On The Cleveland Bay Breed

Viewers of my YouTube channel will know I have horses, we lunge, ride, trap & carriage drive and generally really enjoy them, keeping them and ourselves entertained.  They are pets and massive parts of our lives.

The eagle eyed of those viewers will have noticed over the last two years we have been training our Cleveland bay, he arrived from the breeders Mr & Mrs Orange at Kenley Cleveland Stud.  His name is Nova.... Or Kenley Supernova, and we had to join the Cleveland Bay Horse Society to own him.

He is that rich bay colour with the striking black socks on each leg and a strong black main and tail, the absolute standard for the Cleveland Bay Breed; accept no less!  He arrived with some of the biscuit fringe colours of a foul and he has been slightly behind on his teeth changing from baby to adult, but otherwise he is a big boy, today measuring at least 16hh3 (hh = hands).

 

Nova's character is a quirkly one, for the most part he is all over humans, he investigates you and things around him... Being very interested and unlike many horses he is mindful, he doesn't just blindly panic but instead thinks about the challenges he encounters.

\

Again this is a trait of his breed, to be mindful, steady temptered and is one of the reasons they are so popular in the driving role today; notably for the Royal Family, if you see a bay coloured hosed with the black mane, tail & socks, pulling a carriage for the King, well it'll likely be a Cleveland Bay.

 

When we started training Nova it was literal baby steps, head collar training, leading him around the field, past various bric-a-brac:

 

Since that video was taken I have lost a bunch of weight.... Nova has not, he's grown and grown, his shoulders coming out and strengthening right now in October 2025.  You can see here is withers are just around my shoulder height, today they're up around my ear and he is just such a much bigger animal.

 

Once the head collar training was done we moved onto a bridle, at first with a plastic bit, but quickly he had an upgrade to steel, with a soft articulation in the middle:

 

All of this training was done in house by ourselves, we'd done much of this before with Gerty, but never with such a young horse, still growing, so it has been fascinating to see his mind growing with his skills and size.

 

The next step was to decide how to best approach him into driving.... And long reigns were the best way to move forward, with the help of a local trainer we began introducing him to new equipment:

 

 

Two sessions later and it was my turn to keep this practice up.... As you can see by the state of the grass this was in the burning hot summer of 2025.

So it was I found myself behind him rather than leading him...

 

Which is a very alien thing for a horse to experience commands from literally out of sight as you walk in their rear blind spot, however, the Cleveland Bat genes run strong in him and he was extremely comfortable with this extremely quickly as his quality shone.

 

Graduating to road practive soon after, and I took him out without our trainer just this very morning...

 

All of this is not just about owning a horse, nor just owning a Cleveland Bay, so many people claim their horse is a CB it's hard sometimes to bite ones tongue as a true CB is a very special animal, and you have to have the rare breeds passport, Cleveland Bay Horse Society member ship and all the bloodlines clearly defined to state your horse is a CB.

 

And the bloodlines are very important, Mr & Mrs Orange who bred Nova are massive figures in the breeding programmes, advocates for the breed and the CBHS.  Nova was gelded without saving any semen from him, sometimes I am sad about that, but we could simply not have had a stallion at our yard.

 

So instead of spreading his genes I write this post to spread the true word about the Cleveland Bay, our experience with Nova has been so rich and rewarding and we have decades to come with him.

 

He will drive out pulling a carriage and we hope to ride him too, weight loss programmes and will power willing!

 

He has been an absolute powerhouse of mental development, horse wise he is very clever.

 

And so I bring my post to a close with this post from Mrs Orange:

 

 

Job Interview : switch(char) again! Twenty years on!

I've spoken about some of the strange interviews I've enjoyed over the years; notable engineering highlights were having test driven development spooned to me, when I simply didn't know the particular syntax they were demanding, or having StringBuilder suggested for a C# task where they actually needed to cross-core thread their problem, or pointing out that the CI solution being described would lead to an alien environment of folks being paralysed by fear of red flags; only to witness their development floor being paralysed by exactly those issues as I walked out the door.

Today however, I'm going to go way back and talk about one of the very early development interviews I had; this maybe like the third interview I ever had after graduating, it was with a rail rolling stock company, in a very bright and sunny room with three guys who seemed to know their entire universe was correct and they'd take no new information into their sphere of understanding.

I share this one as a friend of mine was in touch over the weekend, he had an interview, and strangely he had the exact same conversation I had... THE EXACT CONVERSATION, twenty something years later.

Let us start by sharing some perfectly valid C++ code:

bool validate(const char& value)
{
switch (value)
{
case 0: return true;
case 'x': return true;
default: return false;
}
return false;
}
int main()
{
const bool isValidOne{ validate('a') };
const bool isValidTwo{ validate('x') };
const bool isValidMe{ validate(12) };
}

Read this code, we should see an output (if we output the bools) of "false", "true" and "false"... I think we can all agree.  This is perfectly valid C++.

It isn't very clean nor pretty, we're relying on the compiler standard decaying char to int and vice versa; which is not very nice and I wish compilers would complain here, that we're comparing int to char in the first case and we're converting the integer 12 to char, I think it should really strong type this.

But that is not the point, the point is that both in my friends case and mine all those years ago the interviewers got really uppity about that "switch" statement.  They insisted that you can not "switch" on a character type...

Just flat insisted.

I remember in my experience they had me write up what they wanted on a blackboard, with chalk, and they wanted me to go through the code line by line; I wrote more or less the above, they insisted they had a character not a byte (uint8_t: though there was no standard for this at the time) and then they went off on this tangent amongst themselves about the value of the if-elseif-else stanza's they insisted would work over my solution above.

Now I was talking to these guys in the early 00's, my friend however was talking to them in 2023.  He jumped on this with the point of "well if the character is known at compile time, yes then constexpr maybe of use" and he showed them:

if constexpr(foo) and if consteval(bar) examples.

He described their faces screwing up and two of the chaps he was talking to staring at each other before making subtle notes on their paper.

