self-conscious. Apart from a couple of people on the canteen patio, sipping cappuccinos and poring over spreadsheets, I was quite alone. I think I began to imagine my colleagues congregating invisibly behind the huge office plate-glass windows, which reflected only sky in my direction. They would be murmuring to each other "What is he doing?" - "He has reached the birch copse!" - "Does he have enough oxygen to make it back safely?". They would perhaps speculate that I was on some obscure mission - possibly religious. Maybe I was burying the secret of how to write a complete webserver in three lines of awk, for a future in which people would once again revere such things. When I finally disappeared from view they would disperse again to today's hot desks with furrowed brows and an inkling of disquiet. What I did discover in the dark continent between the Lake and the Lost City of Building 4 was a very good blackberry bush. It always seems to be the smaller blackberries on the harder-to-reach bushes which taste the best. Posted at 01:12AM Aug 13, 2008 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[2]
Tuesday Aug 14, 2007
Wrong Mystery Solved
Another team meeting:
The day Donna shredded the mysterious extra piece Risto was seen loitering around the printer area trying to look like someone who has been shocked or confused by something the photocopier has said. However, when no-one was looking he rummaged in the shredder bin. This had recently been emptied, so he was able to make a complete inventory of the surplus jigsaw piece we all thought we had seen the last of. Such behaviour is already obsessive, but it turns out he has gone one huge step further by photographing and analyzing the many fragments in an attempt to reconstruct the whole piece and continue towards his original goal of determining if it is really surplus or has been displaced by some other more genuinely surplus piece. To this end he has ported some pattern recognition software to harness the formidable power of the SFW1000+8i and chosen our team meeting for a grand unveiling of the results... We all cluster round the big screen and Algernon, halfway up his mountain, shades his eyes and squints at the portable LCD. Risto has the floor. "I devised a q-parallel stochastic procedure to approximate best-fit," he says, "and converged using repeated runs of a classical genetic algorithm. This method could have been further optimized into q-space if the other 7 superposition engines were in the coherence group." He looks meaningfully at Donna, almost as if he suspects the fact that the best brains on the planet have not yet achieved 8-way q-bus superposition is all part of a global conspiracy to prevent verification of a true and complete Jackson Pollock jigsaw. "Anyway, I'll show you the the final result. This is the definitive hi-resolution reconstruction of the query surplus piece. Further runs from this point do not improve signal to noise ratio at the interpolated-pixel level..." "Just show us the goddamn picture Riz!" snaps Algernon, and Risto winces slightly. It is a very high-quality image. We stare at it in admiration for a while; then someone says, "Ooh look, I can see a song thrush!" "It's not a song thrush, it's a square dinnerplate with a pair of nail clippers in one corner." "They're not nail clippers!" "Is that David Beckham?" "Hang on, hang on," says Arnie, "It's the wrong way round. Risto turn it 90 degrees clockwise. - - You see? There's the sky, and down here there's like a crowd of people. And that bit of dinner plate is the corner of a building. And here's a car with some guy waving." "Oh yes! I see it now!" "Amazing!" says Algernon, "That's John F. Kennedy in the car. And if I'm not mistaken the building behind is the Texas School Book Depository. Zoom in on the corner of the sixth floor." We may have talked ourselves into this, but it does suddenly seem a highly detailed image. Zooming in on the corner window the shadowy figure of a man holding a bulky object becomes suddenly clear. There is a stupefied silence and then, moments later, pandemonium. Some people were angry with Risto afterwards - but personally I don't think he was to blame. Of course, this may be another conspiracy, or another editorial lapse from the BBC, or it may be our first concrete glimpse of the dizzying weirdness of quantum reality - whatever. But according to the SFW1000's pattern recognition software the man standing at that fateful window was Terry Wogan, wearing a Pudsy Bear necktie and wielding a Spider Man 3 Super Soaker. Posted at 11:00AM Aug 14, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[2]
Monday Jul 23, 2007
Fun with Webcams
