Surviving the stigma: The under cover geek.

Posted on by
1

A recent experience has made me aware at how much pressure I feel about hiding my geekiness and how I’ve gained over the years mental defence mechanisms and automatic self-censoring of my expression so as to seem “normal” around others in social situations.

I have become aware that I have a semi-concious editor metaphorically sitting on my shoulder observing me and suggesting ways to avoid mentioning anything to do with SciFi stories, quotes from films or technology unless someone else mentions it first. There’s a constant feeling that I should hide this side of me.

I think a great deal of this comes from my experiences at school. I was never in the in-crowd. In fact, I was often shunned and left out of all groups and bullied. This meant that I gathered quite a few coping strategies over the years, one of which is an automatic dulling, if not total suppressing, of all emotion if I find myself in a stressful situation. It’s very probably a very unhealthy thing to have but it was the only defence I had so as to cope in many of those years.

During the recent experience I mentioned earlier I found myself suppressing the geek side of myself more and more, fearful that the person I was trying to impress would not accept that side of me. This became highly stressful.

I’d like to be able to release my inner geek and have “geek pride” but the defence systems are now so firmly ingrained that I fear I can never be rid of them, unless in the company of know geeks.

So, why does society have this reaction to geeks? Well, I imagine that it’s because they are different. The normal will always look on the slightly eccentric with suspicion. Of course, the most extreme end of geekiness can be rather anti-social, but so can the extreme end of the normal womaniser or the normal alcoholic.

Anyway, it’s sad, but that’s the way society is. I’ll just have to try to deal with it and interface with it on its own terms.

 

Musings on Internet dating.

Posted on by
2

Having tried Internet dating for some time and getting absolutely nowhere it was interesting to read about some research done in the USA into how this technology is being used and seen by those using it. The results definitely resonated with my experience and those I’ve talked to who have also tried it.

From my own experience and that of those of the opposite sex I’ve talked to (except for a couple of notable exceptions) it seems that the great majority of both men and women who frequent the sites treat it more or less like an on-line shopping experience, with all the consumer ideas of the perfect product which this entails.

There does seem, however, to be a marked difference between what the two genders seem to be looking for in this retail experience.

As for the women, there seem to be two types on the sites, those looking in the most part for a perfect, boxed, shrink-wrapped “bFriend 2” with money-back guarantee and those with children who seem to be looking for an emotional crutch and child minder. Those who are the most picky seem to be the ones who have been through a divorce. This is understandable in a way as they don’t want to submit themselves to the same hurt and pain as they’ve experienced in the past.

The majority of the men are looking for something very different. They seem to see dating sites as seedy singles bars with needy women ready to do anything for “love” and this, from the shocking stories I’ve heard, mostly seem to involve kinky sex.

So, what about these sites which purport to offer a “scientific” matching system. Well, as the report mentioned above put it, they’re not exactly scientific. I’ve filled out the whole slew of personality profile questionnaires and very often the “matches” it gives (from the very small selection available) are very often laughable.

In my experience, the sites which have put the most emphasis upon complex matching have been the least able to supply any meaningful connections. Indeed, in my experience, the site which makes the most of its matching ability and advertises so on the TV never once gave me any matches who would respond to a simple “Hello”, let alone actually meet someone.

In addition, the advertising intimates that there are thousands of members of the opposite sex just waiting to get in touch with you when you join. Well, there are thousands of members, possibly thousands which match your criteria globally. However, if you trim it down to those who are actually within a realistic distance to make the logistics work and then filter out the vast majority of the members who are inactive (or merely spam-bots) you get down to a very, very small number, in the low hundreds, more likely in the tens. New member seem to appear in quite small numbers too, probably no more than five a week, on a good week, and most of those become disillusioned so quickly that they can be thought of as inactive members.

What’s even more problematic is that all these sites charge an exorbitant amount of money per month for this “service”. I have no gripe with paying for a service but some of these sites charge nearly £20. There is no way that a simple web interface to a database and some simple data extraction logic should cost this much to run. It’s close to being a scam.