It was very clear at this point that the CTO performing the interview was not keeping his knowledge up to date, the group seemed to cluster onto the idea of just maintaining what they have, stagnation like this in our joint experience can be problematic.  Both team morale and high turn over of engineers always happens when things stagnate.

I have to say in my interview I actually sat it out from beginning to end and just knew I was not interested in the role; and I did not hear from them again.

My friend however, he was genuinely concerned he'd done a good interview and they'd be offering him a role, they kept him talking for over an hour and a half!

He's a late 40's engineer of 25+ years experience, just like me; the three chaps interviewing him, including the CTO, were ten or more years his junior, it seemed they were looking to back up their team with an older head to lend legitimacy to things; and they had lost two original engineers of their project to literal retirement without replacing them.

He saw the issues and he thanked them for his time and left, with a negative to whether he would be interested in going further.  This stunned them.

It has to be said, so many interviewers forget that though they are interviewing you, you are also interviewing them like most all human interaction it is a two way street and it's crucially important to remember that in a job interview.  We spent a significant amount of our time at work, if you are not comfortable there or feel you are going to be acting out a role instead of filling one and making it your own.

tBs - My First Clan

Today I want to regale you with a story of my past gaming glory, before Eve... before WoW... Back in the days of 2002 I joined a clan.... Now, I've read Ready Player One over and over, I do not get this whole "I don't clan" ethos in that writing because back then being in a Clan was the thing.

Guilds and corps in my later gaming life are very different things, this clan was cut throat.  We were

{tBs}

The Butchers

This is where I met my long time co-killer Chaplain (wave, hi chap!) for we were together the scourge of Avalanche.

This is in the Half Life engine mod "Day of Defeat", and it didn't look this good (this is from the later Source version); all important in this game play was the tick rate of the server, most serious clans hosted their own servers and they tweaked them to the max.

I remember our server admin was a chap called Twister, but that's about all, he never much liked any input about the status of the server.  He didn't play very often, so it was always quite curious that us experienced players were not welcomed into giving him feed back; let me tell you as a now professional game developer and server administrator listen to your expert users, they will know when things are off, they may speculate, but they will know and help you spot issues up front they're a resource, use them, never dismiss them.

Anyway tBs were well known, playing on the European Enemy Down ladder we were very often top 10 in Europe, one time top three, playing on again off again matches against the other members of the ladder; we were effectively the second most active clan behind "Scotlands Finest Highlanders" or SFH.

At one time I myself organised our own "Butchers League" and for four weeks in the summer of 2003 I ran the website and helped organise five guest teams to play pre-arranged matches in a knock-out for the win.  SFH won.  Yes, SFH won the tBs League.  That was fine.

What wasn't fine was the reaction of another clan OAP or "Old Aged Players" they kicked off big time, they could not connect their players to the server; they didn't do any preparation up front and get really really angry, really for no reason, when they were disqualified from a match they simply could not raise five players to compete in.  They were offered a different match slot, but they even turned up to that with only four players and a bad attitude.

Within tBs ourselves there were a bunch of interesting characters, but lets talk more about the game.

Day of Defeat

I loved that game, or mod, my favourite map was Avalanche, a wholly unfair map for the allied side (and yes, I admit I enjoyed playing the German side more) but Chaplain and I were demons of the Church.

The Church, pictured above sat on the flank of the map, entered via the smashed bell tower at the top or the rubble strewn wall at the bottom, the actual doors were closed.  Inside you had two side by side, but slightly offset rooms on the ground, then rubble streaming up to a mezzanine level, with then either the option to climb a ladder to the exposed but dominating tower top, or to carry on up and through a wall to the tiled rooves beyond.

As an axis player you began from the top side, coming into the church via the tower.

As an allied player you began on the ground and were forced up through the rubble.

Defending that tunnel route was critical to holding the map, you controlled access to the opposite side for the allied players, you pinned them in their spawn.

Or you held the tower and dominated the center.

It was probably not well thought-out in design terms, but it was such a wonderful piece of level spacing I loved it.

My best memory came playing another clan, we as axis and they as allies.  For some ungodly reason they had a machine gunner run right up into my door way... and it was my door way, I had gone from spawn, swept over the roof into the church and down in sprint fashion time.  This guy thought he could take my church and lay MG fire on my team from my church tower?!  Nope.  A burst of MP40 and he was down, but do was his MG.

Now it was not often ever we took the MG to the church, it wasn't practical in the close-quarters environment SMG was the usual call to arms.  But this day I could not resist, I lay in the rubble pounding their own MG fire down on them.  Their only hope to remove me was to pre-cook a grenade and time it perfectly to explode in my face.  They did not do this; my score was astronomical with chaplain bringing me a reload of ammo and they throwing himself into fire to respawn and bring me yet more.

That was our church on Avalanche.

A few other maps floated our boat, but were were just so good at that map, specialist even that when we played on open public servers we were often accused of cheating, being so good someone is convinced you are cheating is just the ultimate thrill.  I've only managed it through good strong team work.

The other tBs characters though:

Weeman - constantly threatening to self-harm, a disturbed kid to say the least.

Hopper - Cheating chap, he blanked chaplain and I after botting in WoW (and obviously so) undermining any respect we had for this "skills".

Remus - an older guy, interesting fellow to talk to.

Twister - the hard put server admin, who didn't want to know really about our issues.

Dodi - a nice lad who came and went.

Mako - Not the shark he thought he was.

and of course "The Butcher" himself, Butcher being his surname... Always in charge, but never there.

I learned a lot from this, my first clan, I learned about team work, about trusting others and appointing them correctly and appropriately, all from a computer game, backed up with my martial experience in karate I believe I'm quite rounded in letting people both prove and earn their reward and garnering them with praise for a job well done; whilst also being even handed.

All experience for a computer game, and they call is a game; well, isn't life just one big game too?

