15 December 2005: Conspiracy

The plot thickens.

• The Daily Telegraph today reports that BetFair have given the FA a list of names of people involved with the huge amount of money bet on Harry Redknapp to become Pompey manager, causing him to become the bookies' favourite even while the media was still touting Neil Warnock as a shoo-in for the job. Apparently some names are quite high profile: "if you saw the list you would instantly recognise some of the names. They are fairly well-known figures in the football industry," say the Telegraph.
• "You raise me up", the gentle Norwegian-Irish ballad covered by Selah, Josh Groban, Daniel O'Donnell and most recently Westlife (who managed to win the ITV 'record of the year' award with it, despite singing flat), is the subject of a lawsuit from Finnish writers Tommi and Karri Rinne, according to today's Independent. The Rinnes say they wrote the tune as a Eurovision candidate some ten years ago (surely it's better than Eurovision?) and so now they want liner note accreditation and a big lump of money please. Better not tell them the tune under discussion is itself a mild rip-off of the classic Danny Boy, I suppose.
• Reuters report the words of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said yesterday that there was no Jewish holocaust in World War II, it's just a myth perpetuated in order to promote sympathy for the Israeli state. Meantime the Toronto Star report that Rumsfeld, Cheney and the PNAC folks are trying to perpetuate the threat of a caliphate, an Islamic global government, which is what's going to happen unless the US stops it. (Do the words 'domino effect', 'Communism' and 'Vietnam' have any resonance?). So there are conspiracies on both sides.
• And of course, let's not forget that Rory Delap is paid to play professional football.

Put all this together and what do you have? I'm not sure, but it seems something is clearly going on. My guess would be the Pope and the late Queen Mother are in on it too, along with Elvis in some capacity, and no doubt one of the Kennedy clan (Charles, perhaps? Maybe that's why he's in trouble with his party?).

Have you ever seen them all together? Exactly. I think we should be told what's going on. These are all issues covered in this blog over recent weeks, all coming to a head as we approach the end of the year. Perhaps this blog is the locus of the universe, the singularity by which reality can be defined. Anything written here will come true, and come together will all other things, quickly leading to Armageddon.

Or maybe I shouldn't have had those mushrooms for breakfast.

Postscript: Have you seen the most recent Bush quote? Interesting on many levels: reported by Capitol Hill Blue and relayed via numerous news services including the "Rock River Times" newspaper from Illinois, Bush was challenged recently on the legality of renewing the Patriot Act. He responded by saying "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a god-damned piece of paper!" Just as well they have a written constitutionon instead of a living monarch. Tony Blair must get sick of having the Queen thrown in his face.

8 December 2005: Gamble

As a side-note to the circus (which, if you missed it, has finally seen Pompey pay Saints an 'undisclosed' compensation sum or package for permission to talk to and appoint Harry as their new manager), Ireland Online (among others) reports that BetFair have had 'formative talks' with the English Football Association regarding Harry's appointment.

Those with a keen eye for words will have noticed that a lot of last week's blog touting Harry as Pompey's next manager (before Neil Warnock announced he was pulling out of the race) was based on two sources: firstly the fans on SaintsForever, some of whom actually do have inside knowledge, and secondly on the bookmakers, who at the time had Harry as very odds-on favourite and shortening all the time.

The reason for Harry's odds were the 16.5 million pounds bet on his return, a lot of which was placed before Warnock's announcement. In particular, one bookmaker took a £50,000 bet a couple of days before the Warnock thing, meaning although the press still heavily touted Warnock, the bookies were saying something totally different. Bookies themselves spread the risk: if someone places a huge bet at one particular bookmaker, that bookie will go to lots of others and place exactly the same bet, just in case they lose. As a result, most bookies have similar odds for most bets, and this was no different. One 50k bet meant Harry went odds-on at a time when he was nowhere near favourite. In other words, the person placing that bet god very good odds. 16-1, say? When the book opened, Harry was 100-1, but he'd come in since then.

So the rumour, let's state it, is that Harry or Harry-agent made a huge bet, whether it's the 50k or otherwise. SaintsForever has been awash with this for a few days, and now the papers are getting hold of it. It's no real secret why Harry left West Ham (but let's pretend it is and not mention anything about it here), but this dodgy deal seems far more public. Inside information, secret tapping-up talks between Harry and Pompey, a betting market saying something totally different to the 'official' line, and an amount of money placed that is larger than is placed on the Grand National.

Let's say that again, in case you missed it: the amount of money placed on 'who's Pompey's next manager' exceeded that which is placed annually on the Grand National. That's a lot. One Saints fan described it as 'the most crooked market I have ever seen.'

