27 November 2006: Pet

While the Bithell family welcomes another new member to its number (congratulations to them all, especially Helen for squeezing out a 10lb 9oz Reuben), things have been a little more peaceful here in stormy Southampton. Thanksgiving was fun last week (and we've already almost finished the leftover turkey, believe it or not) and partly as a result of having all the family over, I discovered a fascinating piece of paper tucked away upstairs.

We had to tidy up, you see. And that meant sorting out the 'office' - which, since we moved in at the end of September, had actually been used as a 'random storage place' for all the things that we didn't know where to put. Much of last week was spent sorting, shredding, putting stuff in the loft, but one box in particular proved of special interest. I had barely touched it since lining it with newspaper some twelve and a bit years ago to pack my stuff to go to university. Back then it contained a couple of plates, a random knife or fork and some obscure odds and ends that I thought might be useful. So last week I had to actually unpack it all and find such things as the random knife still in there. But most interesting of all was, of course, the newspaper.

Now, while most of it was from September 1994 (back then the Premiership trophy was held by Blackburn Rovers, if you can believe it), for some unknown reason one of the pieces used for packing was from The Guardian, dated 29 May 1979. Yes, 1979. How did it come to be there? I have no idea. But I thought it might contain some fascinating information, so I had a quick look through it and found absolutely nothing of any interest at all. Some kind of Middle-East unrest, issues in Northern Ireland - could have been today. The most interesting 'news' item was the bird report from Cheshire, where the correspondent relayed the exciting news that for the first time that spring, the swallows had arrived and indeed stayed all week.

However, tucked away in the corner was an advertisement that did nicely date the newspaper: a quarter-page piece encouraging the reader to invest in the machine of the future - the Commodore PET.


Feel free to click on it to get a full-scale version of the advert, but there are two key points I wish to draw out from it. Firstly, the carefully-worded piece is keen to make it clear that the PET is astoundingly useful in all circumstances: indeed, despite being a SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) machine ('for the same price as a typewriter!'), you can in fact use it to control industrial power plants:


Ooo, mummy I want one for Christmas! Yet secondly, not content with this, you can also play a wide variety of games with it...


Just what you want to do on the same machine that runs the Hinkley Point Nuclear Power facility. Of course, this was in the days before multitasking so there was little danger of Alt-Tabbing to the wrong window before hitting "SELF_DESTRUCT".

The most interesting thing about this computer, however, is not its amazing technological advancement (the model pictured comes with a whole 4k of 8-bit RAM) or indeed the fact the cassette comes built in and it's available with a larger keyboard (ooo) but the Operating System and built-in language was called 'Commodore BASIC', programmed by two gentlemen named Paul Allen and Bill Gates who had just recently founded a company named 'Micro-Soft'. They sold Commodore BASIC to Commodore for a one-off fee of $10000, with no royalties or anything else coming back to them. In fact, this is the only example in the history of Microsoft of them selling anything on a one-time royalty-free basis regardless of the number of copies used or sold.

So there, a little history on this AKTing Monday morning. Now it's time for the weekly meeting, where I doubt we'll be discussing the potential for semantic web systems that allow you to both run industrial plants and play space games. Frankly I think the computer industry just isn't imaginative any more.

Addendum: It is pointed out to me that May 1979 was actually a very interesting time, and The Guardian did indeed report interesting things during those days: for example, the election of Margaret Thatcher on May 4 and just two days after the PET advert went to press, Nottingham Forest won the European Cup (now Champions League). Funny to think Forest are playing the mighty Salisbury Town next weekend, isn't it?

21 November 2006: Wow

... that was quick.

Elsewhere, I sadly let my William Gibson radar slip and missed the announcement that his new novel, 'Spook Country', is now with the publishers and should be with us mortals (at least in some countries) on 7 August next year. Part of the reason for the radar slipping, incidentally, is for a change not due to work pressures but actually because WG's blog has been quite heavily featuring random outtakes from said work, being followed up with much F:F:F-like discussion on the forum, and I didn't want to read anything of it before I can actually sit down and read the whole thing. I read a chapter of Pattern Recognition about a month before I got the book and later wished I hadn't.

Back in the real world of smart software and AKTing matters, it occurs to me to at least ask whether Oracle 10g's adoption of RDF storage as an optional add-on is making much impact in terms of the semantic web in the business place - or even just data format questions - as it's been a while since the release and nobody much seems bothered by it (source: trying googling on 'Oracle RDF' and see how many hits are from 2005 and how many from 2006). The reason I ask: Stellent have been bought by Oracle, meaning almost my entire computer research/experience is seeming to come together in one big Oracle-shaped lump, meaning I'm soon going to become either extremely central or utterly useless in the industry as a whole.

