Annoying

I have no idea why some of my posts are coming out with white backgrounds to my text... so annoying.

Comprehensive Computing (1990's and my meeting the Acorn A3000)

When I went to comprehensive they had BBC Micro's... I had an Atari ST at home... the school then upgraded to Acorn A3000's.  Now the ST, Acorn and IBM PC used very nearly the exact same floppy format (there was one byte difference between the ST and the PC basically, and nothing with the Acorn Archimedes series)....

The teachers, totally no idea how to use these machines.  Sure they could run applications in pre-packaged orders, but they never delved into them.  The Acorn had a whole host of built-in software, the OS itself came with a RAM disk, one teacher once saw me cache all my work on a 1MB RAM disk and work hundreds of times faster than anyone else in the lab, but they had NO idea how I did it; and didn't want me to explain it to them.

So they often found me in the lab... despite it being locked...

You could get in via two routes, one was to go in through the neighbouring classrooms air vent between the two back-to-back store cupboards... One day I found the grill had been screwed back in place and sealed, which put a stop to that... And no matter how often I asked teachers would NOT let us into the lab without themselves being present, and quite simply they didn't have the will to help encourage learning, it was a dangerous prescient for them in the 90's to admit that there were those with a natural talent in a field the staff had no interest nor experience in.

So what next?  Well we had to climb out the window, shimmy along the ledge and climb back in... Usually only one person did this and then unlocked the door for the others, but it was a bit hairy on windy winter days.

 But literally, the school didn't want the kids to use the computers, either scared we'd break them, or more likely we'd steal them, ever seen the size of an A3000 and the bespoke monitor?  yeah, I can really not imagine how they thought we'd sneak them out the building unnoticed.

Anyway, one day, I'm there with some code in the RAM Disk, playing about with the Basic interpreter and I had a new thing called a "Compiler"... I think it was for Pascal, but it's lost to memory.... The door unlocked and a teacher pounces in Alan Partridge style... "A haaa, I caught you"....

Yes sir, you caught me.... trying to better myself, please put me in irons and take me away.  Basically, I can only assume; after the fact; that in this school we're all meant to be preparing ourselves as manual labour, I know!   (Top Valley Comprehensive, represent; it's now "Top Valley Academy" or even just part of Red Hill Academy, because you know... We're not allowed our little tribal enclaves anymore).

But this teacher takes a look at I'm doing; I would hazard a guess he expected a game instead he see's code and the dozens and dozens of disks I have, "Come with me, I know what punishment you must receive".... Bit worrying, but we trusted everyone back then, and I followed him to the store cupboard.

And he slaps a brand new unopened packet of 10 disks into my hands then rummaged in a plastic disk box for another grubby one with tippex all over the paper label, which is so tatty it must have been reused until the plastic platter inside was an atom thick.

"Right, I need 10 copies of this disk by tomorrow, else you're in front of the head master"

In hindsight I should have said "Can I go talk to the headmaster about your not encouraging me to learn and explore the machines which are taking over our daily lives".... But alas I said "yes Sir"

I didn't even think about the format issue, I just went home and made an exact sector by sector duplicate on my ST, assuming it was either an Acorn or PC compatible bunch of data, I couldn't tell until the morning, but I made a copy for myself too.

Arriving back I handed him the box.... His stunned face was quite a thing to behold, I think he expected it to take a long time... But I got two drives, yeah baby, rocking the power set up!

But during break, and after scaling the building again, I popped one of the disks into a drive and let it boot....

Lemmings... For the Acorn A3000 series, it was ported by some other company, it wasn't the DMA/Psygnosis original, I kind of remember it being some butterfly logo in purple... But it was lemmings... And I'd made eleven pirate copies of it as "Punishment".

Pretty sure the wrong was all on the other side.

I did get permission from one of the deputy heads to use the computers from time to time, but by the time I finished at comprehensive I was learning Pascal for my ST, and even writing and released my first program as a kill counter/leader board for Elite II Frontier; that was the first piece of software to earn me some money (£25 one weekend, with five sales) so I was hooked; no thanks to any part of my education experience at comprehensive level.

Your Best Work?

The best piece of work you've ever done?

This is one of those subjective questions you can pose people, and you always hope that there's better to come, so really what we're asking a software engineer is "What is the best piece of software or project you've done so far?"

As technology is always marching on and new ideas are always emerging you can often say you're going to make something better, which is great, but it makes it harder and harder to pick out the best pieces of work from your portfolio.... Do you judge it by the number of users or downloads or how much money it made the company or even how much you were paid to do the work?

