Progress is not to be sniffed at
n our occasional series profiling the exciting technological developments of our greatest scientific institutions, we bring news from Warwick and Leicester universities, where a joint project has successfully increased the sensitivity of robot noses.
Despite having very few sensors, the nose in their experiments can now successfully tell apart the smell of milk and bananas, which should be useful in cutting down the perilous amount of milk-banana confusion in modern Britain.
And what, you ask, made all the difference?
A mixture of polymers coating the sensors. That’s right. The team created artificial snot. Now it just needs to create a little aluminium hankie for when the robot needs to blow its nose.
Wipe out
If any of you think that your predecessors didn’t have fun at work, Nigel Kitcher recalls his days working for the British Internal Combustion Engine Research Institute.
‘We had a mini-computer,’ he says. ‘The hard drive format command was called “WIPE” and took the the volume name as the parameter, so my boss decided that we should call the hard drive partition “BUM”.’
You don’t get that on MySpace.
No quarter given on half measures
Back to the Stack, our very own Backbytes pub, and the search for a landlord with the right sort of optimistic or pessimistic tendencies. Our little debate about whether a true curmudgeon thinks the glass is half empty or half full has inspired some even deeper thoughts.
‘The only thing you need to know about a glass which is half full, half empty or only half there (to be completely accurate) is that when in that state it is time to order another,’ opines Bruce Parker at Computer Software Group.
‘Chris Jeffries may claim his pint is half full, and Roger Audley may see his as half empty, but only the truly wise man realises that the beer is flat,’ adds Richard McLean, who seems to have some pretty disappointing locals close to his work at Highlands & Islands Enterprise.
Short sited
To Woolwich Crown Court, where Judge Peter Openshaw recently brought the internet terrorism trial he was hearing to a halt while a witness was giving evidence about an extremist web forum.
‘The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a web site is,’ he said, adding that he hoped a computer expert should ‘keep it simple’ when he gave evidence.
Later the Judicial Communications Office attempted to clarify the situation by insisting that the judge was ‘entirely computer literate’.
Which was just as well: the trial was in its fifth week.
Jigsaw pieces
More news of exciting new uses for an uninterruptible power supply.
‘My friend did not want to pay the charge of 50p per cut from Wickes to get a 2.4m x 1.2m sheet of chipboard into his car,’ says Matthew Lowy at Compelsolve. ‘So he put the UPS in the boot and ran his jigsaw from it in their car park.
‘It quite happily ran it long enough to get the sheet into Golf GTI compatible pieces without running flat. But with some questioning glances from shoppers.’
Which we can all agree is a practical way to save 50p, provided the office server doesn’t crash while you are putting up your shelves.
Car trouble
We are inspired by the news that a motorist wanting £500 to respray his Ford Capri applied for National Lottery funding to do it.
So we ask: who has the worst car in the whole of information technology?
We get enough of IT salesmen talking about how excitingly fast their new car is, especially when most of them spend a lot of time on the M25 in second gear.
Frankly, we are more interested in your embarrassing, sad cars. The cars that your mates don’t want next to them in the car park.
If you want to embarrass your colleagues by nominating their cars, so much the better. If you want to snap a picture of the car in question, best of all. And by the way, you don’t get lottery funding for a respray.
Feeling a bit sicks
Another six-word IT story, inspired by Capgemini’s Andy Mulholland.‘System error. Stress levels up. Pub.’
Any more?
Driven insane by motorway signs
We’ve been asking for the most irrelevant electronic motorway sign, and this week it’s an M25 special.
‘When I worked in north Yorkshire I used to frequently travel home along the A1(M),’ says Andrew Johnson. ‘I once saw a sign indicating that there were problems on the M25 when I got to the Boroughbridge area. In the three and three-quarter hours that it should take to get to the congestion, it would have cleared,’ he says, optimistically.
‘While travelling on the M4 I saw a sign informing me of congestion on the M25,’ says Ian Reed. Not so ridiculous – except that he was travelling west.
‘I suppose that if I kept going, had an amphibious car and filled up in the middle of oceans, after a journey of nearly 25,000 miles it might just have cleared.’
In our experience of the M25, that’s a bit optimistic.
Fitting in
Neil Smith at Harrow College recalls from his many years as a manager in IT that FIFO once had a different definition.
Used in what us kids now refer to as ‘team building’, Neil’s ‘generic FIFO rule’ was a handy phrase which managers used to encourage staff to bond together.
It stood for: ‘Fit in, or…’ We leave the rest to you.
Stacking up
Rod Main, meanwhile, is still thinking about the definition of a stack: that is, you put things on the top, and take them off the top (as opposed to a queue, which is being called a ‘FIFO stack’).
‘When the M20 shuts because of weather, strikes or whatever, thus holding up the ferry services, the police put into place “Operation Stack”. Surely this is a misnomer because the first in will be first out, which is the definition of queue,’ he says.