The student interns are up to something. It's easy to tell because they haven't yet learned to control the smirking reflex. Cracking them was just a formality, although it was easy partly because I'm a cyclist. The interns have taken agin the speed humps (sleeping policemen) which limit the speed of traffic around the lake. It's not that they have a perverse desire to increase the danger of our environment (at least, I hope not!) but more that they feel that push-bikes are disproportionately affected by these inverse pot-holes. You'd think that as students they'd be hard-up but that doesn't seem to preclude owning some fairly high-tech bikes. They don't want to go down in a cloud of carbon nanotubes when their sleek machine buckles or tips negotiating the jump. Site Planning And Maintenance point out that the sidewalks are also for cycles. However, since July 1st in this land the sidewalks have become too dangerous, peopled as they are by glaze-eyed zombies hurrying to the smoking areas in the car-parks. These poor indigents only appear to have seen you. In reality they have paused mid-stride just to check (again) that they have everything they need, and will soon forge ahead without warning and on an unpredictable bearing. Anyway, it turns out that the students' revenge is so inventive that it's worth describing in detail: A couple of days ago they formed a sociable crowd around a lamp-post near one of the speed humps. While the outer students chatted the inner members of this crowd removed the maintenance plate from the lamp-post and inserted a small wireless PC, webcam and powerful integrated amp and speaker. This was all patched in to the lamp's power cable and the cover replaced with minor modifications for the camera and speaker (a few carefully positioned holes). They contacted the PC from the office and checked that the camera images were good. Next a neural network was trained to recognize certain cars as they approached the hump. This job was facilitated enormously by Donna's SFW1000 which eats that kind of problem for breakfast. The student's included one of their own cars as a test and then tuned the tracking between visual match and arrival of the wheels at the hump. The result is that when certain cars (and only those) traverse the hump the noise of a loud squeaky toy emanates from the lamp-post. Some of the resulting camera footage is absolutely classic. I would prise it away from the students but I think they are planning to sell it online to recover the funds they lost by buying smart bikes and mini wireless PCs. In one sequence the victim stops, reverses and tries again. Again the squeak. He gets out of his car and waits for someone to go around him. No squeak. He scratches his head and inspects the tough plastic speed hump - and then actually begins to jump up and down on it to see if he can elicit the squeak! He gets in again and reverses with such violence that he nearly takes out a would-be smoker who has stopped briefly in the road to check his pockets. He drives forward again gingerly - squeak! - he stops and can still just be seen in the camera hunched over the wheel and staring wild-eyed from side to side before making for the nearest parking space. With another victim we see the same reversing strategy, but then the guy gets out and starts rummaging in his boot (trunk - whatever). At length he pulls out a dog's squeaky bone toy and deposits it in the nearest bin. I don't think this anarchy will achieve any useful result - but full marks for imagination! Posted at 10:59AM Jul 23, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[2]
Thursday Jul 19, 2007
printf() - the immortal debugger
Caramba! Gone are the nights of "clubbin'" and the days of backchat and nose-powdering. In between hiding webcams in Project Central and stealing Ursula's entire library of O'Reillys Donna has succeeded in booting the SFW1000+8i! She is the first non-Sumover Futures employee to attain this level of magery. The engineers at Sumover wanted to send her a wee plaque in recognition but a "suit" intervened. The more credible this product looks the more snappy dressers with visitor's badges haunt the corridors. True, she hasn't managed to entangle all 8 Superposition Engines for more than a picosecond yet but seems unperturbed by this and only smiles coyly when people inquire about her progress. In any case, even one working engine has Risto salivating. He limbered up with a couple of Travelling Salesman problems involving 100 cities and then launched into a project of his own. No-one knows what this is. Risto doesn't do "coy", he leans more towards the blunt end of things, with statements like "If I explained it to you you wouldn't understand anyway." We have encountered new and fantastical difficulties when debugging quantum programs. Traditional debugging with breakpoints just won't work. There is an obvious and a less-obvious reason for this: The obvious reason is that as soon as it hits a breakpoint the running program displays this fact on your terminal so that you can decide what to do next. This is equivalent to getting an eyeful of Schroedinger's Cat. The program will have gone irretrievably classical so there is no meaningful way it can be resumed. So, you might say, at least we can do a post-mortem on the breakpointed program? Not necessarily... This brings us to the less-obvious