Monetarily the most money I've ever made on a piece of software was for a website I wrote in about two weeks in ASP & javascript in about 2002, which netted me the grand sum of £4000 for 80 hours work, literally £50 an hour.  But it wasn't the best work I ever did; I mean (snear) it was javascript.

The most interesting work I've ever done is the work I'm doing right now, but I can't talk about that.

So this leads me back a step to my long tenure at my prior employer, the best work I think I did, was a project to port the existing system to a new hardware platform; this involved reverse engineering the hardware interface and writing a new interface for the hardware abstraction layer for that particular hardware, which worked seamlessly and the whole system was agnostic as to which hardware type it was booted up upon.

This was not how that particular system was engineered, so in about four weeks I not only made the hardware interface an abstract interface, but also developed a test bed for the new hardware and then sewed the two together; four weeks in that environment was an incredibly fast turn around.

And it was extremely enjoyable.

That section of work was one of the best pieces of work I ever did.

Years later the creator of that hardware came to work for the company, he saw his hardware but our software and asked a few pertinent questions, for he thought his hardware was secure and could not be made to work on another platform without his secret sauce.  Let us just say it was fun to NOT tell him quite how I'd done the reverse engineering; unfortunately this reverse engineering nous set me up for the next big reverse engineering jail break required by the company, and it was a totally different kettle of fish and worthy of it's own post later.

Explaining the "three dots in Chrome"... A marital skit by Mr and Mrs Xelous

Mrs> "How do I make this page bigger, it's all small and tiny?"

Mr> "Have you zoomed out?"

Mrs> "I don't know"

Mr> "See the three dots on top of one another, top right, just below the cross you close the page with?"

Mrs> "That's just closed the whole page"

Mr> "The three dots?"

Mrs> "You said the cross"

Mr> "I said 'see the three dots just below the cross'"

Mrs> "I only heard cross, don't get cross"

Mr> "Just open the browser again"

Mrs> "The what?"

Mr> "The internet, open it again, and in the top right you see three dots stacked on top of one another just below the cross to close, not ON the cross, BELOW the cross"

Mrs> "Yes, do I click them?"

Mr> "Yes, just left click and you see zoom"

Mrs> "Oh zoom, I can do that my hold CTRL and using the scroll wheel can't I"

1980's-1990's UK Education Review : Pt2

Today I'm going to be using skills that I formed after being utterly humiliated at school, English.

I basically went from Junior school (ages 7 - 11) unable to spell, form structured sentences or really converse in writing.  Plus my handwriting was appalling; it's still bad.

The reason?  We didn't really get pulled up on writing, Maths we had a focus on, we had to learn times tables and stuff - more about that next time, but writing and spelling wasn't really bothered about, I can only recall two times my writing was questioned.

The first was with a supply teacher who noticed that myself, and a bunch of other kids, started writing in the top left of the page, and we would rotate just our wrist around, so our writing went in a rainbow like arc across the page from top left corner to nearly bottom right... Then we'd flip the page over.

I can recall this vividly as she was just utterly perplexed at these 10 year olds not being able to write along a straight line, she made the whole class make a lined page we could use behind our actual writing page and guide our hands.  She also showed us to use a few other sheets below to make our pen/pencil strokes more formed.  Our actual teacher was genuinely annoyed with us "wasting paper" when she returned to find us writing on one page with two or three below.  But the lined pages remained.

The second was when writing about a visit by the police to the school, they showed us a police dog and engaged with us, it was the police being a friendly force and to this day I trust the UK police because of efforts like that (no matter how ineffectual they can actually be, they try).  But we were writing about little the day in little events and had to write out the phonetic alphabet.

I got the alphabet wrong... I was like 7... but I got the alphabet wrong!!!

Just take that in, you can see this blog, how long I've been writing, at 7... I did not know the alphabet.

My teacher, a male that year, was more bothered about us being quiet and well behaved, he was actually busy planning a road trip across the USA that year, and that's what I remember more than any teaching, he left at the end of that first year; which must have been his first year after graduating as a teacher.

All this problem built throughout my time at junior school and at 11 when I walked into senior (comprehensive) they immediately identified I could not spell, could not form sentences, could not really write.  And my mother set about an intensive scheme at home of fixing this (we'll ignore she hadn't noticed before hand).  The school certainly hadn't noticed before 1989.