So, in these days of isolated, static social circles what is the possible alternative for those who wish to find a partner? Actually, I’m not sure these is one. Internet dating seems to be the only game in town, even if it it is close to useless.
 

 

Mars attacks

Posted on by
Reply

Well, Mars is finally getting into a position where I can image it at a reasonable hour of the day (or night).

So, ths evening I had a doze in bed for most of it before getting outside and attempting to get at least one image of Mars.

Mars is rather more difficult to image tham Jupiter due to it being far smaller. Thankfully, for Christmas I got a 5x magnification lens which allows me to make the image on the “webcam” camera large enough to even attempt the task. Even so, with the degree of atmospheric disturbance I never thought I could get anything decent tonight.

Well, surprisingly, after a bit of processing in Registax, this is what I managed to obtain:

 

Astronomical observatory: News update

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been rather quiet about the observatory and astronomy in general in this blog for quite some time now. (Actually, looking back it was last June.) So, what’s been going on?

Observations.

When the weather has allowed I’ve been out a number of times, the most fruitful being around the end of October when Jupiter was close to opposition and hence the largest it can be.

During this time the weather was helpfully quite good with a number of days of exceptionally stable air giving rather good viewing conditions (known as “seeing”). which gave me a good opportunity to try out a time-lapse video of Jupiter turning.

It took a few hours to image Jupiter using a modified web-cam device and then a further half a day to process each of the video clips into single images such as this:

Each of the images was then again put into Registax, aligned and then made into a time-lapse movie:

Which does look rather impressive.

Unfortunately, after that period the weather hasn’t been very kind and Jupiter has drifted further away from us as we journey around the Sun. Still, Mars is on its way!

After the purchase of a new telescope at the new year (more later) I’ve managed to get out only a couple of times, mostly to do tests. The best image so far has been of the Orion Nebula taken by imaging a number of times with my Nikon D90 and then combining the sub-frames into a final image:

It could be better. The telescope mount wasn’t fully calibrated, I need a light pollution filter and the stars were twinkling wildly due to disturbed air. Still, it’s a start and far better than I could achieve with the Meade LX90.

Hardware

Most of my time in the observatory has been spent trying to find ways to stop water seeping in and causing mould to form. In the end I had to spray the whole of the outside of the base with a rubber sealant paint and drill some drain holes in the roof roller rails. These seem to have mitigated the problem but I’ll know better when there’s some more heavy rain.

Other than that, the biggest news is the purchase of a new telescope with a “German” equatorial mount. The fact that the new optical tube is larger too is a side issue as the difference in price between the sizes wasn’t that great and so the biggest which would fit the observatory and the budget was the one I went for.

The reason for the change was two-fold. Firstly, the Meade LX90′ mount is rather crude and wanders all over the place, making it useless for even medium length imaging of deep-sky objects. Secondly, the fork mount, when combined with an equatorial wedge, excludes much of the sky as the mount gets in the way of the camera.

Anyway, in the end, after quite some extensive research I decided upon the Celestron EdgeHD 1100, 11″ scope. That, along with the hardware to fit it onto the observatory’s pedestal and guide scope, cost a pretty penny.

It was only after I mounted it in the observatory that I found the one big problem with the guide scope (other than the weight) and that was that it won’t fit in the observatory. (In fact, the main scope only just fits when it’s at its easterly range of travel.) Still, other than that “Doh!” moment everything’s fine.


The new ‘scope at home.

Well, that brings things up to date really… More to do in the future.

My 30 year personal computing odyssey… So far.

Posted on by
2

The Journey Begins.

Sinclair ZX81

It was almost precisely 30 years ago today that my journey into the world of computing began. I remember the day that my parents bought the Sinclair ZX81 which was to become my Christmas present, we’d gone to Bedford to buy it in W.H.Smiths and it came in a brown cardboard box with nothing printed on the outside. We’d then all got into the car and whilst we drove up past St. Neots towards some shop on the Cambridge road I was able to open the box and start to read the manual. (We didn’t find the shop in the end and I can’t remember what it was supposed to be selling. Instead we turned back at a small roundabout and drove home.)

