Today is my last day...

Life has dealt me some strange cards recently. The girl I fell in love with so long ago has taken herself out of my life and decided to do things her way. Understandably for a while this drove me a tiny bit bonkers. I still love her but we are unable to share that together for the moment.

Chrissy's departure and all the stress that it has caused has allowed me to take a step back from my life and to wonder what it was that I was doing. As you might know, I've been involved in technology and programming for as long as I was married to my Chrissy. It was she that encouraged me to think outside of my own limitations and persuaded me that to go for a job that was apparently beyond my skills was a viable possibility.

So, for thirty two years I have struggled with the world to try and provide a living for a growing family. The path that I walked was one of constantly growing stress with a need for more money, more stuff, cars, clothes and shoes, shopping trolleys full of groceries and bottles of wine and cans of beer.

Chrissy has gone to live with a past that she seems unable to reconcile as being over and forgotten. I intend to go and live in the undiscovered country of the future.

Today is my last day as a technology freak and hunter of cash or chaser of other people's problems. Today is the final effort that I will make on the path of my "career" because I no longer have a reason for struggling along that path with the rain and sleet beating against my face. Today I turn my back to the winds of fate and will allow them to push me along rather than fight against them all the way.

This is my  last day of the past and the first day of my future. Maybe you'll find that this blog becomes more interesting in the next little while. It is unlikely to be about computers or anything based on technology but you might find it interesting.

Have a good day today and remember that tomorrow hasn't happened yet.

Some progress anyway.

Yesterday, after walking about holding my trousers up all day long I went to the store and bought new jeans. Not long ago I found 44 inch jeans tight. Yesterday I bought 38 waist trousers and they are a tiny bit too large. A drop of 4 sizes is pretty good and I am winning the weight loss challenge at work.

Down by 3 stones now.

  

New dimensions

Being a fat bastard sucks!

It eats away at your life, your energy and your mood.

Being a programmer with a sedentary job doesn't help either. My blood pressure has been consistently in the 170/110 range for many years and my weight far to high.

Making an effort of late has gone a long way to rectify that. I have dropped 15 kilos, 33 lbs in old units. That is more than 2 stones for the English readers.

My blood pressure this morning was 150/87!

Still, I have a long way to go. I need to lose yet another 32 kilos to get to my goal weight.

Wish me luck! 

More ones and zeros

I have long held the belief that ones and zeros are all you need t know when dealing with computing of all styles. The almost religious zeal with which some programmers defend their chosen platforms is of little or no consequence when we find ourselves in a  world where there is an android phone in your pocket, an iPad beside the bed, a PC in the office and a Mac in the living room we don't have any excuse for digital bigotry any longer.

The cries of dyed-in-the-wool Java programmers that detest Microsoft systems and the Linux zealots that think open source is the one true way must be silenced when we realise that the refrigerator runs on a PIC 16 and the microwave has an Atmel controller and the TV is equipped with an ARM system-on-a-chip and if we're really lucky and creative we could actually make a TV that serves popcorn ice-cream that you can order from the car on the way home.

This week so far I have programmed in earnest using C#, Arduino C, Processing java, Python, Visual Basic, PIC microcontroller assembly language and have used Windows, Mac-OS, Ubuntu Linux, Android and iOS and its only Wednesday!

Bollocks to digital bigotry. The more I broaden my horizons the more fun life is!
 

Diversity

This is so bizarre, I was a staunch supporter of all things Microsoft for many years. Since 1992 when I first got an MSDN subscription. Now, through no particular effort on my part, Microsoft, the Windows platform, the whole ecosystem is becoming less and less important to me.

Why is this? Well, I think to be honest that I am an early adopter and I tend to chase what is around other people's corners well in advance. I realised a little while back that I have not watched main-stream channel based TV for more than ten years. All my watching and home entertainment is delivered via the internet.

For more than two years I have not had an internet connection at my house! I have perfectly capable unlimited mobile internet and can do all the normal internet stuff such as stream Netflix, watch YouTube, download, browse and do mail to such an extent that I feel no other need. Yep.. Over my phone!

For computing I have not had a functioning Windows system in the house for more than eight months. I have a Mac mini as a media centre, a Macbook Air as a portable but most of my day to day needs are serviced by an iPad and a Chromebook with Ubuntu installed on it or an Android phone.

I have not entirely given up on Windows. In my work I am writing the coolest application I have ever been involved with. It is a totally modular application using Prism and MEF. It interfaces with hardware AND has a full Python scripting system built in so that users can write scripts that modify the behaviour of the application. Seriously, I go to work in the morning with this huge stupid grin on my face and create cool cool stuff!