‘By extension, travel reports shouldn’t say “traffic is stacked up for miles” but that it is queuing for miles.’
In true ‘oh no it isn’t’ panto spirit, Kevin Groves at Ardo UK writes to berate us for claiming that there is no such thing as a FIFO stack. ‘Of course there is. One such example is a keyboard buffer,’ he says.
‘Definitely a queue, not a stack,’ says Nick Ebbitt at Premier Line Direct.
‘This was one of the first things I learned and probably the last thing I’ll remember from my computing degree course. As I originally suggested The Stack as the pub name, can I have my name above the front door?’
No. And no picture of a keyboard either. So we need some suggestions.
Percentage point
Following up our story on Sheffield University’s library, where the documents were consistently more than 1,000 per cent relevant, Paul Manning at Glow Safe points out: ‘If a document is 1165.5 per cent relevant, and you want something that is 100 per cent relevant, then surely 1065.5 per cent of it is irrelevant.
‘Therefore, if 1065.5 per cent is irrelevant compared with 100 per cent relevant, this means it is actually only 9.38 per cent relevant.’
Cheap chip shots
More chipsets, and a little local rivalry, after our request for a definition of the Plymouth chipset.
As Andy Williams at Ealing NHS PCT comments: ‘The Plymouth chipset appears to be on the Plymouth shoulderset’.
Michael Aspaturian at British Energy describes the Plymouth: ‘Limited port facilities coupled with an unpredictable bus fed from a decentralised hub. It is vastly inferior to the more powerful Portsmouth and Southampton chipsets.’
For an alternative view, Andrew Chapman, a Plymouth Argyle fan in exile at Leeds City Council, adds that it shows ‘superior performance levels, and remains a far more reliable and stable option than some bigger names from the past which it has now eclipsed, performance-wise.’
Dawn of the dead
John Loader forwards us an email from Viking Direct’s customer support department, which is apparently staffed by zombies.
‘Please do not reply to this automated email as it is not received by a live person,’ he says. Some jokes just write themselves.
Swim for it
We suggest you pop along to Google Maps, and ask for directions from New York to London.
Thanks to Bruce Parker at Computer Software Group, we discover the following steps: ‘23. Turn right at Long Wharf 0.1 mi. 24. Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi, 29 days 0 hours. 25. Slight right…’
But watch out for the delays on the M25.
Chipsets fall on dodgy grounds
The idea of football team chipsets seems to have got your juices flowing.
Chris Pritchard suggests The West Ham: Inconsistent performance, uses high-risc transactions with potential to go down because of illegal operations.
Antony Hawkins donates the Old Trafford: Excellent performance but runs very hot, so has loads of fans which whine at the slightest problem, and EllandRoad: Performance declines rapidly with time while losing huge resources.
Chris Ormiston prefers The Man City: does not function well when trying to access the net.
Any ideas for celebrity chipset names?
Cornish nasty
Back in Cornwall, where Intel’s use of Penryn for a chipset name has alarmed the local businesses, we encounter jealousy from nearby Plymouth.
‘I always thought that Penryn was just a host for Falmouth’s job centre, but apparently there are some businesses there,’ says Kerry Hoskin at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, alerting us to the concerns expressed on local web site This Is Cornwall that the town would slip down the Google rankings as surfers get directed to the new range of Intel computer processors instead of Penryn the town.
‘And as any good Cornishman will tell you, Cornwall is not a county of England, it is a country near England,’ says Kerry.
If anyone has a description of the Plymouth chipset, we’d like to hear it.
Post haste
Mike Ward writes from Caradon District Council in, as luck would have it, Cornwall.
‘I noticed that on the wrapper my Computing is delivered in are written the words: “Please deliver immediately”. I have been posting first class letters for years now and it has never occurred to me that if I write “Please deliver immediately” on the envelope they might arrive any faster than an ordinary first class letter.
‘I am going to try posting letters second class with the words “Please deliver reasonably quickly” on them, to see if they arrive as quickly as first class ones do. I will gather some results and keep you posted.’
As he is posting material all the way from Cornwall to England, we await Mike’s results with interest.
Slowly but surely
Just when you think you have seen the silliest electronic road sign, along comes someone who has seen an even sillier one.
‘I was driving southwards down the M1 and slowly, along with many others, passed an unwarned slow-moving large vehicle,’ says Justin Griffith at Swanland Systems. ‘Afterwards I saw signs warning that a slow vehicle was due to arrive later on the stretch of motorway in which I was driving.’
Brass in pocket
We carry the following information for educational purposes only, as Tony Spence knows someone who was involved in investigating Kensington’s parking meter pilferers.
‘First get yourself a parking-meter-opening key – it helps if you are employed to empty or maintain parking meters, you get one with the job,’ he says.