At the time I thought of computers as literally magical things. I’d seen them on “Tomorrow’s World” where a year or so before they were extolling the new technology which now cost less than a thousand pounds (showing the TI 44/9). Other than this I’d only seen computers on “Horizon” or in science fiction but here, now was one sitting in a small box on the back seat of my parents’ car beside me. I also marvelled at the ZX81 manual with its painting of a science fiction inspired landscape. (Why are computer manuals so much more boring these days?)

As for programming, at this time I’d only overheard conversations from my class mates at my new school who had had some lessons in the science block. They talked of mystical incantations and something to do with “print, print, print.”

Of course, this being a Christmas present, once we got home it was put away in a top cupboard, out of sight. But still, that was the beginning of the journey.

One Small Computer For A Man…

And so, Christmas Day came and I was at last able to get my hands on the ZX81. It was set up on a chrome steel and glass coffee table and connected to our old “Elizabethan” 12″ black and white portable TV which we’d used in the caravan on holiday. I already had a “Binatone” cassette recorder, which I remember getting for my birthday in ’77, but at this point it wasn’t able to be used as I had no tapes with software on. However, the Christmas of 1981 was spent cross-legged tapping at the flat plastic membrane keyboard typing in the examples from the manual.

It wasn’t long, however, until I soon hit the limit of the 1K memory, so my progress stalled for a while. It wasn’t until my birthday in February that I managed to get the 16K RAM Pack. Wow! How could anyone fill a whole 16K?! Well, I certainly couldn’t.

Anyway, at this point I think I should start compressing the time scales otherwise this post will become a book. Suffice it to say that the ZX81 was my mainstay computer for a further 15 months and it taught me the basics. It also taught me how to be patient after spending one and a half days typing in hex code out of the “Your Computer” magazine only for a thunderstorm to wipe out my work. A further two days of typing later and a rudimentary “Space Invaders” game was ready to play, which worked for about a minute until it crashed due to a typo somewhere in the pages of code.

The Steady March of Progress.

In the May of 1983 I finally persuaded my Dad to help me buy a replacement computer, a ZX Spectrum 16K. At the time this cost a huge amount, £125. Well, at the time £125 WAS a lot of money, at least for my family. Of course, the timing was awful as only a couple of weeks later Sinclair dropped the price of the Spectrum so that £125 would get your the 48K model. Later in the year I sold the ZX81 to one of my Dad’s work mates so I could buy a Fox Electronics 48K upgrade as many of the games I wanted to play by now required the larger memory. (Can you remember when games were all £4.99? Wasn’t it a scandal when they suddenly jumped to about £6 a pop?! :-)) I later bought the ZX81 back from the person I sold it to for a profit and it’s now in my loft.

The Speccy was the machine upon which I did most of my first real world work. This was helped by the addition of the Interface 1 and ZX Microdrives in the summer of ’84 along with the first printer, a Brother HR-5 thermal ribbon printer which could output at an amazing 30 characters per second. This combination took me right through to half way through my degree, upon which I wrote most of my essays using the “Tasword 2” word processor.

During this period I made my first computer purchase mistake. During the latter months of 1984 I had been reading “Your Computer” magazine and getting more and more enthused about the Memotech MTX series machines. They were sleek (for the time) and they even professed to have a ZX Spectrum emulator in the works. Best of all, they had a built in debugger/assembler/disassembler on board just like the “professional” RML 380Z I’d seen and used at school. How could it be bad?

So, after saving up my student grant (yes, they were magical things too) by basically not having a social life in the first term at Uni. (this wasn’t a concious decision) I spent £199 on a MTX500. This was a very bad move. The machine itself was OK, but being basically an MSX machine but without the compatibility and software being expensive and hard to come by it was a bit of a lemon. The Spectrum still got more use.

And On, Into The Future.

Sinclair QL

In the January of 1986 I managed to convince my Mum that I needed something more capable to do my University work upon and so along came the Sinclair QL.

This was a major leap forward. Not only did it come with a full office suite of programs, including a word processor, spreadsheet and database application, but it also had a procedural BASIC programming language and pre-emptive multitasking. i.e. Welcome to the modern world.

