forward to backup

Holy Moley, Batman! It’s already Friday, and the end of February. It’s been a busy week, compounded by another 2-day session of the Enterprise Backup Systems training course I run here. The other guy who was sharing duties here has pulled out, so I’ll be doing them all on my own from now on, unless we can find some other sucker to take it on.

The material is outdated, and badly structured, so that the whole first day is “Death by PowerPoint”, with a few of the students tempted to jump out the window for some relief. I’m tempted to follow them, so I try to liven thing up with jokes. Last time I told the story of Murphy’s Law; this time I had the students imagine they were trying to degauss (wipe) a backup tape by putting it on top of a loudspeaker. I asked for their opinions on which music would be best at the job; I lean towards Industrial music with heavy clipped square wave content in the bass range.

• It takes more power to produce a bass note at a given volume than treble – a woofer needs hundreds of watts, but a tiny piezo tweeter using a fraction of a watt can deafen you.
• OK, square waves aren’t as “dense” in the frequency spectrum as sawtooth waves, but square waves are easy to produce: just overload the signal until it clips. Do this to a guitar and you get “fuzz”, do it to a bass and you get Nine Inch Nails.

There were several Germans on this course, so Techno was quite a popular suggestion. Kraftwerk? Nein, not dense enough. I’m thinking the kind of bangin’ Techno they pump out at the Love Parade every summer in Berlin, at the kind of SPL found there too. The magnetic leakage from the speakers must be frightening to anyone with a pacemaker, and it wouldn’t be good to any magnetic media such as tapes or disks.

Today I booked my main summer holiday – some old school friends are renting a cottage in the Highlands in July, so we’ll all get together and catch up. I may take a Risk game with me, we got a lot of mileage out of that before. The last time we were all together, in 1986 I think, we bought a lot of beer, had a barbecue, then started playing Risk at about 5PM. We were still fighting board battles at 2am, the beer was gone, so we raided the drinks cabinet, and by 5am I sat down to “rest my eyes” for a minute and woke up three hours later, still drunk.

I’ve never had that kind of drinking experience again, because everyone drinks so much so quickly now, I don’t even try to keep up. Back at that party in 1986, we drank steadily but slowly for over 12 hours, and it didn’t bother me. I avoided a hangover by not going to sleep again, after that three hour nap, until that night.

lee-nooks

I can’t believe the way time is flying: we’re already approaching the end of February. Time flies when you’re having fun… or not. I haven’t been having much fun so far this year, but at least I haven’t been bored.

We’ve been asked to plan our own training schedules for this year, to the extent of digging up times, locations, and costs of any external training we want. OK, I want to go on a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) Fast Track ( RH300) course in April please, it will cost €2500. Several of our team started salivating when I passed them the details, so there’s a fair chance we can organize it and get a volume discount too.

Later on this year, it will be time to dig in and get a MCSE in Windows Server 2003 (the OS formerly known as .NET). The exams won’t be available until June at the earliest, so that leaves time to prepare etc. A “boot camp” is a possibility, and I have a line on one here in Ireland. Although it could be quite expensive, we are informed that HP has assured Microsoft that thousands of us will be qualified by the end of the year, and we have backing at board level for this. If the money is available, I can suspend thrift and splurge, if it gets the results.

high pressure support

Well, that was the week that was – but a pretty good one as weeks go, since a) it was only 4 days for me, and b) I had a breakthrough against the logjam effect yesterday and actually caught up with my work, for the first time this year. This was partly due to the consideration of my colleagues, who gave me the space to get stuck in, and partly due to the (few) customers who actually came back to me with useful diagnostic results i.e. what I’ve been asking them to do for weeks.

I’m constantly tempted to lecture customers on what Support is: we help them solve their problems, but they still have to keep their end up. In a minority of cases we can spot a product fault, see it for ourselves, and deal with it; in most cases, it’s something that they have done or are doing, and it’s a bitch of a job finding out what it is, far less getting them to do something about it. Too many customers think they can call our phone lines, provide the little information they think we need, then sit back and wait for us to resolve it. Sorry, guys, it’s your problem unless you can prove otherwise – not that we can tell them that, of course.