I write kick-ass multi-threaded hardware enabled WPF all day long and I'm just plain LOVING IT!.

Evenings and weekends are techno-centric too. My daughter wants to design a robot so we're learning Scratch, Arduino, programming Raspberry Pi, hacking into Minecraft and building circuits on prototype breadboards.

Oddly, I have introduced Windows and WPF to the work because they were all C, GTK, MINGW and Linux before but I think i have convinced them that WPF makes a kick-ass GUI for their systems. Apart from that however, my programming interests have moved well away from Microsoft centrism.

Is this a sign of the times to come? Will the Windows platform take a step to the side and allow other operating systems to take over some of the load? I think that the answer is a resounding YES! but this isn't a bad thing. Diversity is competition and so if Microsoft is falling behind then it is a wake-up call to get better or die.

I've been a great fan of Microsoft for a long time, just as I was a fan of Mohammed Ali and Richard Burton and Lilian Gish. For some of those, the time is gone. Over forever. Can Microsoft remake its business? Can it answer the needs of the mobile masses?

For me I am convinced that competition is not only there but has real alternatives and real values that overshadow the solid and sometimes immutable Windows. Its all about evolution. All about the fittest.

Binaries.

My apologies to the folks who have used my site and found the binary downloads missing.
Last time I updated the site these got missed out for some reason. They are back up again:

http://www.bobpowell.net/Downloads.aspx

Why the lack of posts Bob?

Well, wow, what can I say? I have radically changed my life and have become so involved in coolness that I have had zero time to do do other stuff. I am currently working in the coolest job I have had in years in the automotive industry. I am writing hardware test software which if you think isn't technologically challenging or inspiring then think again.
I have become a Raspberry Pi fan in a big way. I have two of them for various reasons and my kids have one each. We have been programming Python and driving the Minecraft-PI edition in interesting ways.
I am pursuing an idea connected with BitCoin that is taking up some of my spare time and I have become a mentor at a CoderDojo mentoring kids in electronics and Arduino programming.

WPF Toolkit Chart Line Color

After struggling for some time with the problem of being unable to select a colour (yes, I know I spelled it differently in the title, people are more likely to search for the programming term than the concept) for the line chart I discovered that one should select the BACKGROUND colour of the LineSeries in order to change the stroke colour of the line. Nicely logical eh?

The new dogma.

If you say to someone "I like science" then they often respond "yeah.. Me too"

If you say "I'm really keen on theoretical physics" then people say " ohh-kaay.. Hmm, interesting, you mean like atoms and shit?"

If you say "I have developed a serious and plausible contender to both string-theory and the standard model and what's more I can make it work right back as far as the precise moment of the big-bang and explain why gravity cannot be unified with electromagnetism and explain the physical mechanism behind momentum and inertia and I know where Einstein went wrong" people's ears clang shut, they put their hands over their ears and they shout LALALALALA. Really loudly.

Google Anti-Trust?

I have the following settings in my Google Chrome startup page:

None of my Chrome installs on _any_ of my devices will show this as a home page.

Go figure!

East Enders

Today I have learned about pre-cambrian fossilised arthropod brains, seen how the angular projection of Voyager 2 is comparable to the size of an e-coli bacteria when projected onto the ground, read how the biggest star ever discovered is tearing itself apart and seen how a big piece of a russian meteorite has been found in a lake.

I have never watched an episode of East Enders or Breaking Bad and the last time I saw a game of football was in 1995 and that was to be polite to my neighbour.

Life is too short to waste it on crap when there are still a billion new things to understand.

Doing the math

I'm sorry to keep harping on about this now but I have just had another sort of epiphany regarding math.

It seems to me that math has become the be-all and end-all of physics simply because making a mathematical approximation of something that works to n decimal places is deemed to be good enough.

Well, here's the thing. Schrodinger made a shitload of pretty math that describes electron orbitals. This math is fairly dense and difficult to understand. However, if you take a four dimensional figure with varying phase changes then you can exactly duplicate the result of those equations without ever having to resort to the pretty math. Which one is correct? The dense math because it looks cool if you can do it or the brute-force because it works?

I just wrote about fifteen lines of code that spits out graphical representations of electron orbitals and never goes near Schrodinger's equations.

Now then. When was the last time anyone actually saw an electron orbital in the flesh?

Atomic force microscopes are cool but they show little spheres.

Conspiracy theory?

So I have given up using iGoogle as my favoured home-page and have gone back to my.Yahoo
The odd thing is that Chrome seems to ignore the fact that I have set my homepage to Yahoo!. Is this grounds for an anti-trust case?