Upshot of all this:

• Pompey have a manager who walked out on them last year because he didn't like the set-up at the club, but now he's back with the same set-up. Don't expect him to last beyond, or maybe even to, the end of the season.
• Saints don't have a manager, and don't look like getting one imminently. Dave Bassett is currently in charge of picking bad players, annoying the press and moaning about the lack of stability at the club.
• Someone - maybe a few people - have made a killing on this, and it's hard to think it wasn't down to some kind of inside information.
• BetFair and the FA are discussing the possible launching of an inquiry into the highly unusual betting patterns.

You figure it out. It's a circus after all, and the show must go on.

5 December 2005: Circus

And just who are the clowns in the whole show?

The fans, most likely. The chant "what the **** is going on?" (to the tune of Cwm Rhondda) resounded around St Mary's on Saturday, not for the first time in Rupert Lowe's tenure as Chairman. While some clubs (Plymouth Argyle, for instance) plod along gently and harmlessly, bouncing between divisions and occasionally finding a genuinely good player (Mariner) or manager (Sturrock) who then gets poached by the big boys, nothing particularly bizarre or weird ever seems to happen there. The strangest thing was when manager Peter Shilton was suspended rather than sacked by nasty old Dan McCauley, but even that was resolved in a couple of days, and never led to the utter confusion of the fans. At Saints, it's a different story.

Chairman Rupert Lowe replaced Dave Jones with Glenn Hoddle because Jones was involved in a court case, and needed time off. Fair enough in principle, but when the case was resolved, do you think Jones got his job back? Of course not. Was he ever going to? No. Hoddle was later poached by Spurs, Rupert taking the roll-over-and-die approach in trying to keep him, and just moaned a bit about how bad it is when football clubs poach the manager of other clubs. (Not that he did that with Sturrock or Redknapp within a couple of years of saying those things, no, not at all). Strachan resigned halfway through a season because he needed a hip replacement which, incidentally, he's never had, and now he's manager of Celtic.

And now this. Harry wanted permission to talk to Pompey, Pompey wanted permission to talk to Harry. Rupert said no, because Harry is our manager. (This only a year after Rupert stated he didn't believe in the post of 'manager' and preferred to have a 'head coach' and a 'director of football' instead, and then appointed a rugby coach to the staff for no apparent reason). So Harry quit (sort of). Although he's still under contract, and hasn't resigned. He says. But he also says he's not coming back to Southampton and he says it's been the worst year of his life. And Rupert says he's as bemused as everyone else by it all, and his job is to respond to events as they happen (Press Conference quote from Saturday night). No Rupert, your job is to provide a little leadership and direction, particularly in times of crisis.

But then there's always been a suspicion Rupert has no clue at all, and has just been winging it all this time. Let's never forget Rupert's classic press conference (only last year, can you believe it?) when he was asked about a possible return of Hoddle as Strachan's replacement, and he stated:

There are always people looking to plant a Klingon blast on the Starship Enterprise. We've got our force shields up, but the Klingons are shooting at us. Every time they land a punch they are sapping our powers. Now we need to adopt the Invisible Shield until we have got the right man in place.

The fans aren't angry, Rupert, we're just confused. The clowns of this circus seem to be Rupert, Harry and the staff at Southampton FC, but considering the number of fans who show up every week and pay over-the-odds prices for Championship ( = division two) football, perhaps the clowns are the fans after all.

What the **** is going on? Who knows.

1 December 2005: Management

Seems a while since I mentioned football on here. There's a good reason for that: unusually, both my teams are having 'nothing' seasons. Saints and Argyle float in mid-table obscurity in the second tier of English football, although Argyle are only a couple of bad results away from the drop zone (it was ever thus when they're in this division). No cup runs, no controversial happenings, no boardroom politics (at least, not since Argyle appointed the dull Tony Pulis whose only action so far has been to cancel the contract of fifty-seven year old zimmer-frame applicant Taribo West).

But over the last couple of days, SaintsForever has been going a bit crazy, which will worry Keith a little since he's short of bandwidth at the best of times. Is it just that we're looking for something to talk about? Maybe. But the news that Milan 'I hate all managers' Mandaric has sacked Alain Parrin as Pompey's boss has led to a flurry of speculation that the next manager might just be the same as the last one. According to BlueSquare (as I write this, at least) Harry is 3/1 on favourite for the job, having come in from 9/4 on earlier this morning. Media speculation continues to point to Neil Warnock giving up his beloved Sheffield United job (and the prospect of taking them into the Premiership this year) for the Pompey job (and the prospect of a relegation battle and quite possible relegation this year). Mmm, let me think for a moment, I wonder what I'd do if I were him?