I only did phone support for a year here at what is now HP, formerly Compaq, but I had never expected to do any. I thought I’d be doing something more like what I’m doing now. I thought phone support was a low grade position; it is, in a way, but that doesn’t tell you much about the people who do it. I was promoted out of phone support to “Level 2″ over two years ago, but I was quite lucky; many of my former colleagues are still there. I know about the stress they endure and the knowledge they’re expected to hold, so I won’t hear a word said against them.

I have the luxury of partially specializing, knowing a few fields in depth, relative to the Level 1 phone people. They are required to know a bit about everything, but some of them have knowledge going far deeper than expected, which helps a lot but for which they get no thanks. Some of them are well qualified to join me here, but the internal situation, especially the merger, closed off that avenue for a year, and it’s only now showing signs of opening up again.

No plans for the weekend – I might get round to watching the DVDs I bought last weekend in London, including Natural Born Killers and The Royal Tenenbaums. More Command & Conquer: Generals, of course. Where’s the Glee™? My hands need some right now, it keeps them supple.

general anarchy

Apart from work, the few days since I returned from London have been dominated by Command & Conquer: Generals, which I bought last Friday. This is the latest in the C&C family, and the first version based on a 3D graphics engine, which looks stunning. I don’t buy many games, but this was a no-brainer.

The storylines are simpler than previous versions, but it’s all the better for that. You can play as one of three factions: the USA, China, and a terrorist group called the Global Liberation Alliance (GLA). All three have bizarre and surreal elements to their organizations and weapons, especially the GLA, whose “weapons” include car bombs and angry mobs – controversial, given the current political climate.

I’ve been trying to work my skills up in a logical order, so I’ve been playing as the Chinese so far. They have their weaknesses, but they also have nuclear weapons, complete with gleeful operators passing comments like “I am the bringer of light”! More fun is had with the hackers and the Propaganda organization – apparently, troops can be harangued into healing themselves and shooting straighter. I’m also getting a lot of use from aircraft in “combat air patrol” mode – great for taking out enemies before they get near you, as long as they’re not missile-armed.

The graphics are quite astonishing, yet still very playable at the high resolution of my laptop screen (1400×1050). The engine models most things in the environment, from people and trees (neither of which can withstand tanks very well), to flowing water, and explosions from hand grenades to tactical nukes. If I can talk a few more people into buying it, we may have a few network matches in the near future.

an american navigator in london

I took Tom Clancy’s Red Rabbit to London with me, a borrowed hardback copy, which was a pain to carry around but worth it. It’s not a return to his old style, he’s introducing more subtle real-world detail in his recent books, but he’s clearly had fun filling in a major gap in the story of his main character Jack Ryan, whose CIA career is just starting to take off at the time of the story, 1982. The background is the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, and Red Rabbit is an attempt at creating a “back story” behind the real events. Historically, of course, the attempt did take place.

Without giving the story away, then, Red Rabbit is almost a prequel to Clancy’s later novels, offering a chance to expand on his other interesting characters, most notably the Foleys, the husband-and-wife team that later jointly came to run the CIA after years in the trenches. I’m not sure how wise it was to hook his narrative up to real history, but I can hardly fault the storytelling. Red Rabbit is almost up there with The Cardinal Of The Kremlin as Clancy’s best work, I think. He’s no Shakespeare, but he’s not John Updike or Philip Roth either, two Pulitzer Prize winners that I have found almost unreadable.

Clancy just about passes the British Geography test that American writers can easily fall foul of (see 2 Dec 2002 blog). He has the Ryans living in Chatham in Kent, travelling to London via Victoria station, which is correct. He then blows it by having Jack Ryan driven from near Manchester to Chatham in half an hour – not a chance, since it’s over a hundred and fifty miles, with London as an obstacle that would necessitate taking the M25. Two hours would be a minimum at high speed, more likely three. Close, but no cigar, Tom.

london light

his is a letter I just wrote to Jerry Pournelle, which described how I felt after two days in London:

Hi, Dr. P,

I lived in London for eight years, but I’ve been in Dublin for the last three. I’ve been back in London for 2 days, and the fear of terrorism and war is everywhere, playing havoc with life in general.