The Old Lady and the Server

No, this isn't some strange nursery rhym (though I wonder if it could be) no this is a story of a literal old lady whom I believe was trying to collect as many notches on her bed post as possible...

Let's start at the beginning, I lived in a house I rented, I had a spare bedroom and my younger brother broke up with his long term girlfriend.  He came to live with me, quite unsuccessfully, as his life was very chaotic, and indeed in the end I threw him out in the end.

But in the nine months he inflicted himself upon me he had a few lovers through his door.  One of them was said "old lady".

I say old she was maybe early to mid-forties, with children, but that was old, my brother was nineteen... heck I was only twenty two.

He was going through a series of different jobs at the time, and somehow he met this woman, who promised him a bunch of things; like a car, and MR2 if I call correctly.  Which he went on about constantly.

These rewards never appeared, but one day she did, one morning to be precise, I came down into my own kitchen and there was this woman in my non-smoking house smoking.  If looks could have killed she would have murdered me when I asked her to go outside to smoke.  Until she realised this was my house; so the stories clearly went both ways between them and my brother.

"Where does server come into this xel?"

Well, when my brother broke things off with her she continued to communicate with me, I'm not even sure how she knew my contact details to be honest, I think she had a nominal business address or something, in fact thinking back now, I think one of the mysterious things she promised my brother as she bedded him was to get me a job; despite my not asking.

But it seems she was looking for a NOC engineer.

Indeed, I spoke to her briefly where she was talking to me about setting up BSD servers, "My servers run BSD".  She never explained what her servers were doing (I suspected porn).

She did however offer me a job, at £4,000 a month.  That's £48,000 a year.  At the time I was in a £21,500 job doing network maintenance (which I hated, and have commented about in earlier posts).

So her offer was interesting, I took a weekend to expose myself to BSD.  I'd not really used it before, just early versions of Linux, ScoUnix and Windows.  BSD was interesting, different, but nothing I had experience with.  She kept talking about her current NOC guy.

Either way, it came to nothing, and I think that's because I never came...

Story Time - Fantastic Rack Mount Mistakes - Part 33 and 1/3

It has been a very long time since my last story time, and so this one comes to you with an unknown number, I am however well beyond any possible NDA or secrets for this one, so I can finally share (it's been 20 years yesterday).

I had a job in a data center, nothing too special, but I loved it.  The loud room, the air conditioning, the rack upon rack of machine, I absolutely loved it.  We're talking 2002 here, these were the 2U high style of machine I use a lot today, the odd 4U or 8U JBOD box too, loved them all.

I had all my wiring terminated and was beautifully dressed, I wasn't in charge of the whole place, just one isle, but I took my time whenever there was an issue to run new cable bundles beautifully dressed along the cabinet runners into each cabinet top, seven cabinets to a row, two face to face on the cold row and then the back of these into the hot, I had a hot row run by a lovely guy called Jerod next to me, he was French I think, lovely guy (shout out to Jerod if you're reading!).

The other side I had the work bench, a coveted space, between the hot and cold isles were thick plastic strip drapes, like you'd get in a meat packing plant.

We would patrol our isle, identifying any issues or disks showing physically bad, schedule them in for late night fix ups and then to into the communal office where we each hot desked.

Each of us had a laptop and would sit and connect into the monitoring suite remotely, with a big screen we connected via VGA to our laptops and dozens of spare keyboards we could quite often spend the night shifts doing nothing but playing games; Medieval Total War was the order of the day for me at the time; some of you know of my origins in the "game industry" take me back to hacking about and modifying MTW (Sorry Tom, whom I now work with, for fishing about breaking your baby).

Anyway, about three months into this job another tech on the day shift came to me about Isle 4, the far end of the room, he was getting drop outs at intervals during the day, but none at night, he was trying to figure out what might be causing it.

We took a look at his logs and sure enough on his disks he had 250-700ms delays for seek times on his platters, he also had a higher than average fault rate on disks, apparently he was also rebuilding raid arrays a lot.

He asked us in the night team to watch over the kit live; which we duely did.... Quiet as a mouse, nothing not an issue ever in about three months of monitoring.

Meanwhile in day light he was tearing his hair out; I've got to admit to genuinely not remembering his name, but he had long greasy black hair and was from Northampton which he told me more than his name... "Hello I'm <forgetable>, I live in Northampton".

But forgettable as he was I can't forget the day he handed that isle over to me.

Stumped as to what was going on, and frankly pulling rank, he shuffled Jerod down to Isle 3, himself into Isle 1 (my isle) and all new machines were coming into isle 2, which mr senior with disk failures was going to be setting up.

This really irked me, my isle was by far the best presented, when sales wanted to show new accounts around they showed them my isle and they all laughed over the name of the cabinets; we couldn't name the machines, most of them belongs to customers, but we could sticker and name the cabinets themselves, so they all got Bond Theme names.... Jaws, Octopussy, Moneypenny, Q and M all had simple servers, processors more or less and my two JBOD cabinets were Sean and Roger.  Stencilled on in lovely white enamel paint.

So I was hoofed off to isle 4, dark, at the back, no work bench... and immediately set about making it my own, I redressed the cable bundles (which annoyed Mr Senior, though he loved my already done ones, my dressing his was seen as an overt declaration of war).  It's so simple too, cable tie around five, cable tie through the middle to break them into three and two sets then pull.... Today you can get cable combs and I find them so sexy.

Anyway, dressed to impress what was not impressing was the fault rate, and instead of it being the accepted norm; as it had been for Mr Senior for months; it was now a big deal because I was in charge of the isle.

I set about trying to work it out, I could not figure it out.

At night, when I was there it was all fine, the day guys saw nothing; they pretty much just tended the machines remotely, no maintenance happened between 7am and 7pm so it was up to the night guys like me to swap disks, rebuild arrays, fix cables and install new machines.

So after two weeks with the log I got showing all these faults, like what was causing a disk which had worked all night and most of the day suddenly to show 500+ milliseconds seek!  It made no sense.