(Actually, if I were him I'd write a couple of books criticising everything about UK football, especially all the referees, and retire on the proceeds, spending the rest of my life lying in a hammock made of pure silk and eating pasties on a small beach on the Hawaiian island of Maui. But that's me.)

Speculation is rife partly because Harry is staying quiet about the whole thing, and neither he nor Rupert have publicly stated that they would like Harry to remain manager. Of course, after Harry left last year, Mandaric bad-mouthed Harry in a big, big way, but that doesn't seem to matter now. The situation seems to be this: the Pompey scenario has simply opened the lid on the deep troubles within Saints right now. Even if Harry doesn't go back down the M27, we now know that there is a big gap between Harry and Rupert, therefore probably between Harry and Clive Woodward, therefore probably between Harry's gang (Kevin Bond, Dave Bassett, Denis Rofe) and Rupert's gang (Woodward, a few of the directors and the recently-departed Simon Clifford). Harry's contract runs out at the end of the season, he hasn't been offered a new one, and he doesn't seem to want one anyway. Harry would be happiest with a directorship down at AFC Bournemouth, and it seems that is how he'll end his footballing days.

So whether or not he ends up at Pompey over the next few days, it seems his days at Saints are numbered anyway, probably with quite a small number. Old-school east-end Harry doesn't fit with Rupert, Clive, the PLC and their new football, we've known that for a while, but now it's coming to the surface and one way or another, it seems that something's up down at St Mary's, and it's quickly coming to a head.

Maybe we are just looking for a story in a boring season, but hey, guess what? The Sheffield Today sports section today reports Warnock is about to turn Pompey down. Since I began this blog, Harry has come in further with the bookies to 7/2 on to be the new Pompey boss.

Something's afoot.

Edit: Within two minutes of posting, Harry's odds shorten to 6/1 on.

18 November 2005: Adventure

Light relief from this AKTing lark is provided by occasional teaching and guidance for some undergrads learning languages such as Visual Basic, Java and, from next semester, probably Javascript.

One of my duties is to set and mark weekly labs and semesterly assignments. For the current bunch of second years, this means I get to choose what their object-oriented programming project will be. Ah, the choices, the choices. Could I go back to my MSc and steal the vehicle project which so clearly demonstrates subclassing? No, because it's tedious and boring. How about a theme park, where the rides, rollercoaster trains and customers are all objects interacting with each other? No, it'll probably require a fancy animated front end. Be a good one if they were learning Flash, though. So eventually I settled on a heavy extension of the project covered in chapter seven of the BlueJ book: write a text-based adventure game.

Now this, for me, is great fun. Brought up on the BBC Model B with its many limitations (how on earth did we survive with just 32k of RAM? I mean, really??), I quickly developed a taste for 'interactive fiction' as it was known. Colossal Cave, the model for them all, was ported across to the Beeb by Level 9 and provided me with many happy hours in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike. Acornsoft's Castle of Riddles and Philosopher's Quest were also great fun and quite challenging, while Scott Adams' Circus I just recall as being highly frustrating in terms of both the game quality and the extremely poor parser. Then one day my sister brought home the best game I ever played: L, the Mathemagical Adventure.

This was a school game, educational software in its early form. I knew a little of these games from 4Mation's efforts such as Granny's Garden and Flowers of Crystal. But this was different altogether. Here we had a sensible text-only GUI that didn't try to overpower me with teletext-style graphics, and the gameplay wasn't full of random monsters and clueless puzzles. The game fitted together wonderfully well and while certain puzzles I would still regard as too difficult (the clues to play 'three blind mice' on the piano were obscure, to say the least), it was sufficiently enrapturing to grab the attention of almost anyone who played, and keep their attention as the game unfolded. And the best thing was, I learned without even realising I was learning. At the time I didn't even know about Fibonacci, but I quickly worked out that the only telephone numbers that worked were 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc, and figured out that you add the previous two numbers in the sequence to get the next one. I had no idea about normal angles, but the billiard table made perfect sense to me. A collection of bats explained to me what a triangular number is, a hole in a boat taught me about icosahedrons, a computer apparently running its own version of L taught me about recursion. I didn't know the significance of the names like Neumann, Crowther and Woods, Martin Gardner but I learned as time went on. I knew about square roots, so the drogo guards weren't a problem, but if the combination for the safe lock is a perfect square and a perfect cube, what can it be? Some scrap paper enabled me to figure it out one Sunday morning while eating a bowl of cereal. I was learning, and I never even knew it. Congratulations to the Association of Teachers of Mathematics for providing an environment where it was so fun to learn, I didn't know I was learning.