Suffice it to say that this machine was invaluable for my University work, not only as a word processor upon which I wrote my degree mapping project report (I won’t go into the story of the power cut in the halls as I was writing the conclusions) but it was also used to write programs to do some of the project work, such as normative mineral analysis and plotting up data for the remote sensing coursework.

It was also the machine which really got me into low level programming and assembler. QDOS is/was a beautiful and simple operating system to code assembler on and Motorola M68000 assembler is really quite high level, the combination of which made it simple to write programs. The high-water mark of which, for me, was a full emulation of the University College London BBC Micro terminal emulator engineered from their documentation. It was a combination of a DEC VT52 emulator and a Tektronix T4010 graphics terminal emulator with access to the BBC’s *FX commands.

The QL also acted as a my development machine for many projects during my MSc in Computer Science, especially those involving assembly coding. In a way, this is THE machine I learnt the most from.

Onwards and upwards.

I’m now going to speed up a gear and skim past my first floppy disk drive in ’87, the second hand BBC Micro to play Elite in the December of the same year and even the Atari 520STM in the summer of ’88. No, the next “big thing” was the first hard disk drive in 1989.

It was a revolution! You could store huge amounts! It was fast! It was expensive! Wow!

Actually, other than the first and statements these would seem laughable today. The device was a 28MB drive for the Atari ST and cost a whopping £400. In today’s money you should probably at least double that figure. Today 28MB would seem like a pitifully tiny amount of storage, enough to hold a couple of images taken with a digital camera, but it seemed cavernous. This was helped by the fact that the ST could only use a modified version of the FAT12 file system and the hard disk drivers could only use disk partitions up to 4MB in size!

Oh, and as for the the statement, “it was fast”, well all things are relative. There was a disk speed testing program which came with the disk utilities which could measure the sped of your drive. Bear in mind that this drive was a Seagate SCSI device… the maximum read speed was about 600K/s and writes maxed out at about 400K/s! Today I am getting similar speeds from my ADSL connection and I’m not that close to the exchange.

The Technological Slow Down.

Up until now it seemed that every year brought a new wonder. Indeed, with the arrival of first Minix and then MiNT on the Atari ST and TT030, I was getting closer and closer to having a UNIX box in the house. 

My home computing before the PC era.

Before the attack of the IBM PC clones

Actually, in 1993 I picked up a Sun 3/80 via Alec Muffett and then purchased for about £500 a Seagate 425MB hard disk to get it to run and then I DID have a UNIX machine at home. Things were looking up! 

After the PC revolution

My home computing set up in 1995, after the arrival of my second PC. 486DX2-66.

It wasn’t until 1994 that I made my first steps in the “PC” world, picking up the bare bones of a 386SX machine and then sourcing the components to make a working system so that I could try out this new Linux thing and play with Microsoft Windows. Overall I think it cost me another £500 or so to get it running.

Still, it was essentially the end of the “boost phase” of home computing as far as I was concerned. At this point I had effectively, be it in primitive form, everything I have here today. I had a network (10Base2), UNIX and Linux machines, a Windows box and Internet connectivity (albeit via dial-up modem). From then on it was merely a case of a gradual improvement in speed and usability.

Until….

Enter the Age of the iDevice.

iPhone

Yes, I can say that we have now entered a new phase of the computing story. It’s both a very good and a very bad thing.

Effectively, for me this was preluded many years before I got my first Apple when I got my Palm Pilot Pro and mobile phone (Motorola MR30 brick) in ’97. But it wasn’t really a revolution until I got my first smartphone in 2003, a Handspring (later Palm) Treo 600. It only had GPRS connectivity but it was e-mail on the go! It had limited web browsing. It was amazing at the time. (It also had amazing battery life as well, but that’s another story.)

But it wasn’t until I got the iPhone 3G that I really found how mobile connectivity should be. Simple, sleek, quick and it “just worked”. The iPhone 4 was just as good.

However, the bad thing about all these devices is the way that the iDevice simplifying of devices is starting to intrude onto the desktop (and laptop) devices. Locking the users out of being able to access and program them. It’s almost as if you’re only buying the privilege to hold and use the devices rather than own them. This is a potentially slippery slope.