I arrived on Thursday, through the quiet Luton airport, with only armed police (no soldiers) in evidence, but had my bag searched at a train station later, by a “police community assistant” (not even a real police officer), who seemed to have been given the job as part of some hazing ritual. He was totally unprepared for the procession of angry people he was creating, but still had the cheek to ask for my name and address. I was carrying a hardback book (Tom Clancy’s “Red Rabbit”), but he didn’t even look inside it – there was space for a pound of C4 had I been so inclined.

At the time I was being searched, someone arrived at Gatwick from Venezuela with a live grenade in their luggage, having obviously not been searched at departure. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2765531.stm. BBC News ran an “expose” showing how a presenter could go and stand under the takeoff path at Luton and Stansted airports, within SA-7 range of departing planes, for half an hour before being challenged by armed police.

Today about half a million people are marching towards Hyde Park for an anti-war protest that has been semi-hijacked by a “Freedom for Palestine” platform. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2765041.stm It was such fun walking out of the centre, against the mass of “day tripper” protestors in their eiderdown jackets, with Starbucks lattes and McDonalds muffins in hand, that I had to resist the temptation to go “baa!” at every corner in memory of Dolly (who died yesterday). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2764039.stm

Starting Monday, every car that enters central London will have its license plate read by computer, and the registered owner will receive a fine if they haven’t paid the £5 “Congestion Charge” by the end of the day. There are unconfirmed reports that the system is (or soon will be) capable of facial recognition too. Of course, the call centre that handles payments and exceptions (for residents etc.) is hopelessly backlogged, due to poorly trained staff and badly-designed systems, and thousands of local residents can expect to get nasty letters through the post in weeks to come.

Now I’m off to Luton for my flight back to Dublin. Let’s see if I can make it without Tube crashes, “peaceful protest” riots, cancelled trains, bag searches, facial profiling, disrupted flights, and a SA-7 warhead up the undercarriage as we take off. Good day…

irish news

Just caught the late News here, with two items of interest
to me:

1. The Government here are going to drastically increase the
   price of cigarettes again, perhaps as high as €8
   (£5 / $8) for a pack of 20. Combined with last
   week’s news that smoking will be banned in pubs and
   restaurants. perhaps as soon as May this year, is further
   evidence that smoking is firmly in the government’s
   sights.
   I never have smoked, except for one puff when I was 13 or
   so, but I know enough smokers to be going ouch in
   sympathy. I won’t miss it, of course, and if smokers
   really can’t deal with it themselves, what else can you
   do but dissuade them as far as possible?
2. The Government here are investing large amounts of cash
   in a national broadband internet scheme, though they
   won’t be addressing the “last mile” question, as far as I
   can tell from the short report. Why can’t private firms
   do this, as Qwest and others did in the USA? I understand
   it involves government regulations about telecoms
   competition, naturally.

not yet fearful

Back at work. I still have the dedication line on the front page to the Columbia astronauts, and it will stay there until there is some resolution to this situation.

We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

This is the epitaph on the memorial plaque to John and Phoebe Brashear, pioneering Pittsburgh astronomers, but the line originates in the following poem:

The Old Astronomer to His Pupil

Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then to now.

Pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete,
Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet,
And remember men will scorn it, ’tis original and true,
And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.

But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learned the worth of scorn,
You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn,
What for us are all distractions of men’s fellowship and smiles;
What for us the Goddess Pleasure with her meretricious smiles?

You may tell that German College that their honor comes too late,
But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant’s fate.
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

– Sarah Williams, “Best Loved Poems of the American People”, Hazel Felleman, ed.
Garden City Publishing Co., Garden City NY: 1936, pp. 613-614

The old cliché, about knowledge as a light that cuts through darkness, does not seem like such a cliché after all.

bricks of masonry

Bought a DVD yesterday that carries two complete Billy Connolly concerts, from 1991 and 1994; both filmed at the Hammersmith Apollo (formerly the Odeon). Pretty amazing stuff, though I wouldn’t try watching it all in one go. He’s great at embroidering what starts as a simple story into something quite extraordinary. He sounds like a programmer – subroutines within subroutines, umpteen layers deep. I’m watching a bit of it the 1994 concert now, and it comes across like this:

Travel
 {
 Airports
    {
   "moving sidewalks"
      {
     Escalator Nightmares,
      Involuntary Noises
       {
       Cold
         {
         Norway
         }
       }
       Loose Paving
        {
        Glasgow
         {
         Swearing
         }
       }
     }
   }
 }

Because he mentions Freemasonry at one point, I looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica again today. I had thought little of it in the past, I used to see it as a formal version of the Lions Club – which does apparently have some links, I read somewhere. My first encounter with it was around 1994, when I was working in the V&A Museum in London. One of the warders approached my boss with an offer to join the “Worshipful Order of Lighthousemen”, I think the title was. It wasn’t presented as secretive in any way, and they didn’t mind that I was in the room. My boss replied “that’s Masonic, isn’t it”? “No, no, we’re just a bunch of blokes who get together and have fun.” He was Catholic, though, so the conversation didn’t go any further, and there was a bit of swearing once the warder had left the room. The keyword is “Worshipful” – if I understand it correctly, that definitely indicates a Masonic connection. Since then I’ve been more aware of it, but every time I read about it I have an overwhelming impression of pointlessness that precludes any serious interest.

Since a Freemason is “required to be an adult male believing in the existence of a Supreme Being and in the immortality of the soul” (Britannica again), that pretty much counts me out, since I believe in neither of those things. (It’s debatable whether I can be called “adult” too, but that’s another story.) Actually, I do still see it as something of a joke – I have read the Illuminati books, after all, which are about a secret society that tries to run the world, but keeps getting it wrong in humorous ways. The Ku Klux Klan, as originally formed in 1866, had openly Masonic trappings, some of which persist to this day. I even know the secret handshake, or at least I think I do, since I heard it third-hand. It includes a mechanism for indicating your status on several levels, ranging from “pleased to meet you”, through “there’s something a Mason can do for me” to “emergency – I need immediate help”.

Reading about the history of and reactions to Freemasonry today led me to think about agnosticism and atheism. Am I an agnostic or an atheist?

Modern agnosticism can be traced back to T.H. Huxley’s writings and speeches from the 1860′s – he invented the word – some of which hark back to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). The Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it like this:

(Huxley) insisted (agnosticism) was “not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle,” viz., to follow reason “as far as it can take you”; but then, when you have established as much as you can, frankly and honestly to recognize the limits of your knowledge. It is the same principle as that later proclaimed in an essay on “The Ethics of Belief” (1876) by the British mathematician and philosopher of science W.K. Clifford: “It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

I find myself in total agreement with the above, so by that definition I am an agnostic. Confucius (551-479 BC) put it like this:

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

In practical terms, however, I call myself an atheist. Let me explain:

• I can’t make absolute assertions, without absolute proof, about the whole universe from my little corner of it. To do so, whether the assertion is positive (“this is the case”) or negative (“this can’t happen”) would be unscientific.
• There are things I can assert, if I have proof to back them up, such as the presence of the Sun, or even its composition (from spectra). Absolute proof is not required, if what you have is enough to go on. Quantum Physics is not an absolute, but it provides workable explanations of the Sun’s power source, the creation of new elements there, and their detection in spectral lines. This computer’s silicon circuits rely on “quantum tunnelling” for its semiconductors to work. In other words, the theory works well enough for my purposes.
• To close my mind off, to refuse to entertain possibilities, would also be unscientific. This makes me a theoretical agnostic, since I am not making an assertion such as “there are no gods”.
• However: nothing I have seen in my lifetime seriously suggests the presence of anything we call “supernatural” in any form – ghosts, Allah, fairies, Krishna, magic, or God. It’s fun to speculate, but I can’t take it seriously.
• If you are going to tell me that any of these exist, I will require proof. By proof, I mean something based on reality^*1 that does not hinge on personal experience. The fact that you have seen something does not mean that I could ever see it too. I could make myself see something (self-delusion), but it should not come to that.
• This makes me a practical atheist; my daily life does not involve the supernatural, my answer to the question “do you believe in [God | Allah | Krishna | Ra]?” is “No”, and I live my life accordingly.
• Because I try to think scientifically, that does not mean that I am obliged to investigate any idea or concept that comes my way – there are far too many of them and too few hours in the day. They nearly all start the same way – “someone says…”, “someone saw…”, “someone thinks…”, all words with nothing to back them up. Getting me interested would take something a bit more solid. Don’t tell me; show me.