problem: A breakpoint may sit on one of several code-paths and be missed by the others. In a classical program a breakpoint which is not visited has no effect on the execution of the program - but in a quantum program the mere possibility of visiting the breakpoint influences program execution even if the breakpoint is not visited. In QM terms the breakpoint is a potential "observation". It's effect on a system even when the observation is not made is sometimes termed "counterfactual". I believe the idea of something which only might have happened influencing something that did was one of the paradoxes first raised by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in a thought experiment involving bomb fuses which could be triggered by a single photon. So, anyway, trad breakpoints are a no-no. We've gone back to using printf() - but to a tiny qRAM filesystem which runs entangled with the program image. It's funny to think that messages may be written (sort of) to that filesystem which are no longer there when the burly programmer finally gets to look at the file. Still - our output is now coherent, even if not complete ;-) We automated the initialisaton of the qRAM-FS:
/*
* Hello world - "Q-safe"
*/
#include <qstdio.h>
main()
{
fprintf(qstdout, "Hello, World!");
}
[NB: For anyone who feels in danger of losing the thread of Lake Guillemont a handy list of episodes is provided on the side-bar (most recent first)] Posted at 04:11PM Jul 19, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[1]
Friday Jul 13, 2007
The Missing Piece
Someone around here is one piece short of a jigsaw puzzle. It is a curious fact of human nature that how we feel about a crime is not primarily dictated by the size of the injury - the amount stolen or the severity of the violence. When it comes to sentencing, size matters; but as social beings we are often swayed more by the motivations of the perpetrator and what the crime says about their trustworthiness, or simple worthiness. So when we read about someone up on a charge of GBH for confronting a burglar with perhaps more than reasonable force our sympathies tend to go with the householder rather than the burglar - even though most people would rate violence as worse than theft. If I see someone deliberately drop an empty crisp packet on the street I'm emotionally ready to rescue the litter and incorporate it into the litterer's body in some painful configuration. Yes a crisp packet is tiny, but the void in the head of the person who dropped it is the size of a parking lot. By the same token I imagine spammers are probably frightened of being identified in crowded places (if they ever leave the house, that is). Someone in Lake Guillemont probably thought it was an amusing practical joke to pinch a piece from the completed Jackson Pollock jigsaw in Project Central. I imagine them thinking "They were a piece up, now they can try being a piece down...". Well, mean-spiritedness is revealed in the smallest actions probably more clearly than in the largest. If you want to join the ranks of street litterer's, spammers and others who should know better, then hang on to that piece. Otherwise replace it and we'll say no more about it. In fact - I'll even offer an inducement. Return the piece and I'll blog one entry on the subject of your choice (at my discretion) - a reward made possible by the anonymous-coward technology of the internet. P.S. You'd best wait till no-one's about. Donna thinks she knows who you are and I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of her wrath. She handles that shredder like a pro these days. Posted at 11:42AM Jul 13, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[0]
Thursday Apr 26, 2007
Donna's Pet Project
Donna is building a quantum computer! This has arrived in kit form from Sumover Futures Inc (I bet the stock analysts love that name) who are a startup specializing in qbit-logic workstations. Some marketing guy there (probably only half a marketing guy) decided it would be funky to use complex numbers for their branding - so this beast is an SFW 1000+8i. It looks like an ordinary workstation at the moment - because that's what it is - but then there's this big rack hanging off the back with some major cooling plant on 3-phase. The rack, once you've fought your way inside it, can take up to 8 "superposition engines". Each one of these can maintain a goodly pile of quantum "dots" in a state of quantum coherency for a respectable number of seconds. The actual number of seconds achieved is a matter of luck, of course, the only guideline we have is an MTBF of about 4.5. In use it's supposed to be a bit like programming an FPGA. The host OS on the workstation (our bit) allows you to build qbit processing logic into one or more engines and then release them, hoping they don't go classical before they spit out an answer. There's supposed to be a photonic crossbar linking the 8 units so they can exchange "data" without loss of coherence. This would effectively increase the number of coherent dots eightfold. The cost would be a substantially reduced MTBF but at that level of, er, simultaneity who cares if you only get it for a second? Unfortunately the cross-bar isn't supported yet. You need correction codes to allow you to ignore photons which have accidentally bounced off something, and Sumover haven't got them working yet. Donna claims to have some ideas about that - I hope none of them involves the shredder. Posted at 09:14AM Apr 26, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[0]