Anyway, I’ve been rambling on for far too long now. So, I’ll conclude this piece and look forward to hopefully another 30 years of the odyssey to come. I think it’s going to be even more evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

[Edit: 7:50pm 12th November, 2011. : Replaced stock image of Sun 3/80 with image of my computer set-up in 1994 and 1995.]

On the fly VMs: Viable security model for downloaded apps?

Posted on by
4

I’ve been thinking… always quite dangerous I know…

I woke up early this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep and for some unknown reason I started thinking about downloaded applications and how to prevent trojans getting a hold. Then it came to me, why let the application have real access to the system, especially the filesystem?

I started wondering how feasible it would be to modify the operating system to create on the fly a virtual machine which is a clone of itself within which an untrusted application is run. This VM would not have any real write access to the filesystem but instead would have a copy-on-write shadow copy of the real one. For performance reasons it would have to have pretty transparent access to the graphics sub-system but this shouldn’t be too high a security risk. Once the application had terminated the filesystem write operations could then be vetted and a risk assessment and “reputation” for the application could be determined before actually making the changes to the real data on the disk.

Later on the application could either be manually unrestricted or, if it’s “reputation” was above a certain threshold, unrestricted manually.

Anyway, it was just a thought.

[Edit] More thoughts added as a comment.

Google+: Cooking with the curate’s egg?

Posted on by
2

About a week ago I managed to get hold of an invitation to Google+, the new, not quite publicly available, in development, nascent social site Google are toying with. It’s got quite a “buzz” campaign running about it at the moment and all the Technorati are flocking to use it. But is it any good? Or, more importantly, could it become good enough to win main-stream users from Facebook?

Well, it does have a lot going for it. For a start the interface is clean and the management of the social groups is light years ahead of Facebook’s. There are issues with some of the privacy decisions made in the design, such as limited circulation posts becoming visible to those outside the initial distribution is one of the people within the circle posts a comment with public distribution. However, these are teething problems and the site is still very much under development.

There is currently no API for external applications to be built, such as games. For some people this is a major problem, for others it’s a blessing. It has been stated that a development system is being developed so I don’t see this as a road block in future.

The feel of the site has one major down side for a social site currently. The whole experience seems quite solitary. This isn’t because of the lack of people to “friends” with but more that you have no idea if any of your friends are currently on-line. You may not want to interact with them there and then but it’s nice to know that they’re about.

The other problems I see currently is that Google+ seems to be mostly gluing other Google services together. The imaging uploading and sharing is done using Picasa, which isn’t ideal for the posting of quick images on the go from a smart phone. The messaging service is a poorly integrated link to Google Chat.

One of the most interesting new facilities which could actually make people prefer Google+ over other systems could be the “Hangout” audio/video conferencing and chat sub-system. However, this is crippled by two problems currently. The first one is related to the fact that you don’t know who’s on-line at the moment. i.e. you can’t just invite those you know who are around for a chat, you have to invite blindly. The second one is that you have to download and install a plug-in for your browser for it to work.

So, do I think that it could rival Facebook in the end. Hmm… at the moment I’m not sure. There are currently too many things which make it less immediate and interactive with regards to interacting with your friends. Also, currently the reliance on glued on functionality from other Google services which don’t quite match with a social sharing system could well be a long-term problem.

So there you have it, at the moment it’s a curate’s egg, good in parts. I don’t want to damn it so early in its development but I am a little worried that the early reputation may stick. Let’s hope it does come to rival Facebook as that needs competition, especially as the developers seem to be getting into the Firefox and Gnome developer’s mind sets and changing things for change’s sake and seeing themselves as the only arbiters of good design.

Flash, bang, what a picture.

Posted on by
Reply

On Friday afternoon an old friend posted on my Facebook wall a link to an article about a new supernova discovered on Thursday in one of the arms of the Whirlpool galaxy (M51) and wondered if I’d seen it.

Fortuitously, Friday evening was practically the clearest sky I’ve seen in Oxford so after Saturn became eclipsed by the house roof (which now happens annoyingly early) I decided to have a go at imaging it.