Higgs Bogon

The Nobel prize for physics is as much of a disappointment this year as the peace prize.

The committee have awarded Peter Higgs for the prediction of his eponymous particle that "confers mass on matter"

Well, actually the results show a "particle", in an energy range that did not correspond to Higgs' first choice of ballpark figures and that has no recognised function. This is like awarding an explorer who declared himself to be looking for Yeti as the greatest Yeti hunter who ever found an ant-hill. There is no Yeti as yet but there is definitely a bump full of something.

So, the big question is: What are Higgs' Bosons made of? What is this "particle" and how can such a thing confer mass by making the things that contain it stick more strongly to the magical Higgs Field? BOGUS!

I can't believe in this stuff any more! I was such an avid science freak and wolfed all this sort of thing down as gospel but now I look upon it all with pity for a bunch of misguided and short-sighted people who are too busy slapping their own backs to see the real world.

We have physicists jumping up and down and peeing in their pants because of a data blip. All of the math that was done since 1926 is wrong! The first term of the first line of Einstein's equation was WRONG! DELTA T is BOGUS!!! There ain't no frikkin delta in t, get used to it!

Nobel Peace Prize is bullshit.

Over the last few years I have been astounded at the Nobel Committee's unflinching and shameful pandering to political pressure and inability to nominate a peace-prize winner who truly makes a difference.

The nomination of Barak Obama, despite my admiration for the man as an intelligent force for progress in  a country that needs progress more than most, was a weak and sorry excuse that made no mark on the world.

To ignore Malala Yousafzai in favour of a Qwango is worse than their refusal to award Mahatma Gandhi for his efforts. A girl who's life might so easily have been destroyed by religious extremism and who escaped that fate by such a slim margin to make a cause for the rights of simple respect and education for female children shouldn't be ignored. Peace is about people.

Goodbye to Google

I switched to iGoogle as a home page many years ago and have been using it every day and indeed every time I hit the web ever since.

Before that I had a Yahoo! page that I had various news and science widgets installed on.

Recently I've been looking for an alternative to my iGoogle page and logged in to my old Yahoo! one to find settings from a decade ago still there and still usable. It was like coming home to the farm and finding Old-Yeller romping down the drive to meet me.

Goodbye Google. Hello old friend...

Back up at long last

Poor old Octogig has stood in a corner unused for about four months. Today I managed to get it installed at the hackspace and I have my own four square feet of desk!
The network is nice and quick so I updated the web site with some minor cosmetic changes and now I actually have Windows dev tools again I will be able to do some proper work!

2hack or /2hack = true

I just joined a hackspace!

I've been living in a tiny house for the last few months and I've been used to having a big workshop, a man-cave style shed and room to put all my projects and electronic junk wherever I liked.

I hadn't realised just how much actual room I needed for an electronic workbench, oscilloscopes, test meters, screens and dev kit!

There is a hacker-space near to me and so I've taken full membership and will have my gear installed including full logmein access to Octogig and all his development goodness before the weekend.

Ahh. I can feel the inspiration rising...

Is this the real one?

I've been giving a lot of thought to virtualization recently. Some while ago I wrote a Z80 emulator and the experience taught me some interesting things.

I think that an algorithm, given the correct system of inquiry, can ascertain that it is an algorithm.

I think however that an algorithm cannot discover the structure of the machine that ultimately underlies it's embodiment.

This is to say that there is no guarantee, for example, that a simulator is not itself running inside yet another simulator and indeed that it might be running encapsulated in yet another ad-infinitum.

There is therefore a certain level of abstraction that cannot be comprehensible to the system that is doing the work.

I think for example that I could write a program that ascertained the registers used in the program within a Z80 assembly code system and could test and analyse the various instructions used in such a way that the program could map its own flow and internal storage. However, if that system were "hosted" on a PC running a Z80 simulator then the system would necessarily stop at the boundaries of what it must consider as it's own "universe"

This means to say that a Turing machine can know that it is a Turing machine but never be sure that it is not encapsulated within another Turing machine.

Interesting eh?

Not enough danger

Today, a parent will say to a child; "Do (insert something here)" and the usual response is "Why should I"

It used to be that the Father would say "Climb that tree!" or mum would say "Don't touch that" and before the child had the chance to stop and ask "Wh..........." something large and dangerous would have ripped the little bugger's head off and be chewing on their genitals or the kid would be foaming at the mouth and rolling its little eyes back in its head from the bite or the toxic plant effects mum was just telling them about.

Nowadays they just say "Why should I?" and there isn't a real excuse to turn around and suggest that "if you don't you will die in a horrifically-painful-and-not-neccesarily-quick way"