Finally of course, CONGRATULATIONS to Andy and Andrea who, as mentioned in a previous comment by the great Mr Moore himself, are now engaged. Good luck to them both!

20 November 2006: Forever

SaintsForever, the most popular and balanced Southampton FC fans messageboard, is no more.

Nobody seems quite sure what precipitated it happening yesterday afternoon (a comfortable away win the day before should have seen people in a good mood, right?) but after months of stress, abuse, threats and the like, Keith seems to have said 'ok, that's it'. A month or so ago the site was suspended for a few days while they decided what to do, but then re-opened. And now this... a surprise, but sadly that's the way of things.

SaintsForever was good on a number of levels: Keith ran the site himself, with the help of some admin folks, and never put advertising on the site (different from Pasoti, where I often find adverts for 'Portsmouth' related stuff in the Google Ads, obviously Google being unable to distinguish Portsmouth from Plymouth (the smell it usually enough to be able to tell)). The site got very high profile last summer, around the time of the Wilde takeover, mainly because for a while SaintsForever actually became the official unofficial mouthpiece of Michael Wilde and the consortium to speak to the fans. Indeed, even last week when a newspaper rumour began about the need to sell Wunderkind Gareth Bale in the January transfer window, Wilde issued a statement to the fans via Keith and SaintsForever. Because of this particular slant, and the raised profile overall, I suspect Keith began getting more flack than he ever expected from all sides of the equation, and just said that enough is enough. Shame, but messageboards are just databases run by enthusiasts, and that's the end of that.

Of course, this leads to the question of where the SaintsForever fans will head next to continue their chat. Longest-standing rival (from Rivals, coincidentally) is The Ugly Inside, Nick Illingsworth's largely anti-Pompey shouting page, but the degree of animosity held by average UI posters to SaintsForever means it's unlikely that will be the new home. There's ForeverSaints, a website set up to essentially mock Keith and SF, but which strangely seems to have taken on a life of its own more recently as a viable football discussion forum... who knows? Interesting thing on there is the rumour the SaintsForever WILL re-open very soon, under new management... maybe that is the answer to our Saints discussion needs?

Funny thing is, if this stuff had gone on on Pasoti it would have shut down months ago. Unless Boris was involved...

13 November 2006: Hiatus

It occurs to me, and to others it seems, that I haven't blogged in two months.

Now, this in itself is not a cause for world concern: deaths in Iraq, the train crash in South Africa and Google envisioning free cell phones top the stories on three of my usual news sources, and certainly each of these is more important than my lack of blogging. However, I feel some sort of explanation is necessary, if for no other reason than I seem to have a spare fifteen minutes before this week's AKT meeting.

Curiously, the fact that I wasn't blogging on This AKTing Lark ties in with the fact that I wasn't AKTing for the last month or so either. As the magical PhD funding drew to a conclusion at the end of September, and with it came the switch to 'nominal' student status while I find the time to write the final six paragraphs of the thesis (yes, I counted them this morning) and print it out, the combination of 'AAAAH I'M FREE' feelings and 'OH POO POO POO HOW DO WE PAY THE RENT?', along with ongoing lack of movement on the Research Fellow job front, led to an unnamed company based close to London and a month of decidedly non-AKT contract work.

Now, having read the contract with said company very closely, it occurred that they weren't at all keen on me mentioning in blog-format their name or anything to do with my work during the time I was under contract. So no, I can't tell you who they were or what I was doing for them, except for one word which, to start with, brought back many happy (cough) memories of QAS: Stellent.

So that was October dealt with, spent working probably a good bit harder than I thought I would have to work but learning a lot along the way and starting to think about how RDF and Ontologies could/would/should fit inside a commercial Content Management System (probably something to do with metadata, but I'm not really sure: mainly because, FOAF apart, nobody really knows what to do with RDF yet). I actually enjoyed it quite a lot more than I ever enjoyed the equivalent work at QAS - probably because there was a good deal of creative freedom as well as some genuinely interesting projects. So that was good.

Anyway, it's all over now. ISWC last week saw a dull presentation by a heavily jet-lagged not-really-PhD-student-but-not-yet-officially-RF about why RDF and 3Store was necessary alongside traditional SQL approaches when dealing with performing calculations on large sets of metadata, which a few people seemed to find interesting, to my surprise. And now it's back to the office - just in time to move to the new building (well, that's a month away) - and I'm all excited and ready to start work in a project with the acronym ITA. Which leads to three questions:

1. What does ITA stand for?
2. What does the job entail me actually doing? and
3. Does this mean I have to change the name of this blog to 'This ITAing Lark'?

Somehow it doesn't have the same ring to it.

13 September 2006: Symbols

OK, but what is it?