After I having to re-aligned the telescope, as the LX90 mount doesn’t seem to take care of accumulated pointing errors very well and was hence pointing in the wrong part of the sky, I managed to get on target. I swapped the eye-piece for the camera, found a nearby bright star to get focus and then moved back onto the subject.

I tried a couple of exposures, all taken using an infra-red remote control so as not to cause the ‘scope to bounce around, but only one of these was usable. The trouble is that the LX90’s mount isn’t that good at tracking the sky either, even with an equatorial wedge. It seems to jerk forward randomly every minute or so making exposures longer than about a minute practically pointless. Still, with the level of light pollution, even a minute’s exposure creates a mostly orange image.

Anyway, I had one usable image…

DSC 0095
Original image.

As can be seen, the galaxy itself is quite a subtle feature, mostly obscured by the reflected glow of the Oxford light pollution. So, the next task was to try to filter this out and enhance the galaxy within the image. I did this by adjusting the colour curves for each of the three colours and then adjusting the overall curve.

M51 full scene 2
M51 full scene 2

As you can now see, the light pollution has been greatly subdued and the galaxy stands out far greater. You can still see an artefact caused by the optics of the telescope, the subtle ring of orange with a bright dot in the centre, but this can’t easily be removed.

All that needs to be done now so as to make it an instructive image is to crop, flip (so as to remove the inverting of the image caused by the optics) and annotate…

M51 annotated cropped
M51 annotated cropped

And there it is!

Not quite as good as you’d get from a professional set up but adequate to show the supernova.

The making of an observatory

Posted on by
Reply

Quite soon after the purchase of my telescope last August I determined that the time and effort it took to deploy the ‘scope and set it up meant that most clear evenings weren’t going to be able to be utilised. Almost as soon as I’d got it all ready it was time to pack things away again, or the clouds had rolled in. I needed a fixed observatory which would allow me to start observing quickly.

After doing research on the ‘net, in early October I finally plumped for a 6ft x 6ft rolling roof shed from Alexander’s Observatories and sent an e-mail asking for a quotation. At the same time I did the same for the patio base foundation from a local landscape gardening firm, N.V.Firmin. Little did I know how long both of these stages of the project would take. In fact, I imagined that there could be a possibility of having it functional by Christmas.

Well, at least the landscape gardening firm got back to me quickly. However, after getting the quote I was a little disappointed to learn that the start date for the works would be after Christmas sometime. Still, having not heard anything from the observatory company I wasn’t too worried about the delay.

Time ticked ever onward and October became November and November became December. Finally, over two months after my initial contact, I got a reply from the observatory company. To be honest I was expecting never to hear anything at all at this point and was starting to look at alternatives. Still, the quote was good so I gave the go-ahead and sent the deposit, which was cashed on Christmas Eve.

Everything went quiet for a few weeks and it wasn’t until the end of January that I heard from the landscape gardening company. Typically they wanted to install my patio and fencing the weekend I was away down in Cornwall for my and my Dad’s birthday. (Don’t you love the way life works that way?). Anyway, they started work the day before I left so I was able to survey their markings on the lawn after I got home (in the dark) and made amendments. For good measure I drew a sketch plan and taped it to the inside of my patio doors. I was very glad to discover after my return that everything was in order and a very nice job had been made.

patio1
Early February: The patio is almost complete. (The hole is for the pedestal foundation.)

At this point I had assumed that the observatory company’s quote of 8 to 12 weeks for delivery was still on track and that soon I’d get the template for the pedestal base foundation. However, I’d not heard anything since before Christmas, so I sent an e-mail informing the company that the base was ready and could I please have the template…

Another month passed and I was about to send another e-mail when out of the blue the template appeared. It was now 10 weeks after I’d paid my deposit and was getting a little concerned that I hadn’t heard anything more.

A couple of weeks later I sent off another e-mail and was surprised to get a reply back within three days informing me that work on my build would be starting in a couple of weeks and the delay was caused by a number of large observatories in the queue before mine. This, I assumed, meant that the timer for the delivery of my unit would then start, i.e. it would be 8-12 weeks from that point. I was not that happy.