Anyway, 2002 was coming to a close, December 21st rolled around and I offered to cover a couple of the guys shifts, they had kids it was nearly Christmas and we worked Christmas Eve and half Christmas Day, one guy on on guy off for 6 hours at a time those two days, I took two shifts back to back.

Alone in the office, I watched the monitors and played games.

No spikes.... What gives, no spikes on the DAY I am actually here.

Hold on, I'm here, but no-one else is.

Could it be human interference?  I checked electrical circuits for noise, I checked lights, I checked if the air conditioning was affected outside and in.  I checked everything, no signs, no peaks, no noise.

HANG ON.  NO NOISE!

Spinning disks can be affected by loud noises, specifically by vibrations, I'd seen this demonstrated when doing my Compaq certification training.

There was no noise, could it just be vibration?

We were on the first floor (for anyone in the US, this is the floor above the one on the ground) so we are one storey up.  There was the main reception below center of the room, to the right where isle 1 is would be a hall way void with offices leading off it, under isle 4 would be a toilet and a changing room.

I went down, put the shower on, came back up.... Nope.

Then I took my laptop with me, no wifi, but I could plug it into various office ethernet ports around the place as no-one was in.

There I am Christmas Day, banging doors, flicking lights, flushing loos and then pouncing on my laptop to see if it affected any of the disk activity I was artificially running up.

Nothing.

Defeated I logged my time, handed over to Jerod and went to have my Christmas dinner.  I had 12 hours to think of something for Boxing day.

I walked into Mr Senior asking why there was CCTV of me "Dashing about with my laptop in random offices".

I just said I was trying to check light circuits for his disk issues; he made it abundantly clear they were my disk issues and left me to it.

Boxing day, the sales had started, the building was at the corner of a large commercial estate, there being a newly built Ikea across the road as the crowds rolled in and their stock levels fell they would be due a delivery soon.

I still poked around the office and the eureka moment came on the 27th December 2002.  For a large lorry was rumbling past the office, I had to wait for it to pass, a massive blue IKEA clad lorry.  I went into the office, logged into the monitoring and sure enough there was a trace of a large disk issue.  Times 4 minutes before; when that lorry went past!

I didn't hear it, I didn't feel it... But had the disks?

I waited and watched when a few lorries passed during the fairly quiet week between Christmas and New Years, nearly every heavy lorry going back resulted in some affect on the disks, vibration was being carried into the ground and I guess up through the building.  I will be honest, I could not tell.  But every spike I saw was timed with a lorry.  In fact I soon let Jerod in on my idea and plan to fix it and so he watched and I monitored and when he came in I could tell him when a lorry has passed!

I was not about to shout about this to Mr Senior, instead I set about fixing it.

I ordered a mat of 1 inch thick rubber, the stuff you mount washing machines on in your kitchen.  I already knew the racks pretty well, they were bolted at each foot, I'd need a torque wrench to unbolt them and I could use two of the hydraulic scissor platform lift trolleys we used to move machines about to lift the rack ever so slightly.

I didn't want to do this alone, so Jerod was roped in with the promise of a take away pizza from the glorious; but long gone; parlour we loved.

Mr Senior handed over to me and Jerod that night, it was not uncommon for two of us to be on at night, especially if there was work to do fitting something out.  It was normal to have two people when we were lifting machines too.  But Mr Senior would have been apoplectic if he'd know what us two kids were about to do.

I unscrewed the first rack from the floor, swept the dust out and used a wooden baton to bridge the lip to the metal of the scissor lift and I cranked it.... The cabinet moved, I nearly wet myself as it looked like it was going to topple, then Jerod jacked his side up on the other side and it came level, with an inch to spare I slipped in two of the pads.   He slipped in his two and at a shout over the loud AC we lowered.

I then used a phillips head screw driver to puncture the rubber and a knife to dig a bit out through each bolt hold and fastened the bolt back through, not too tight, just tight enough.

It was sweaty work in the hot isle as I was, but we did the first three of seven that night.

I went home and decided to pre cut the squares and use a drill to cut the middle out of them,the next night all seven were done.

Our disk fault rate when to zero.

That was my last time as an IT minion; I went back to programming soon after, and Mr Senior never was told what we did... His training should have told him.

What did Don do?

First things first, we're going back to the latter half of the 90's here; and I've mentioned Don before in one of my older posts, skidding into hero mode.

Don was a programmer, he was kept in a little plexiglass bubble of his own and spent all day in what looked like vi (certainly a terminal based text environment) writing what I think was C for the NCR minicomputer running Sco Unix I mentioned before.

Whether this is actually true, I don't really know, for he spent a lot of time sitting with his hands crossed over his head waiting; at the time I didn't know what he was waiting for, at home I had a Pentium 100Mhz rocking 16mb of RAM and running Borland Turbo C++ for DOS I had a lovely little progress window showing me it was compiling; I had not met the glory of GNU yet.

So Don would stare at a massive (like 19 inch) monitor, he had a Wyse VT100 next to him too, and he would not stare at that very often.  He would also make copious notes on paper and seemed to program very deliberately, looking and reading through the information at hand.

He did this, almost without interacting with anyone else for the whole year I worked with him; looking back on it I wished I had been more proactive and just asked him more about it, as he was clearly programming C around a Unix system, which is a) uber cool and b) uber cool.

It always struck me quite how long he thought about and maybe designed anything before acting.  You could say this was because he was mulling and considering the problem, he was being a good engineer, with forethought and wanted to get things right?

No, see I think he was really just in fear of how long the compile would take...

Just like me with the project I'm working on twenty five years later.

I hate FizzBuzz and Will Analyse anyone who uses it

One FizzBuzz Interview so far.... News flash... The moment I am asked to write FizzBuzz during a technical test I intentionally stop and ask the questions from there on out.  I've done this a couple of times.  And you know what I learned... I learned a whole lot more about the interviewer and their processed than they found out about me.

Let me take you back to a technical interview I had about five years ago.

