Category Archives: pensées

Ada plus One

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Yesterday, 24 March, was the first ever Ada Lovelace Day. This is what happens when I don’t keep my ear to the ground.

Ada, as I’m sure you already knew (I did – hah!) was the daughter of Lord Byron who because of her work with Charles Babbage is often credited as being the first programmer. From the day’s official website:

“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.”

What an excellent idea. Thanks to Pennski for bringing it to my attention.

I won’t blog at length on the general awesomeness of anyone, (a) because I don’t generally and (b) because I’d feel the need to ask permission and that takes time. But I will mention a few (by no means all; omission from this list implies absolutely nothing) of the several IT-related women I have known. In alphabetical order to avoid any hint of favouritism or bias:

  • Joella, former colleague, who was a reporter and then editor onInformation World Review. This means that for >50% of the 1990s she and her lovely but somewhat vague editor were the totality of UK-based IT reporting. (Correct me if I’m wrong, Jo …) She also, more recently, introduced me to the blogging concept.
  • L, former colleague, now working for Oxford Uni. Twenty years before we met she was working for Locomotive Software, proof reading their manuals, which would include the manuals that came with my Amstrad PCW all those years ago. I think that’s where she met her husband. She now programs Javascripty sort of stuff.
  • S, head of my division but I’m not crawling. Now responsible for heading communications and customer support on a 40Gbit/s optical network that links every university in the country, she started here in the mid eighties when it was basically two cans and a bit of string.
  • T, fellow writer, longest acquaintance of all the above, bisexual witch and freelance IT consultant. See where a degree in theology from Durham can get you?

Next year I may mention some others …

A tale of fire and water

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Recently finished, and hugely enjoyed, Pompeii by Robert Harris.

In a book set in Roman times, about Pompeii, you think you have a shrewd idea what’s going to happen. So it came as a pleasant surprise to find most of the novel is in fact about water. Marcus Attilius is engineer in charge of the aqueduct that feeds water to most of the Bay of Naples region. The water supply unaccountably fails one hot day in August 79AD and he has to find out why.

The reader already has a pretty shrewd idea why, and it’s no great surprise that, yes, the aqueduct has been blocked by earthquake activity near the base of Vesuvius. It’s easily dealt with. But in the process of his enquiries Attilius stumbles across intrigue, fraud and skullduggery that would make quite a decent novel on its own.

Yes, the reader is thinking, all very good but sooner or later that volcano’s gonna blow and press the reset button. Which it does, but in a way that still manages to continue the story so far quite logically. Each chapter starts with a paragraph or two from a modern text on volcanology, so we the readers understand what’s happening even if the Romans don’t, and it’s all quite seamless. One of Attilius’s niggles is what happened to his predecessor, who looms over the novel without ever actually appearing alive. Turns out the guy was a native of Siciliy, from near Etna, and was about the only person in the whole of Campania with an idea of what was about to happen.

And when the volcano does blow, it’s terrifying. You see how the Romans must have felt. First, they had no idea Vesuvius was a volcano at all (the Greek historian Strabo, who had obviously been up there, described the top as a flat plain – no crater like today. You could stand up there with no idea the mountain was hollow). When it blew, around midday, the clouds of ash blotted out the sun and brought a premature night to the land. When the final pyroclastic flows came, burying Herculaneum and Pompeii completely, that really was at night so it would have been twice as dark as before, with visibility through the ash just a few feet. All they would have seen were the faint glows of light tumbling down the sides of the mountain. The first couple of these, from the point of view of the Pompeiians, go from right to left, east to west, and take out Herculaneum. The next just seem to get bigger and bigger, coming right at the town …

You’re on the edge of your seat, I tell you. And what makes this vision of volcanic hell doubly powerful is that Harris has been so good at describing the contrasts. The pre-eruption paradise of hot sun, vineyards, crystal clear water from the aqueduct, and the well-ordered civilisation of the empire that collapses into local chaos.

Another point that struck me – and amused me – was that Attilius reports direct to a guy in Rome who reports direct to the Emperor. A couple of times he is able to play on this fact and bypass all local politics, vested interests etc. The aqueduct itself, the mighty Aqua Augusta, was built by direct order of Augustus. That well known bunch of commies the ancient Romans had absolutely no problem with the idea that a vital resource like water operates under centralised state control. Privatise it? Don’t be ridiculous! They would have laughed.

Okay, we don’t have slaves or gladiators and we know a thing or two about volcanoes now. But it’s just possible we may have lost something too …

Banking gestures

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Gordon Brown is considering legal measures to get back some of the £693,000 pension paid to former RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin.

Strange to say, I hope he doesn’t, or is not able to. This is because my considerable dislike of smugly complacent overpaid not very good bank chiefs is still second to my dislike of politicians who move the goalposts because the headlines tell them to.

Freddie’s considered response to the idea that he should forego some of the pension as a “gesture” is available for public view. He’s agin it, though you’d think that on the salary he’s been paid recently he really should have put a penny or two aside for a rainy day. As he says:

“to voluntarily accept a reduction in a pension entitlement which has been built up over many years and in other employments in addition to RBS, is not warranted.”

Quite. I’m a one-law sort of guy. If someone has benefited because the law was in the wrong place, change the law, don’t come after the benefittee. Even if he is stinkingly rich. One law. If the government finds a legal way of taking some of his £693k off him, they will find a way of denting the monthly fiver I confidently expect to be claiming off them soon after my 85th birthday, or when old age forces me to retire, whichever is sooner. That would be a Bad Thing.

And anyway, who among us (apart from RBS account holders, but I’m not one) doesn’t actually find it screamingly funny? I can’t remember when I first heard the argument that “you’ve got to pay the right sort of salary to find the right sort of people”, but it was a long time ago, way before the present crisis and probably way before the last. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t now. Finally, finally it’s being exposed as the lie it is in such a way that even the politicians are having to accept it. The “right people” got us into this, you dolt. Freddie is the peak of a very large pyramid going all the way back to Thatcher and probably beyond. If this fiasco finally gets it into people’s heads that you pay people what they’re worth, and if they screw up then they’re screwed, then it will be worth every penny.

And will either Gordon Brown, who ravaged our pension accounts, or his illustrious predecessor who got us into an unjust, illegal and unwinnable war, and who between them spent every last penny of our spare cash such that there is none left anywhere, be foregoing the considerable benefits that accrue to an ex-prime minister?

Anyway, I have a solution. Stop me if I’m wrong – it’s possible – but is the basic idea of banking not:

  • you give the bank all your money for safe storage.
  • occasionally you draw some of this money out.
  • but not all of it.
  • so they get to play with the rest – invest, spend, whatever – just as long as any sum you wish to claim is always there on demand.

I’m going to hazard a guess that a large part of the £693k, or the monthly £57.5k, won’t actually be spent. So, if Freddie keeps it in a bog standard checking account at RBS, RBS will still have that money and he’ll still be quids in. Everyone’s a winner.

You’re welcome.