You an imagine then the pleasant surprise I got when just a couple of weeks later I received a text message asking if it was OK to deliver the shed the following Thursday. Of course I said yes!

So, after months the day of the observatory arrived… 7th April, 2011.

Nick duly arrived at 8:30am, not long after his ETA and surprising seeing as he had driven directly from Norfolk, and he started right away… with the help of the first coffee of the day.

1stbase
8:35am: The base goes down. (Note the first coffee of the day.)

Due the relatively small size of the observatory Nick was able to prefabricate most of the parts and carry them all complete in his van, so in came the base and quickly the chipboard floor panels went down, cutting a hole for the pedestal.

cuttinghole2
8:47am: Base complete, pedestal hole cut.

It didn’t then take very long until the walls came in one at a time, they were lined with single ply and the observatory started to take shape.

wallsup
9:48am: The walls are up.

Nick at this point was on his third mug of coffee, along with biscuits. It’s thirsty work, especially when it’s the hottest day of the year so far and the area’s a bit of a Sun trap.

The next part of the build was to install the supports for the roof rails and the rails themselves. Basically, the supports are just 75mm fence posts. The horizontals slot into recesses in the walls and are supported by other posts at the most distal end from the shed.

railsupport2
11:18am: The roof rail supports are being fitted.

Once these were complete and the aluminium tracks installed it was time to install the roof. The main wood lattice structure was delivered as a single unit. Onto this was screwed the part of the southern side of the shed which slides with it before, finally, the wheels were installed. The whole thing was then lifted by the both of us onto the shed.

onwiththeroof
12:15pm: The roof structure is on.

The roof was now fitted with chipboard sheets which were then covered with roofing felt before more shuttering was installed at the gable ends. The project was starting to look almost complete. More coffee helped… And most importantly, the roof rolled.

theresherolls
2:05pm: The roof rolls for the first time.

From this point on things slowed down a little as it was all about installing the final details such as the door, the roof locks. Once these were done it was time to bolt down the pedestal.

pedestal
3:10pm: The pedestal is installed. Build complete.

And so, by half-past three the installation job was complete and Nick was on his way back to Norfolk.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening setting up my telescope for the first time in its new home. I had to rotate the pedestal by one bolt hole so that it was closer to being aligned north-south and then level its top.

Although the basic structure was now complete there was still no power in there and most importantly the strut which joined the two rail supports together was rather inconveniently at nose height. This would be rather tricky to navigate in the dark so I needed to raise it above head height. Also, I wasn’t happy with having the chipboard floor exposed to the weather and so I decided to clad the base with some wood cladding. Another inconvenient problem was that the eastern folding panel was too close to the ‘scope and hence couldn’t be folded down.

All these problems were fixed the following weekend. I used a sledgehammer and a block of wood to ease the whole observatory 5cm away from the house, relieving the folding panel problem before re-engineering the strut and bolting the legs down.

finished
The Weekend: The finished product, well almost.

And so it’s finished… well almost. I’ve still got to paint the inside and then there’s the proper final alignment of the ‘scope mount but it’s mostly there. I certainly didn’t expect last October that the whole project would take six months to complete.

But does it meet my requirements? It would be a bit sad if it didn’t. Well, let’s say that I can now go from deciding to go out to do observation to getting the first object in the eye piece in a little over four minutes and it takes a similar amount of time to close things down again. So, yes. A definite improvement on the 40 minutes it took previously.

Enthusing teen minds: Why today’s computers won’t create tomorrow’s programmers.

Posted on by
12

The recent 30th anniversary of the launch of the Sinclair ZX81 and the subsequent post on his blog by Jim Finnis brought back to me a recurring thought that today’s computer technology is the antithesis of that required to enthuse a teenager to want to discover and play.

The computers of the early 80s were a blank canvas. You plugged them in, switched them on and (hopefully) the input cursor blinked at you. There was no decoration, no clutter and it was something waiting for YOU to do something to it.

Not only this but with the manual which came with it a 13 year old could within 5 minutes print their name on the screen. Within 10 minutes, at least with the second generation, make a funny noise. And within half an hour he or she could have his or her name scrolling up the screen in different colours whilst making unmusical noises and annoying their parents… they were hooked!