I drive up to the building, it is way out in the sticks; just about still in my home county, but so obscure it's in a part I have never ever been in.

I pull up and the building is like a box of black glass, no character, no soul, just a box.  The non-native tree species planted around it to discourage birds actually using the tree's and the austere grass puts me off.

Things don't get any better, for I walk through the door and there's no secretary, no desk, nothing... The lights aren't even on; this doesn't bode well.  I look around for a buzzer, a phone even a limp notice of what to do.  When a door opens and a man approaches offering me a hand to shake.  He leads me to a similarly deserted corridor with a chair in it and I'm left to my devices once again.

I read some inane notice about some award some member of the staff had received (this is important later in the interview) and I read the fire evacuation notice.  It's quiet, quiet and silent.  There's one door nearby with a few people within and another which is a closed office piled with stacks of desks..... Empty corridors - which would be dev spaces, massive rooms with a few people in them, no secretary and piles of desks?  What have I walked into?

About ten minutes later I'm ushered into this room, I've brought my CV a few piece of detail about me and some references to my technical projects at home; as well as references to some of the discussions I have on these very pages and my github.  You know actual technical things, which you can see me achieving.

I can't talk about my current work with them... Heck I can't talk to you guys about my work now.  But I do it, and I pay a mortgage; that's all the proof I can proffer.

Anyway, I seat myself and a lady explains their technical lead will come and perform the technical test, he enters a moment later with a massively overpowered gaming laptop.  I hate gaming laptops.

I much prefer a simple sleak laptop, a decent screen, nice keyboard and plenty of battery life; and I do my work on a remote machine via SSH or whatever machinations you wish.  I do not generally work on my laptop, it's a portal onto other more powerful machines which are tethered, and this way I can go take my laptop with me anywhere and get amazing performance from it, as I'm only interested in a bit of internet, RAM and then remoting into other services.

Anyway, he plonks this behemoth down and proceeds to tell me about test driven development... TDD.

I HATE TDD.

Now, I know test have a place, heck I really like doctest, including tests into code you've written, to ensure it is within specification is perfect, and validates your progress.

My hatred comes from writing tests up front, I find this backwards logic, and I don't think you could ever persuade me otherwise.  Define the scope of your input, validate it in your code (I often assert up front when data is unexpected or malformed, or at the very least bail early) and then you run your code, and then TEST the result.  I do not believe you should write a test and then further write the code to fulfill that test.

You will miss something, you will be thinking about the test as the solution, rather than the solution itself.

If anything writing the test and then producing the code to meet that test may very well be called TDD today, but when I was a lad it was called Prototyping.  And though I'm sure we can all agree prototyping is best done in a language different to your final product, it is not really prototyping when you are not producing the product, you're producing a test.

I find it wasteful of time, and often ignores enough scope, for instance I've seen a fair few hundred thousand up front tests written and then the code to meet them in my time, never have I seen a validation of the input data, the input has generally been hard set into the test.  That's not as wise a test-scope of ensuring the result after the fact.

(This does not mean test suits after the fact are the best, I just think they're the best for my style; not least as they are opt-in, for those times you are in a swing, and easy to add later).

So, TDD... Why is he telling me about TDD?

He does, he explains they have a method and that method is structured, he does not offer me any test framework specifically, instead he opens notepad and asked me to write FizzBuzz.

And the interview stops there; I don't think the guy realised it, but I stopped being interviewed at that point, I was not going to accept their job even if offered, but I wanted to see where this lad (and he was young) was going with his thinking.

This half empty hulking building and they're trying to hire engineers, and he is going on about TDD but FizzBuzz?

So I play total dumb, I simply start to write "int main"... And he surprises me.

"No No, start with the test".

Ohkakkkakay....

I have NO idea what test suites he has installed, I don't use G-Test or Boost-Test, I use doctest.  So I write a SCENARIO; he blinks and just takes the laptop off of me and starts to open some other window... I didn't know he would allow me to open some other window, this isn't my machine, I don't know what he has installed.

This sort of sums up TDD to me, the tools aren't easily defined.

Anyway, twenty minutes later and I just about have it Buzzing on 5's and I'm not very interested, I've come to a conclusion.

He isn't impressed; rightly so, but he has no idea he's just been investigated by an older and more cynical mind than his.

He leaves and no less than three people come into continue the conversation, and boy do they, they talk to me for a solid 120 minutes; I timed it... I was so bored.  But I engaged a little when they talked about their award winning technology.

I recall the poster for the lady who had won this award and mention her, by name.

"What, how do you, who has been talking to you?"

This is very strange, "no" I assure them "no-one, I saw the poster on the notice board".  One of the two girls flanking the chap in the middle here makes a note.

They talk to me about the company a bit more, they talk about their re-shuffling engineering and wanting to press their position forward to a virtual machine the customer hosts on hardware; previously they had been providing a dedicated box.

I'm terminally not interested in this boring black blocky building which now perfectly reflects the boring blocky people inside.

And I give up, I lean forward, elbows on the table, and I gather the copies of my CV from the hands of the three people and I say:

"Look, I've spoken with your technical lead, and I'm scared to my core of your processes, I don't like what I've heard, it seems you're struggling to recruit and there are reasons for this you will have to identify yourselves; I don't think I can help you"

They are scowling a little here, I'm sure they're far more used to candidates who want the job.

"Indeed, I think somewhere you have a beige room with ranks of screens and engineers in stuff suits not talking with a great board or wiki with all the failing builds traffic lit from your little test driven development board...."

At this point the lady on the left looks at the guy in the middle, who has a little switch to his eye.

"And such a stifling, control freak, desperate development environment is not one I wish to be part of"

They thank me, and I thank them sincerely.  And I leave.

As I come out of the building the sun has come around, the black glass face of the building is now not so black, instead I can see inside, there are three long benches of PC's all facing a pair of chaps at the front sporting bluetooth ear phones in one ear.  Above their heads is a large TV screen with a list of running continuous integration tasks and each has a traffic light.  As I watch one goes red, one of the two larger men touches the headset at his ear and an engineer on one of the benches glances up and starts to scrabble about on their machine.