The X-Files series, though I didn’t watch it much, seemed to be about this kind of problem. The main protagonists, Mulder and Scully, investigated strange (fictional?) occurrences, with much human interest coming from how differently they reacted to the same apparent phenomena. In conversation, I am open to possibilities, but an evangelist would see this as a chink in the armour to exploit, the distinction is often too subtle for them, as I have found. I was a bit surprised when a colleague of mine brought this up in the pub a few years ago, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect that belief in the Judeo-Christian God was “common sense”. It might be in Ireland, a heavily Catholic country, but I said something like “the universe is wonderful enough without invoking the supernatural”. The response was “I’m not talking about the Supernatural, I’m talking about God” – at which point the conversation was effectively over, as you might imagine. “Whose round is it?”

I agree that people have a need to Believe, but we need to balance that with the tendency of people to manipulate, delude, cheat, and lie, to themselves as well as others. I’m aiming for a mind that is “open but filtered”; interested in learning, but with bullshit-detection in full effect. I can’t claim to be there yet.

* Reality, by my favourite definition, is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. I think Terry Pratchett may be implicated somewhere, since his DiscWorld books sometimes feature Gods with that very problem – they vanish when people stop believing in them, with hilarious consequences. The Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy also helped my thinking here, with Douglas Adams’ comic interlude about a god that vanishes in a puff of logic. Coming back down to Earth: a skydiver with a failed parachute might “snap”, close her eyes, and stop believing in the ground; the atoms making up the ground may be mostly empty space, with subatomic particles made up of quantum improbabilities; but… there’s no reason to believe the end result will be any different. That is reality as I see it.

nothing to be done

More details today: investigations are focusing on the left rear wheel well of the Columbia, where the undercarriage is stored. It’s a weak spot in the otherwise unbroken wing surface, and NASA suspect that this area was damaged by ice or foam falling from the external fuel tank during takeoff. A break here would catch the wind and channel white-hot air inside, and temperature readings from the inner wing and side of the shuttle appear to confirm this. There are even photos of wing damage, published by NASA yesterday, though they show the upper wing, which doesn’t tell us much.

There are also reports that NASA knew that the damage would make re-entry hazardous, but did not tell the crew, allegedly because “there was nothing anyone could have done”. We can be certain that these allegations will be highly damaging, whether true or not. NASA, for better or for worse, is a political organization; George Bush has paid it almost no attention, never visiting the Johnson Space Centre in Houston during his eight years as Governor of Texas or his two years as President. They definitely have his attention now, and they might not like what happens next.

hot wing

Investigations into the Columbia disaster are focusing on the left wing – apparently, there is telemetry indicating a serious temperature increase there, enough to raise serious concerns. A normal plane could survive the kind of minor damage that is being discussed, but the re-entry phase is so critical that any major deviation from the correct attitude can be fatal, and there is essentially nothing that anybody can do to correct it. The loss of a few tiles, even from a wingtip, would (I think) lead to the loss of the wing pretty much immediately, with a complete loss of control.

wrong stuff

Earlier this evening I found myself watching The Right Stuff, the 1983 film about the test pilots and Mercury astronauts of the 50′s and early 60′s. There were seven of them, as there were seven people aboard the Columbia today. One of them, Virgil I “Gus” Grissom, would later become the USA’s first space program casualty in 1967, along with Roger Chaffee and Edward White, when Apollo 1 caught fire during a simulation exercise.

The first astronauts were largely drawn from the ranks of test pilots, and The Right Stuff portrays the Mercury program as an extension of test flights into space, in response to the military requirements of the Cold War. After the intense public interest that resulted, President Kennedy’s announcement of the Apollo program in 1961 has also been called a Cold War stunt, but I think it was clear by then that the people of the USA needed to know that there was still a Frontier, and pioneers to explore it. That need has not gone away; while NASA has suspended Shuttle flights while yesterday’s accident is investigated, President Bush has already made it clear that space exploration will continue. As if there was any doubt.