So back to today, and the undergrad assignment. While I don't expect the Squirrel Adventure to challenge L or even Circus in terms of its complexity, it's been worthwhile just to bring text adventuring to a new generation. I've barely seen any since the early 90's days of 'Guild of Thieves' and 'Fish' on my Acorn A3000 machine, and even then the pictures were starting to become more important than the text descriptions. Adventure games today mean something more like Trogdor's Peasant Quest (albeit a little more sophisticated - maybe GTA San Andreas is a better example) so it's therapeutic if nothing else for us oldies to get back to the roots of the adventure game.

Who knows, maybe this is the start of the textual revolution?

12 November 2005: Budget

Small piece of good news from The Planetary Society: the Voyagers may be safe.

Some of you may remember my rant about the Bush administration cutting budgets and directing NASA policy such that, among other things, the Voyager probes were to be cut off, despite Voyager 1's proximity to the edge of the Solar System.

Now it seems that the Senate and House Appropriation Committees have passed NASAs 2006 budget and sent the bill off to the White House for Mr Dubya to sign. The Planetary Society website explained the Voyager position a couple of days ago:

The Society also advocated that the Congress direct NASA to continue operating the Voyager spacecraft, now on their way out of the solar system. While the appropriations bill doesn’t mention Voyager specifically, it gives NASA re-programming authority, and that authority is expected to be exercised in favor of continuing the Voyager mission.

All this on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Voyager 1 snapping those stunning shots of Saturn's rings. Maybe there will be a happy ending to this story after all.

11 November 2005: Tipping

Today is a day for remembrance, as at 11am we all stop for a couple of minutes and remember the war dead, particularly from World Wars I and II. It's also a day for working at home due to the Zepler building still being sealed off (although rumours are rife that we may be allowed some kind of access at some point next week). And it's a day for football, as I play my first five-a-side game of the Veteran's League season, hoping to pull 'ECS Footie' somewhere above mid-table obscurity this season.

And less important than all is a sad piece of news reported in The Times last Saturday, which I only just saw this morning. It seems that some killjoy Canadian scientists have further destroyed the notion that life in Devon can be occasionally interesting by announcing the results of their study into the physics of cow tipping. Not only would it take between two and five people to exert the force needed to tip your average moo-moo over, but they also state that when cows do the sleeping-standing-up thing, they're actually only dozing and would be easily woken. Therefore, you'd need a well-organised team of very quick-working cow-tippers to have any hope of success, and since this particular sport is the exclusive preserve of those leaving country pubs at chucking out time, there's little hope of them being well-coordinated enough to be able to perform such a task.

Now, this is all well and good, except for the fact that I've seen it first-hand. Growing up in rural Devon with a window that overlooked gently rolling farmland on the southern slopes of Dartmoor, you don't see much happening at any time of day, let alone after dark. But sometimes, just sometimes, you'd look out around 11.30 and see a couple of torches flashing around in a field over on the other side of the valley. Fascinated, I would continue to watch while the people - usually around six or seven in number - would walk unafraid towards some cows with the clear idea of tipping. Normally (actually, the vast majority of times) the cows would run away, thereby showing that they were not asleep in the first place, or perhaps were dozing as the Canadian study suggests. But on one occasion it happened: a cow, seemingly standing up, did not move as two tippers closed in. They got close, reached out their hands and pushed hard, while their companions shone their torches on the scene, lighting it up for anyone to see who happened to be looking. And yes, the cow did go over: not in the hilarious Del Boy fashion most people assume, it just kind of stumbled over, legs wobbling as it woke up and tried to right itself. The movement of the torchlight suggested laughter from the companions as the cow got back to its feet and ran off up the hill away from its assailants. The tippers then returned back in the direction of the main road and that was that.

So that's my cow-tipping story. Deeply unexciting, and probably backs up the Canadian study more than anything else, except it clearly shows one thing: cow-tipping is a sufficiently well-known 'rural myth' that it will be (and is) attempted by someone, somewhere on at least a semi-regular basis. And yes, it does work, at least sometimes: this letter to Canada's National Post offers an alternative view of the physics of it all. The problem, of course, is that the original scientists did their work based on a particular model of physics and theoretical analysis: they didn't actually go out and try it empirically. Would have saved them a lot of time if they had, but hey, that's the nature of scientific research.

Which leads to the secondary question: who on earth funded their study in the first place? And were they pleased with the results?