It is a sweat shop.  I was not only right, but so happy I'm driving off.

I felt like going and knocking on the glass and cooing at them "Come, follow me, be free, be free".

But instead I just drove home.

Prior me: Just coming into edit this before it goes live on Friday, guess what I'm watching... 

And I disagree with the approach of analysing FizzBuzz; analyse the interviewer.

My first PC from Watford Electronics (1994)

The year was 1994, I had just learned to program in Pascal, I was doing quite well in my A-Level computing course and my parents bought my brother and I a PC... With "Support".

Yes, they forked out quite a whack of cash just months before the Pentium processor came out to buy us a machine powered by an Intel 80486SX2, which ran at 50 megahertz.  It had 4 megabytes of RAM and a 200 megabyte hard drive, as well as a HDD floppy drive!  I was in love with this thing, and I'm a little bit sad when I think about it's fate later on.

We bought this beast from Watford Electronics, it included at home support for a flat fee, I'm pretty sure Watford Electronics never expected this to be an issue, but it was.

We came to use this machine, daily, without really knowing much about it at the time, but a 50Mhz machine was blisteringly fast to us, it had an S3 Trio VGA graphics card in it too and came with WE's own ISA expansion card to add a custom CD-ROM drive, which they touted as being "Dual Speed"... aka slow or very slow.

This was all fine until 1995... Yes a whole year passed.

The few friends with PC's at home had Escom Pentium based machines, having waited to ask their most affluent parents for them that Christmas gone by, and so it was my brother and I played catch up.

Sure, I had all the beans in the bag with Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS and my learning more and more about computing, but games were where it was at.

The first title to show some issues was CivII, which I got for my birthday from a couple of friends.  I loaded it up and it stuttered terribly on this machine; I know now that the bespoke card to link to the bus was the blame, it had no buffering and relied on the drive's throughput and this was too slow for the game.  So despite our machine appearing on paper to be more than enough to play, it struggled terribly.

So much so that my mother decided to pack the whole thing up, including my game, and send it to Watford Electronics... I'm not sure what they did with the machine, but it arrived back behaving exactly the same way as it had before, it was sub par by design, they couldn't admit that, but by damn it they had described this machine as being Dual speed and fast enough, so it was by damn it going to be.

And it was such that on a festering hot day in 1995 an engineer arrived, a suited, briefcase carrying engineer... from Watford Electronics... Under the auspices of their repair warranty service arrived to see... What?

Well he saw two kids playing games.  I think he expected an office or a school.

But no two kids and their sweaty sickly close bedroom, and he set about looking at the issues, and sure enough he agreed with us, grudgingly, but he agreed.  And set about trying to sort things out.

He reinstalled the machine, no dice, it was just as slow doing the same tasks with the software reinstalled.

He fettled about with the settings; which I had already done; resulting in things getting even slower.

And in desperation of the perspiration he reached into his bag and pulled out a selection of options, the first was a sparkling Intel Pentium Overdrive chip, which would have overlain the socket 7 and boosted us immensely.  I knew this was pretty damn expensive.  But alas his hand waved over this and selected a 486 DX2-66Mhz, he set up the motherboard and rebooted.

Telling me something I'd not understood until this point... "The SX Chip you have doesn't do floating point maths, it's all integer based".  A slight exaggeration, but about right, the SX was a DX which had failed certain tests, Intel had cut certain traces and so they sold the lower spec chip rather than writing off the failed DX in their ledger.

The DX2 however, only really made a difference in Doom... Which we played already, and it didn't make that much of a difference with the 66mhz to 50mhz jump being so small.

And so it was he reached once more to a different flap in his bag and he pulled out a tray - yes a whole tray - of 486DX4-100 chips... 100Mhz!...

Things ran like a dream then, even with his busting of my mobo jumper settings.

I pushed that chip to 114mhz on very rudimentary air cooling, and it worked well into the 2000's.  I loved that chip, and we got it by bemoaning the system.

The system itself, with the proprietary Watford stuff in it eventually broke down, I had gotten into tower cases too, so the large desktop case of mostly air was left, the hard drive failed, and the machine was itself lost in body but never in spirit.

That 486DX4-100 chip stayed with me a long while, I had it until at least 2003, and in use.

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.

1980's-1990's UK Education Review : Pt1

In this series I am simply going on a tour of my memory, mainly over my time at school.  My schooling started really at Junior School (7-10 year), we learned to roughly read in Infant school (5-7 years) but that was literally it, I just remember playing with toys at Infants and then being made to read at home.

So we'll start there infants school, we painted things, made collages, I do not remember a single day of structured learning.  Everything seemed to revolve around playing.

Highlights include anything with some structure, this included one day going from a classroom at the front of the school to a classroom at the back of the school, I'm guessing our teacher was suddenly ill so the class was divided between the five others.  And going into that other classroom the kids had "grown up" toys, this was lego - and lego technik - they had a TV with a video recorder and a programme of watching structured learning tapes.  There were actual projects on the various boards around the room, things the children had gone.  They'd done tadpoles, with the kids drawing diagrams of each stage f the tadpole development and they were currently doing cress.

I drank all this in, it was like night and day.

When my little brother came into the school three years later, he was in one of those more complex classroom, not the very plane almost dumb class I was in.

That very much reflects my opinion of my time at infant school, I was put in the dumb class, we weren't encouraged to read, we didn't do math, there weren't any really interesting projects, yet I saw this going on elsewhere.

My mother made me read with her at home, when it became very clear I was not learning at school.

And my grandfather I remember him watching me write and coming over to correct me, I remember very distinctly his showing me how to make the "8" shape rather than just drawing two circles atop one another.

So yeah, not very good, this takes us to 1989.