Tuesday Apr 24, 2007
Makeovers
One of the interns has hold of a large, shiny nut and bolt - which probably should be fastened through some critical component in the lab. He idly spins the nut up and down the bolt while he he sits at his desk and it makes an agreeable jingling sound to accompany his "Agreeable", that is, for about a minute. After that time it becomes monotonous. Then it begins to remind me of an animal in a cage too small, pacing up and down. At about this time Arnie Shepherd's leg starts up. I believe I mentioned way back that the office is earthquake proof; one consequence of this is that the floor vibrates like the skin of a drum. A good leg-twitch can transmit itself up every seatpost in a twenty metre radius. Confined to the office for a few generations we would probably acquire the ability to communicate with infrasaound, like elephants. So I now have jingling from one direction and steady tremors from another. Output from a coredump seems to crawl around my screen and become disassociated from all meaning. What are these figures? 0xdeadbeef - what on earth does that mean? - Thud thud thud, jingle jingle ... Brrrr thud thud, jingle jingle... The caged animal must have a bell on it's collar. It seems to be eyeing me from behind the dense foliage of a SCSI packet structure. I try to move my mouse pointer but I have no idea what I am going to do with it when it arrives at its destination. The jingle is now as loud as the sound made by a convention of 500 chainsaw-wielding zombies on a luxury liner. Suddenly in the corner of my eye I spot Ursula Resplandor heading purposefully towards the intern. Halleluja, I am not alone! However, I have watched this scene before. She will falter in the advance and make some angry but significantly oddball remark which will fail to move the intern. He will laugh, his fellow minions will laugh too, Ursula will retreat in disarray and the jingling will resume on a cosmic scale. But as she passes me I am conscious of a scent of some hitherto unnoticed perfume - and around her eyes are distinct traces of makeup, applied with skill and economy. She goes right up to the intern and fixes him with a cold stare. The forehead is barely puckered, the eyes barely narrowed, but the effect is devastating. The intern's neck and head change colour from the bottom up like some funky GUI histogram warning of imminent memory exhaustion. Ursula holds out her hand and, receiving the nut and bolt without a single word, proceeds serenely labwards. "Arnie, quit the leg!" I cry and, turning, I catch Donna watching after Ursula with an approving smile. Donna has taken to wearing rather chic glasses, the better to absorb Ursula's weighty copy of "The Compleat Cryptographer". She has also asked to take my Knuth home with her and I worry lest I will be separated from it forever. Posted at 08:00AM Apr 24, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[2]
Saturday Apr 21, 2007
Minutes
Algernon spent most of the meeting showing off his yacht and extolling the virtues of his satellite network hardware - which he got from these guys. Donna was declared winner in the question of who-put-the-last-piece-in-the-puzzle. Algernon cracked up and said "I like your style baby". (You have to cringe carefully in brave new webcam world or it may be held against you.) Donna will now get a project of her own to manage. Ursula barely batted an eyelid - curiouser and curiouser... The next puzzle is to be a Mark Rothko. Algernon is going to try to get one to cover the whole East wall. Arnie Shepherd says "Me bagsie the middle bit". Donna has had a note from Human Resources instructing her to remove the large pendant bearing a likeness of Alex Turner which she proudly wears at work. Algernon says "Don't worry, I'll take it up with them". Donna says "Arctic Monkey is, like, my religion!" "That could be a good angle..." says Algernon. Posted at 07:13AM Apr 21, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[0]
Tuesday Mar 27, 2007
Matters Arising
