Friday February 25, 2005

Stereophonics

I came across The Stereophonics by acccident when a sample cd was attached to a copy of the Sunday Times magazine . I played it, liked it and got hooked.

Tracks that I especially like are "Billy Daveys daughter" off my least favourite album "Word Gets Around", "Lying in the sun", "Have a nice day", "Nice to be out" and "Rooftop" off the album "Just enough education to perform". The album "Performance and cocktails" has the excellent "Roll up and shine", "Hurry up and wait" , "I wouldn't believe your radio" and "A minute longer". The last album I have is my favourite "You gotta go there to come back", which is all brilliant. The fact that I seem to like the latest stuff more means I hope to be able to look forward to their forthcoming new album "Language. Sex. Violence. Other?" released on 14th March 2005.

UK TV news being dummed down ?

I am of the opinion that the UK TV news is being dummed down. We tend to watch the early evening news either on BBC, or ITV if we get home late. Last week during the Sinn Fein/IRA behind the bank robbery story the ITV news ran an interview with Martin McGuinness. The question was "Are you a member of the IRA ?" - or something similar. Answer "No." "Is Gerry Adams a member of the IRA ?" Answer "No." In fact McGuinness was slightly more intelligent than the interviewer, he said it would be political suicide for anyone in Sinn Fein to be involved in terrorism or the IRA. So in fact he answered the question that should have been asked "how can you prove or indicate to our viewers that you are not involved in the IRA?"

For me I think if they want to sort this mess out there is only one way. We all know the IRA has influence and knowledge of the criminal underworld. Find the people who really did this robbery. Naive proposal perhaps as people could be fitted up. But at least cooperate with the authorities if you really were not involved.

First job in the computer industry

I thought it might be interesting to mention my first experience in the computer industry. I had no formal training and all I knew I had gleaned from my BBC B computer and reading DEC hardware manuals borrowed from friend who worked for them.

So I started at CIS software a subsiduary of Computervision. I worked in their Swavesey office in Cambridgeshire. The company wrote CAD/CAM software, the most famous portion being called Medusa . I was to be a computer operator and do other stuff like configuring the graphics terminals they used and so on. I loved it. I learnt how to do the backups onto 1/2" tape on Pr1me [sic], Vax ( nothing sucks like a vax !) and Sun computers. I setup new terminals for the computer programmers who mostly used vdus. I had my own Sun for a while until someone needed it. I also learnt how to put vampire taps on the yellow ethernet cable watching out for the "ethernet jammed" messages appearing when some of the foil was left in the hole I had just made.

The Sun machines were made by CV under license so parts of the hardware including the chassis was made by them. CV also tinkered with Sun Unix and had their own version. The Vaxes were linked with decnet and used software from Wollongong to talk TCP/IP to the Sun machines. The Pr1mes did not even have ethernet - yet. The graphics were run on several graphics devices; Tektronix , Westward and many more I cannot remember the name of. The software could use a tablet to allow theuse of menus for easy access to CAD/CAM facilities.

I learnt the most when we moved to Harston. A brand new building. We still used terminals but an ever increasing number of engineers were realising the benefits of working under a window system and source development was starting to be done on Sun machines then ported to the other two platforms. We had a big switch to allow engineers to select what machine they wanted to connect to - a Gandalf I think they called it. We setup a Vaxcluster and the number of Sun machines increased and we also started to get Vanilla ones. I graduated to more complicated work installing and configuring machines and learnt more about each platform we used.

The disks that were state of the art at the time; 800MB on the Vax, smaller on the CV Sun boxes. The Pr1mes originally had the 300MB CDC removable packs I used to hate it when the heads plunged into the pack when they spun up. Always ready for a head crash I was...

On the Sun side I remember starting to use NIS and the first time I could mount stuff over NFS. Naturally enough without the automounter engineers let themselves in for "nfs server not responding..." Cross mounting anything in sight. I remember the first Sparc Sun box a Sun 4/260 ? It was as fast as our Vax 8500 and at a fraction of the price. Amazing box. I left soon afterwards to then concentrate on administering a network of mainly Sun boxes at another company. More on that another day..