My Desktop PC History

My PC history and I literally mean PC's, so we're talking after my Atari ST, this is a list of the machines I've owned and used in order and a little bit about what I did with them.

486-SX-25 (1994)

The first PC I used was built by a company based in Baseford in Nottingham, it was at college and was equipped with an Intel 80486SX, it ran at 25Mhz, ran DOS 6.2 and a netware network layer.  It had 4MB of ram and basically was very much locked down, that was until we figured out how to quit out of the netware login screen (repeatedly CTRL+C whilst hitting enter fast).  The college had loads of these machines of this specification, the three main IT labs of course but then there were two more directly outside one of the lab doors, another in the head of Chemistry's office and a bunch in the library.

I primarily programmed in Turbo Pascal on these machines, I remember playing about with writing my first games on this in EGA graphics mode.

486-SX2-50 (1994)

My first home PC, it was from Watford Electronics and had their own ISA riser connecting to a dual speed CD-ROM, I remember Encarta amazed me, as well as working out how to just play CD's whilst programming.  I of course did my college work on the machine, and I remember my brother did his too.

The machine came with 4MB of RAM and a 200MB hard drive... MEGABYTE... I remember windows 3.1 ate into the disk significantly.

But DOOM came into view, now at the time I had no idea really what SX meant, but it had effects on DOOM's speed.  One of them was the maths.

I actually programmed around the limitations of t he SX chip without realising it and this came back to save me (or curse me) later.

Later we got Dark Forces and another 4MB of RAM, giving us a total of 8MB in this machine as I went to Uni.

But basically the SX had no floating point unit, it had only integer mathematics as well as a bunch of other operations being missing.  It was basically a DX chip which had failed QA and had come part of it disabled, but this was a "2" which meant it ran twice as fast as the machines at college.  And that speed difference was reflected in my little home brew games suddenly running twice as fast.

This remained my main and only PC going to Uni, but in my second year of Uni, sharing this machine with my A-Level studying brother I needed my own and these "Pentium" machines had been released.

Pentium-100 (1996)

The power of the penium, with the EDO ram SIMM's was so massive compared to the 486, and this was the first machine I started to program in C on.  Indeed, it was also the first machine I wrote Java on and even played with Linux.  But I never loved this machine.

Running at 100Mhz, it was blisteringly fast to me, but I was still using DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 for the most part.

I should have, it was the first machine I bought with my own hard earned money, I did keep it until my final year at uni, but by then I had started to build my own machines.... But I'd also been to work in IT.

HP Pentium-166 (1998)

This was a machine at work, it was mainly a windows 95 platform for me to work with, I soon had Windows 95 at home too, so things balanced up.  All I used this for was some very basic database work, which the prior incumbent in my job had left (and which was awful).

Compaq Pentium-II 233 (1998)

Another work machine and at 200Mhz, it seemed like the things of legend, but this was a compaq deskpro to which all the analysts and myself upgraded, with  massive 17" CRT monitors, they were really nice machines.

I did a bunch of Pascal programming on it, a bunch of Cobol and some database work (I think it was in FoxPro).

Pentium-III 300 (1999)

Returning to Uni for my final year I built this machine myself, I remember this was a slot-1 processor, and I put a whopping 32MB of RAM into it.  I wrote my dissertation on it and networked it to my older Pentium 100.

Voodoo3-2000 AGP.... Which I only sold in 2013 on ebay, at a profit.

Cyrix-150 (1999)

This was actually my pentium 100, but I found the Cyrix chip for sale for only £10 at maplins so bought it and stuck it in the old PC, to find it was a massive performance improvement when compiling and running both C and Java.

Celeron-III 450 (1999)

This was a machine I actually built for a customer, I spent a bit of time making PC's and making money doing so in the late 90's.  And this was one which stuck out to me because it was such a nice performing machine, it included a graphics card (I think it was a Voodoo3-3000).

The build was with a gigabyte motherboard using slot-1, but the processor was socket 370, buying it and using a daughter board was cheaper than buying a socket 370 motherboard, and performed no differently.  It actually made adding the cooler so much easier.

Pentium III 500 (2000)

I bought this after uni, just a new chip, with 128MB of RAM as I set off away from uni.  I just played a lot of games on this machine, dabbled with Java, but I didn't have the compiler suite we used at work to my programming was mostly all in the office.

Pentium III 500 (2001)

This was the office machine I had at the time, I'd had one before, but don't recall it, this one however was by the local computer firm in Redditch and I remember it was a 500mhz Pentium III.

GeForce... At some point at home in 2001/2 I got the first GeForce card at home and started to babble with OpenGL on Linux.

Pentium III 1ghz (2003)

Another office machine, this was a bod standard HP I think, the job here was C++ programming, but coming from a pure Borland using history (all the way from college to now) I was suddenly not in a Borland using shop and... well... I didn't stay at this job very long.

Pentium IV - 1.5ghz (2004)

A prescott Pentium 4... at the high speed of 1.5ghz, this was my first hyper threaded machine, it was built from the ground up for gaming... so it had 1.5GB of RAM (the most I could afford)... the dual thread pentium 4, overclocked to 2ghz on air.

A pair of GeForce 8800GTX in SLi.

I bought it to run Battlefield 1942 really well, and was really very good.  I also played national league Day of Defeat and started my dual obsessions with World of Warcraft and Eve-Online on this machine.

Core 2 Duo 3ghz - Wolfdale - 2.3ghz

I built this machine for my father, he didn't appreciate it at the time.

Core 2 Quad Q6600 - 3ghz (2007)

This was my main driver for years, and the machine I first put into the Cosmos 1000 case.  It had various RAM, disk, graphics configurations until the last iteration being a GeForce 260 GTX (squared) so this was two GeForce 260's on the same card in SLi together.... It was really good.

I spent time coding for Lordz Game Studio on this machine, as well as playing lots and lots of games.