The Boss is on the hoof. He is not abandoning us, merely relocating. Around here it is often feasible for a team member to move to a different country, or even hemisphere, and still remain in the same team - although it does feel a bit odd when that team member is the manager. The other odd thing is that he does not appear to have yet finalized where he is moving to. We had a team meeting (conference call) yesterday which underlined this situation. Algernon (the manager) decided to make it a video conference. We did not succeed in booking Brighton - the biggest and swishest meeting room - or even Filey, so we're all crammed into a broom-cupboard of an office with no windows and going by the name of Mother Iveys. There is a jumble of windows on the screen: us - looking like a submarine crew discussing whether to drop the ballast and cry Mayday, the guys from France, a couple of webcams and a blank window where Algernon is conspicuously absent. Risto I-am-not-a-Finn Kymmentäkivi and Arnie Shepherd (scourge of EPROMs and inventor of the WiFi deep fryer) unmute the phone to float a pre-meeting proposal about the reintroduction of doughnut days. Donna and Ursula, who have become oddly inseparable over the last couple of weeks, are not prompted to comment. Donna has her nose in a book entitled "Additive Cellular Automata, Volume 1", but she breaks off between chapters to refresh her lippie. The atmosphere is becoming oppressive when, at last, Algernon's window crackles into life. "Team! Glad to see [puff] you could all [puff] make it!" There is a confusing whirl of colour in the window, caused mainly by camera shake. Then it steadies and Algernon's face comes into view. He is looking bronzed and healthy and sporting surfer's sun-block on nose and lips. As he speaks he is rigging a spinnaker on the deck of a roomy-looking yacht which is coursing swiftly over a glittering sea beneath a sky which is blue from horizon to horizon... Posted at 12:03PM Mar 27, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[0]
Tuesday Mar 20, 2007
Incisive Thinking
Continued from here
Donna is importunate: "I've got the last piece, does that mean I get a prize then?". Ursula attempts to smoulder but technical types are unconvincing smoulderers. "It's the person who puts the last piece in who gets the prize, not the person who's holding some random leftover piece." "Alright then," says Donna, meeting Ursula's gaze levelly, and with one deft movement she removes a piece from the puzzle and replaces it with the spare. She seems to have made a good choice because it is immediately impossible to say for sure which piece has been exchanged. "Ah, that'll be the last piece then," she smirks, "This one wasn't a good fit." "Let me have a go," says Ursula and, as Donna obligingly passes her the piece, you might be forgiven for thinking Ursula was already intending to snatch it. She stands over the puzzle, peering at the piece and muttering, as though it were some more than usually delinquent doubly linked list. But the new spare piece refuses to be re-homed. Risto "I-am-not-a-Finn" Kymmentäkivi - he who is always running tomorrow night's build of Solaris and always seems to get the best chair in a crowded room - sits back in his chair and puts the tips of his fingers together. "The status of any remaining piece is difficult to determine. There may be still be an error in the puzzle. I mean, let's list the possibilities:
"How do we do that?" says Ursula looking up blearily. "Well, if it is itself a duplicate then we can simply compare it to every other piece in the puzzle. But that doesn't help if some other piece is duplicated or if the rogue piece is from some other puzzle. Plus it's non-optimal to look at every piece. Probably we should create a subset of all pieces with the same shape and then search within the subset for the best fit." If there is such a thing as a silent groan then Project Central is resounding with it at this moment. Donna is rolling her eyes and seems about to protest when Risto continues, "We can probably automate the process by breaking the puzzle into sections small enough to photocopy. If we photocopy the reverse side then I can get some pattern recognition software off the web to hunt down the candidate pieces. I mean, it's a slog but we don't want to put a picture up which might have a bug in it..." So the puzzle is carefully dismembered into about eight A3-size pieces and a curious cortège of assorted engineers and onlookers (stifling giggles) makes it's way to the photocopier/printer area. Donna has a somewhat stooped appearance and is less perky then usual. But then, as the first section is being gingerly slid onto the glass, she adjusts her ponytail and says airily to Ursula, "Hang on, can I see that piece again?" Ursula hands it over. "You seen somewhere else it fits?" "Not really. I was just thinking, why don't we ... I mean I just thought of a way, right, that we could further optimize this procedure." And, again, rather too quickly for anyone to stop her, she pops the piece into the gaping jaws of a shredder and presses the start button. She turns back to the stunned crowd (now numbering about two dozen people) and, looking radiant, exclaims "Does that mean I put the last piece in?" After the cheering dies down it turns out some folk are somewhat peeved by this turn of events (I think you could probably name a couple) but to my mind it puts Donna on a podium with Alexander The Great for sheer schutzpah if nothing else.