Noel Edmonds' 'Red Box Club' competition is what it's all about: you have to decipher the symbols by the end of the month. They're the ones that have been on his hands during 'Deal or No Deal' games since March, and apparently there's some kind of logic to it all. The prize? A day out at a filming of 'Deal or No Deal' in Bristol, so it's not really worth it. Interestingly (well, vaguely interestingly), the anoraks on a Deal or No Deal internet forum have pointed out that actually there have been a few additions to the symbols, and a few deletions...

Still, should be easier to figure out than the Publius Enigma. Let's keep talking...

Footnote: is it me, or does one of the symbols look like Mr Blobby?

6 September 2006: Windy

Two blogs in one day when I'm writing up?

Well, having just mailed two further chapters in for review, I thought it might be a good opportunity to have a look at the matching method I used to tie together the ACM and Citeseer paper sets and see if I could improve it a little. I won't explain it since it'll be very boring for you (it's quite boring for me, and I actually enjoy this kind of tedious pattern-matching stuff) but it does continue to give me ample opportunities to look at the titles of obscure academic papers that nobody has ever cited and quite possibly nobody will ever read again.

My point is this: some of the titles are strangely, glorious bizarre. As a random choice, currently rolling up the screen in front of me are papers titled "A bump in the stack encryptor for MS-DOS systems" (I'm sure it'd be a bump in the stack for anyone) and "A 2-(22,8,4) Design Cannot Have a 2-(10,4,4) Subdesign" (I never said it could).

But my favourite, and the real reason for blogging twice in a day, is the wonderfully-titled paper "A 3/2-approximation algorithm for the Windy Postman Problem." How could it not grab my attention with a name like that? The first thing I love is the way the title naturally assumes that I know what the Windy Postman Problem is, and why I should therefore be excited at an approximation algorithm costing only three shillings and two pence. Sadly, of course, I had no idea what the Windy Postman Problem was, but as the matches continued to roll up the screen, my imagination began to run riot. What were they talking about? The thought process ran roughly as follows:

- It's got to be about farting. Kind of like Windy Miller from Camberwick Green, too many beans, heh-heh-heh-Beavis. (Incidentally, why aren't you surprised that my mind went to the farting scenario first?)
- Is it postmen having problems with wind? Or postmen who suffer from wind having problems in society? Maybe it's a problem with airmail?
- Maybe the wind is so strong it blows the letters out of the postman's hand and he has to go and collect them all again?
- Maybe he needs a van, like the UPS guys. Except without the brown socks.
- Hm, yes. It's got to be about strong wind causing problems for the postman in his delivery duties. It's got to be about the losing-the-letters-and-having-to-find-them-again thing. While farting.

Not even close. Apparently it's one of those simple-sounding problems that we used to occasionally come across at school, like the travelling salesman problem: essentially, what's the quickest route to make sure the postman visits every street in a city at least once? That's the general 'Chinese Postman Problem'. (We have a problem with Chinese postmen now?) Variations include the use of one-way streets as part of the problem. The Windy Postmen have the additional problem that while all the streets are two-way, some are more easily traversable in one direction than the other (because there's a strong tropical wind out there of course), so there's a trade-off to be made between short, costly routes and longer, wind-backed paths. And the people who wrote the paper weren't talking old money, the 3/2 is to do with how long it takes to calculate an approximation for the best path.

Still, it was fun while it lasted. Meantime the matching algorithm spots another one: "A Case Study on the Mergeability of Cases with a Partial-Order Planner" goes into the database. What an afternoon I'm having.

Elsewhere, future-movie-critic-and-eldest-nephew Matt continues to dazzle with unexpected observations. When asked by our reporter to name his favourite vegetable, his second answer (his first was 'fish fingers') was 'broccoli' (which is strange enough in itself) and when asked why he replied 'because it looks like trees'.

He started school yesterday. I doubt they'll know what's hit them.

Postscript: Googling on 'windy postman problem' brings even weirder stuff to light. I just found a paper that states: "Eulerian graphs and trees are windy postman perfect." Intriguing, baffling and poetic all at the same time.

6 September 2006: Burp

One of the sad things about writing up is that I don't always get to see 'Deal or No Deal'.

For the uninitiated, it's Noel Edmonds ('im off of multicolour swap shop fingy, never as good as Tiswas eh?) without Mr Blobby or John Craven or bleddy Keith Chegwin or anyone, doing a game show where people pick boxes randomly hoping to avoid boxes that have large sums of money in them. The premise actually sounds too simple: surely you wouldn't get away with it six days a week for nine or ten months a year? Well - somehow it works and it's good fun and I don't care what you think, I like it.

What I like better is Harry Hill pretending to be the banker. And thanks to the copyright-busting wonder that is YouTube, I just found some highlights...

Click here to have a look. I'm loving this game...