Core i7-920 (2012)

Yeah, we're at Core i7.... the best I could accord for the i7 release set and it went into the same case as the Q6600 was in.  This machine was a main-stay until I actually swapped out the Core I7 (4 cores 8 threads) for a Xeon which was 6 cores and 12 threads... I did that in like 2016... so I've had 12 threads at home for a long old time.

Ryzen 5 3600X (2018) -> Ryzen 9 3900X

Team Red.... Aside from the cyrix I've always, always been Intel... Ryzen turned my head, and the 6c12t 2600 was the first I could get my hands on.  But the motherboard was purchased with upgrades in mind and the same machine now has a Ryzen 9 3900X 12c24t.

It was a mchine built around the 64GB of RAM, dual m2 NVMe and a stack of 4TB disks, all in a corsair obsidian case.

Stupid Things I've Been Told

Throughout my life I've had moments where people simply nay-say what I've told them... This became a very real trope (until I took up a marshal art and became very good at it) in my life and lead to a loss of confidence on my part, today lets take a look at some of them which I still remember:

English (1991)    AMBULATE

I used the work "ambulate" in a sentence, I was 12 or 13.  My mother immediately said "There's no such word", and I said "there is, it means to walk, and it's where the word Ambulance comes from"... She flat refused to accept this and really made me unsure; she was wrong, she has been wrong about many things, but this was one of the earliest times I actively recall her being dead wrong.  Her response also made me second guess myself, so much so that I sat and read the dictionary, other kids at school ribbed me about this for years after, but I read the dictionary.  I was right, ambulate is a word, it does mean to walk.

Engineering (1985)    METAL SPARKS

My Dad was in the door way of my Grandfathers garage, angle grinding part of the front of the family car, and there were metal sparks flying all over the place, to the left of the closed wooden door was a fabric cover over some garden furniture.  The sparks were flying and landing on this dry fabric.  And I said "that's going to catch fire".... I was 7 years old and I could see this cascade of burning sparks would set light to the fabric if it carried on.  My Dad turned to me and said "don't be stupid, there's nothing in a spark".  As though it was a zero weight particle an ethereal nothing, of course, we all know that a spark is a red hot but admittedly tiny fragment of metal, not only could it have set light to the fabric, but it could also have gotten into someones eye... But, I was seven, I was clearly wrong... No, no I wasn't.

Electronics (1992)    CD PLAYER

I was sat in the library with a selection of the annoying, ignorant, bully children who were my class mates, when one of the boys Richard ventured something about CD's, about their spinning... of course CD's spin, we all know this, that's why they're round and the lazer is set to slide back and forth.  Richard wasn't known as a braniac, but he was right.  Immediately a boy called Zahid took the utter and total michael out of Richard, really horrible child this Zahid was and he was one of a bunch of morons in my class... Martin, Martin, Paul and Zahid were a group of utter moronic and bullies; each with their own insecurities; and they took it out most days on me, but this day they dragged this poor Richard lad into it, who looked quite abashed, I decided to stick up for him... Well, never had I been so quickly and thoroughly insulted by a moron who knew nothing but how to ride his mouth.  Zahid, I hope your now very bald head knows just how wrong you were, and what a moron you looked flat arguing that CD's don't spin, because they do.

Computing (1984)    TYPING

Sat before the first BBC Micro that the school had bought and the teacher was trying to explain LOGO to us, he was leaning over the computer typing one handed upside down, and I could tell what he was trying to type... For I had had a computer at home for the last year, and I'd been typing in simple BASIC programs, so this LOGO thing looked very rudimentary even to my six or seven year old mind.  So I offered to do the typing for him, he was copying off of a sheet, he'd have been able to tell the class the command and then see me type it in and the turtle robot (or just the screen) complete the command.  And better yet, I'd have been so much quicker making the class feel far more interactive.  This teacher, Mr Allison, turned his eyes down on me like I was a dirty stinking urchin (which I likely was) who not only couldn't understand what he was doing, but it was far far beyond anything I could ever do with a computer; see we were a school intended to produce manual workers, no-one expected a kid from that school to end up being a programmer... I'd hazard a guess that a fair few are now, and I look back on that day thinking... Why did he say I couldn't possibly type?  When I could and can....

Computing (1993)    FLOPPY DISK FORMATS

I was always curious about computers and when my senior school created a "lab" with twenty Acorn A3000 computers I was eager to give these 2megabyte machines a whirl.  My machine at home was an Atari ST and it's floppy format was compatible with the Acorn machine (they both being nearly perfect compatible matches with MS DOS's format on the IBM PC).  But this lab was always closed, not always locked, but closed... But I started to let myself in; and one day I was caught in there, learning, programming and typing notes, by one of the teachers; I don't remember this guys name, he was never my actual teacher, but his lab was his coveted land and I think he was a little put out that I was there with two of his machines going doing different things at the same time, not just that, but I was doing things so much more quickly because I'd learned that the Acorn OS came with a RAM disk, and with 2MB of RAM I could assign 500-720K and basically copy the Floppy disk straight into RAM, work on it incredibly quickly, and then sync the data back to the disk... So I could do the work I was doing incredibly quickly.  He didn't like this, he didn't want to learn, he just wanted to make me look a fool.  So he asked me what the disks I was using were.  So I showed him, "You have an Acorn at home?"  No, I have an ST... Silence, he just stared at me, and he paced off to his desk and pulled a disk out his desk... "Go home and make me 10 copies of this".. and he handed me a box of blank disks... The disk was Lemmings... This teacher was literally giving me homework to commit copyright fraud... I didn't take that disk home, but I did return to his lab... turn on all the machines, and copy the disk once.. then with the two copies copied it on two more, then on the four machines I made the next four copies, and then I had the last two machines running the write of the disk as he walked back in... A mere ten minutes later.  "That should have taken you all night!".... Why... it's binary maths... 1 becomes 2... 2 becomes 4... 4 become 8.. here's your last two... "Aren't you the IT teacher?".... he just stared as I handed him his contraband and left the room.  I didn't like the man, but I was a black-belt in karate and knew who I was by then...