Later that day I find Risto loitering in the photocopier/printer area. He seems a little distracted. Posted at 01:40PM Mar 20, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[0]
Friday Mar 02, 2007
Donna
There's little sense of security in the computer industry. You can put your best work into a development project only to see it canned at the last moment owing to the need for "risk payload rebalancing" or a change in "goal-centric strategic realignment parameters". So I'm more than a little proud to point out here that the department in which I work has managed a series of arduous, complex and sometimes overlapping projects all to a satisfying conclusion. One of the keystones of our success in this regard has been the annual employment of student interns. There is nothing like a bunch of students to breathe new life into a flagging project. It's true they bring a certain amount of mental baggage under the general heading "Computer Science" but this stuff can usually be unlearned in a couple of weeks. Then for enthusiasm, creative flair and industry there is nothing to beat them. Our newest recruit is one Donna Jackson, formerly a nurse in the cardio-thoracic unit of our local hospital, who decided to swap bedpans for an Open University IT course. The intern who helped interview her could barely contain his emotion afterwards - blurting something along the lines of "But she knows (obscenity) all!". He clearly hadn't been listening when Donna was outlining her special interest in the Reluctant Surgeon problem and her attempt to analyse it using Varela's extension of the axiomatic algebra of Spencer-Brown. It's amazing how people succumb so easily to technical snobbery. So we employ Donna like a shot and assign her to work in the Lab Manager's office. This esteemed room has partition walls lined with framed jigsaw puzzles. It's the gnarly endgame for our current project which is a 5000 piece puzzle of Jackson Pollock's painting One: Number 31 which we began in November 2005 and came close to giving up on during the football world cup. With the end in sight there are quite a few people in project-central at lunchtimes. There's a lot of jostling and the atmosphere can sometimes get quite heated when there's a disagreement about which inspired blob of paint goes with which. Donna, however, has been a marvel. She seems to complete whole chunks before anyone else gets in - as if she has been fitting them together in her sleep. There's a prize for the person who puts the last piece in, so yesterday lunchtime, with only a few pieces left, the room is particularly full of myopic geeks trying to palm their own stashes of avant-garde fragments and pecking competitively at the table. I have decided to sit this one out so I am testing a new consignment of Nepalese tea (which definitely contains more than tealeaves) when the victorious shout goes up. It is followed almost instantly by protests and incredulous gasps. Peering in at the door of project-central I am amazed by a curious scene. My colleague, Ursula Resplandor (she who can diagnose three data-corruption panics before breakfast), is stretched halfway across the enormous puzzle with a forefinger triumphantly pinning a piece which looks like a deformed chromosome. The puzzle is undeniably complete - and therein lies the problem. For Donna (the voice of protest) is still holding a piece and looking decidedly wronged. Now, everyone is familiar with the misery of finishing a jigsaw puzzle and discovering that the hole which nobody could find a piece to fill is there because that piece really is missing - but how often do you finish a puzzle with a piece left over? The thing is unheard of! It has the same sort of unexpectedness quotient as wandering up to the old drinks machine, drawling "Tea, Earl Grey, hot" only to see it swing into action to serve up exactly that. ... to be continued ... Posted at 07:39AM Mar 02, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[3]
Thursday Dec 14, 2006
In search of a good cuppa
Kettles are not permitted in the office. In fact all domestic appliances are forbidden. For instance, you won't see anyone using hair straighteners at their desk. The drinks available gratis from the vending machines also feature in Dr Seuss's book The Lorax, in which we see them being used to pollute a lake where once "the humming fish hummed". The "hot" water provided by these machines is nowhere near boiling (health & safety) and so barely awakes the full flavour of a Vintage Darjeeling or Assam (organic). What to do? The solution turned out to be a concealed kettle. We positioned the offending article in an empty desk pedestal with a deep filing drawer, drilled a hole in the back and through this fitted a hose which fits over the spout of the kettle. The trailing end of the hose runs between cubicle partitions