Now, let’s look at today’s technology…

The desktop or laptop computer takes an age to start up (i.e. more than 5 seconds) and totally insulates the user from what it is.

Smartphones are usually on all the time so don’t have this problem. Similarly tablets.

They’re immediately brimming full of functionality all vying for your attention, but it’s also incredibly locked down. You can do absolutely anything… ANYTHING as long as it’s what the visionary who steered the programming teams thinks that you should want to do. Woe betide you if you want to do anything different. It’ll either ignore you or give you an unhelpful suggestion in a dialog box. You can be creative, but only in the ways you’re told you can be.

So, what about the art of programming?

Well, on tablets and smartphones forget any native fun. Apparently this is too subversive. On the desktop it’s only slightly better (and I’m not singling out any desktop OS here). What are your options?

Well, on MacOS and Linux you can open a shell window and all sorts of interpreters and compilers are available and all sorts of graphics libraries to use with them too. You would think that this would be the ideal playing ground. Sorry to burst that bubble. It’s a great playing ground if you’re already a programming expert. It’s like taking a 5 year old into an engineering workshop, sitting him down and then complaining when he doesn’t build a car as he had all the tools available to him to do it and hence it must be his fault.

No, these environments are hopeless to teach and enthuse. There’s so large an energy barrier that it’s too daunting to even try. Also, how many lines of code in one of these modern development environments would it take to do the equivalent of the following?: 

10 FOR x=1 TO 100
20 FOR y=0 TO 7
30 INK y : PAPER 7 - y
40 BEEP 1,y
50 PRINT "Noisey coloured text"
60 NEXT y
70 NEXT x

I bet you’ll find that it’s quite a large number of line of code using all sorts of weird and wonderful libraries, possibly some non-standard ones to do the sound and a whole lot of code to manage the framework to create a window with the correct attributes and define the font etc. Hopeless!

Oh, and when it comes to drawing lines and circles etc. Oh dear.

Of course a great many people think that a computer with similar functionality to the old BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum would never be able to compete in the mind of a teen when they have all that touch-screen goodness and Angry Birds to play with. I beg to differ. It was most delightfully illustrated that this is profoundly not the case in the second episode of the BBC’s “Electric Dreams” series (unfortunately not available to watch on-line) where the family was given a BBC Micro to play with. The teenage son brought his best friend home from school to play with it and they thought it was awesome. They liked that it was a blank sheet that they could make do what they wanted and not be told what they should want to do by the device. And, of course, what they wanted it to do was make silly noises and write their names on the screen in different colours. It sparked enthusiasm!

So, what can be done?

First of all we need to ignore the idealists who think everyone should start their programming life learning something worthy and object orientated. Once the kids are hooked they can learn that later. Also, that’s not how peoples’ minds work. You don’t see object orientated recipe books for a reason. Also, however annoying to the seasoned programmer, line numbers help understand the sequential way that programs work. In other words, the early 80s micro BASICs got it mostly right. BASIC does stand for “Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” after all.

Firstly, any system which is going to enthuse also HAS to have as its core functionality the “5, 10, 30 minute” teen grabbing fun element outlined near the beginning of this post. Without it the whole thing’s lost. Any system would also have to allow growth. Just as BBC BASIC allowed the nascent programmer to grow into using procedures so should any new project, and possibly more, such as variable typing, scoping etc. Line number could be made optional in an advanced mode.

Secondly, the freedom of the code itself is far less important than the freedom to discover, so any project should not use a viral license such as the GNU Public License (GPL) but instead use something such as the BSD license.

Thirdly, and helped by the above, the core should be written in a platform neutral way with the platform specific interface on top. In this case, probably the best platform to use would be the GNU compilers and specifically that implementation of Objective C with the QT libraries to interface with most operating systems (except, notably, Apple systems, especially the iPhone/iPod/iPad).

The biggest fly in the ointment with this whole pipe dream is that I just don’t have the skills to develop such a system. (Another would be getting people such as Apple to allow the system to be made available via their App Store type portals.)

So, anyone interested in starting a project? 😉