all the way to the outer wall where we have integrated it discreetly with an air conditioning outlet. The tricky part was concealing the kettle flex which must plug in to a highly visible integrated socket strip on the top of my desk. We purchased the thinnest 13amp rated flex we could find and adapted an unused ethernet socket on the same strip to supply mains power and earth on three of its pins. A similarly adjusted RJ45 was attached to the end of the kettle flex. Now it was possible to plug in and operate the illegal device in a manner entirely above suspicion, and many clandestine pots of tea were enjoyed by all. My boss, naturally, is unaware of this arrangement. One day he brings his young daughter into work - along with his state-of-the-art Armani Laptop to keep her occupied. This laptop (not to take anything away from the daughter) is his pride and joy. He has graced it with multiple bootable partitions so that he can run a selection of Linux distros, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris 10, Nexenta and others. He once showed me OS/2 Warp on the thing and we all suspect that somewhere it is harbouring DRDOS and CPM. It has got to the point where you can't have a simple conversation with the man without his mentioning GRUB or chain loaders and their various problems. Anyway. He stations his daughter, Louisa, in the desk next to mine and boots up the machine for her to use. We're all gallantly chatting to her, for she is a tad shy, when suddenly her eyes widen to the size of billiard balls and she points her little finger at the laptop screen in front of her.
I get a sick feeling in my stomach as my boss steps back from my desk with his hand in his mouth.
Posted at 10:06PM Dec 14, 2006 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[2]
Friday Dec 08, 2006
Attack of The Phones
My desk here in Lake Guillemont is a haven of tranquillity. It is kitted out with a special shelf 23 OUs (O'Reilly Units) long on which I have placed packets of tea from every corner of the globe. It's the sort of place where a bloke can unwind on a Monday after an exhausting weekend assembling flatpack for in-laws. Although it is a hotdesk I have discovered it is even feasible to doze off at it for short intervals - provided I have taken the precaution of attaching chair to desk with a long bike padlock. I have also erected a nameplate with a fictitious name on it, which is a good diversionary tactic although perhaps not strictly ISO 9000. So you have a pretty good idea now of the kind of restful ambiance I am enjoying this Monday after a weekend spent luring a mouse from an extensive dwelling made out of fibreglass insulation and catfood (our cat is more of a watcher than a doer) and positioned in a quiet cul-de-sac with good access to local amenities behind our cooker. And you will empathize strongly with the sense of nervous collapse which steals over me when the phone unexpectedly rings and on answering it I hear:
- Er... - Do you presently own a mobile phone sir? - Um... yes, NO! - You don't own a mobile phone? - No, yeah I do. - And can you tell me who supplies your network and how long the contract has to run?
- (imperceptible sigh) Is the phone switched on sir? - No, hang on, I'll just do it. Who did you say you were with? - TETNEF Mobile! You may not have heard of us before but I am in a position to offer you some very attractive terms... Sure enough, my search for telesales outfits in Bhutan has returned several addresses - and one of them is right in the cross hairs of the Higgins gridref. Gotcha! Better hope he's a local employee. I fire up SatNavSniffer given me as a clandestine quid-pro-quo by someone in the haulage business and hunt for delivery vans manoeuvering in the vicinity. Where there are IT offices there are always IT office fitters. Meanwhile George is delivering rapid fire features of multiple mix-and-match TETNEF tailorable tariff options and I am countering with a list of the exotic benefits of some imaginary phone company I have dreamed up on the spur of the moment. Make him work for that bonus. Yes! A lorry not two miles away and it's even toting an onboard camera. I squirrel down the SatNav uplink and assume control of the puny device. The Bhutanese translation site has no trouble with the command "Next right" and soon the necessary unicode is winging its way to the cab. The camera is not bad. I'm getting about one frame every five seconds. It's drizzly but otherwise a bright evening in that part of Bhutan. The lorry pulls up facing the windowed side of an office block. It looks very new - perhaps I should have tried hacking into the office surveillance system instead of commandeering this truck. I send a translation of "Vehicle malfunction detected. Please exit cab and await assistance". Time to bring George in on this little game.
- What is this...? - Take a look at the parking lot. See the man standing by the truck? - Yes...? - He works for me George. He knows who you are. If you ever, ever , ring this number again he'll pay you a visit. Do you understand? - He's visiting me tonight actually. He's my brother. Garrrgh! The office surveillance system! George rings off abruptly and I bruise my hand on my desk. Posted at 11:15PM Dec 08, 2006 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[1]
Wednesday Nov 22, 2006
The Dispossessed
My desk is hot! This is just another way of saying that it is not really mine. One trip to the water cooler may result in a bloodless coup. The occupying force has tidy hair and owns a briefcase and a Gucci laptop. He has replaced my post-it notes with his own post-it notes which are anathema to me. My post-it notes said comforting things like " I lurk nearby until he gets up to visit the water cooler. As I move in for the kill he receives new mail. The laptop makes a sound like an incoming cruise missile and scares me half out of my wits. I lose the element of surprise as tidy-hair guy swings around the corner with his water cup brimming. Looks like another day in the Lab for me - well, white noise helps you think they say... Posted at 07:41PM Nov 22, 2006 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[0]
Tuesday Nov 21, 2006
Lake Guillemont
It is beautiful today in Lake Guillemont, so I decide to make a serious investment of time gazing out the window. My first impulse would be to describe our surroundings as "landscaping by those who would rather have knocked up a few more buildings" but that would be grossly unfair. For half a mile we abut mixed woodland owned by the M.O.D. I could hardly call it "undisturbed" since at any moment its peace can be shattered by apocalyptic booms which seem to come from every direction. At lunchtime it fills up with dog walkers who are used to the din. More surprisingly their dogs seem inured to it too - calmly raising a leg to a tree trunk while I find myself diving for cover in the nearest shell hole. I conclude that these phlegmatic beasts are either war veterans themselves or simply stone deaf. So the woods are not undisturbed but they have been here a long time. There are many mature hardwoods so there is a good mix of wildlife and the sort of general untidiness which reassures the observer that nature is being allowed to get along quite well thank you. And it is that untidiness which the builders of this modern, spacious and curiously earthquake-proof office have successfully allowed into the grounds. We have manicured lawns along the front, paying lipservice to the norms of business park gardening; but they run up against a rugged moat within which a riot of waterweed conceals dark things stirring. Workmen at perpetual tea-break on the bridge claim to have seen monstrous fish leap clear of the water. They speak wistfully, as if planning to return at night with a rod and a warm jumper. We have a central park with little paths and benches surrounding a spinney. But this is not planted, rather conserved from what was there before. It is something like chalky heathland; wirey and straggly and bursting forth with hundreds of different species of sedge and hawkweed and trefoil. The botanist I once was can't really remember the name of anything, but rejoices nonetheless. And we have the lake itself (a pond really) which teems with dragonflies in the Summer and anarchy all year round. As I watch, a vast heron flops onto the water and begins to struggle with a fish the size of a coelecanthe. I am so mesmerised that I fail to notice at first that my tea has gone cold and my boss is standing next to me. He peers at the same scene through a pair of field glasses as the heron begins to prevail. "Ah John, John", he murmers in a voice of distant disappointment, "it's an Ardea herodias eat Esox lucius world..." Some people know too much for their own good. Posted at 01:28AM Nov 21, 2006 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont | Comments[0] |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