‘The basic method of augmenting one’s income was simply removing the loose coins from the meters; in every meter there would be up to two coins which could be liberated by simply triggering the coin feed mechanism. Then there were coins which failed to enter the coin box and could be trousered. This was in the region of two or three coins per meter.
‘In the Kensington meter thefts the miscreants went a step further and they had keys to open some of the meter cash boxes.’
Kensington’s internal investigation went as far as secretly checking the meters before they were due to be emptied by the staff, to see if any dishonest meter emptiers were giving themselves an unofficial bonus.
‘It is not that many years since I followed a “meter monitor” down a street in Manchester and in a matter of minutes saw him pocket cash from a dozen meters,’ adds Tony.
You wouldn’t want to be stuck behind him in a bank queue, would you?
Spinning around
Steve Quinn at South Tyneside Council spots that the BCS has joined in our amusing ‘ unfortunate project names’ thread.
‘In the 26 April edition of Computing there is an advert from the BCS regarding its recent upgrade to CMMI v1.2 entitled “Software Process Improvement Network (Spin)”.’
Capital solution for cAPS riddle
Sometimes we just put something in to check if you actually did your Microsoft Word training module, and the good news is that at least 100 of you did.
Which, if you divide it into the total readership of Computing, is a pretty good success rate.
The story so far: last week we were prompted to ask whether Microsoft could provide software to help people who accidentally turned on the cAPS lOCK key. And sure enough, it does.
‘As Microsoft Word shows us in a screen shot: “Correct the accidental usage of cAPS LOCK key”,’ says Charles Etchells at ProjectMandate, whose name was chosen at random from all of you who emailed us.
‘When the check box is ticked not only does the incorrect capitalisation get corrected automatically, but the caps key is also turned off for you. Service or what?’
Jon Ley at CMi suggests: ‘Try turning the caps lock on and then start typing. As soon as you get past the first word, Word automatically corrects the case of this word and turns the caps lock off for you.’
Oh, by the way, it is also in all the Microsoft Office 2007 applications, thus rendering the cAPS lOCK key as the PC equivalent of the appendix.
And so, none too soon, we close the correspondence on this subject, as we have belatedly decided we have far more important things to worry about.
Queue mania
Such as, when is a stack not a stack? Last week we linked to a FIFO patent, which is not convincing anyone.
‘Anyone who has ever been to a post office will instantly recognise that a less esoteric name for a FIFO stack is “a queue”,’ says Alan Griffiths.
‘You neglected to say when Mssrs Suzuki and Moriya were granted their patent but I’m quite sure there have been many provable cases of prior art here in the UK.’
Terry Richter at South Downs College adds: ‘I’d like to clarify the stack debate: LIFO is a stack, FILO is a stack, FIFO is a queue and a LILO can be very useful when your brain starts hurting.’
If only the patent examiners had more experience of our UK post offices and access to the expertise of the Backbytes community.
Six-pack
We were contacted by the representative of the CTO at Capgemini, Andy Mulholland. Andy’s blog at www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2007/04/6word_it_stories.php has been challenging readers to come up with six-word IT stories and he would like to share some with us.
We liked: ‘Tape backup? Um...what tape backup?’, ‘Architects? Too expensive for my project’, and our slightly melancholy favourite: ‘I want requirements; you provide solutions’.
OK, so Wired did something similar last year (which Andy acknowledges – it is the blogosphere after all), and we wished we had got to it before either of them, but take a look.
After all, it is good to see consultants thinking about how to do things economically for a change – we should encourage them.
Cash reward
Someone doubted the veracity of Westminster Council’s parking meter losses last week. You really should know better.
‘Around 1980 the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea discovered that cash was being stolen from its parking meters to the tune of several thousand pounds per week,’ says Tony Spence.
‘At the time it was one of the few London boroughs actually making a profit from parking meters, and Westminster made a resounding loss. I am surprised that the amount allegedly stolen from Westminster’s parking meters is as little as £50,000 per week,’ he adds.
Perhaps someone could write in and tell us how to do it. We are not considering it, and we are certainly not encouraging you do it, but it is handy to know, in case of civil strife, for example.
What on earth?
We think we might have a winner for the motorway sign that is furthest from the place it is referring to:
‘While driving on the A1(M) I saw a sign for the “Earth Centre”, which by my reckoning is almost 4,000 miles away,’ says Phil Hartswell.
Own goal
Finally, this week’s placename: Intel chipsets. Carl Whalley has an end-of-season football theme.
‘Stamford: Has the largest cache and runs for long spells with no penalties. Highbury: Solid but dull performance producing lots of hot air.’
More please. And by the way, Carl, they do not play at Highbury any more.
Caps lock question reverting to type
Another solution to the cAPS lOCK problem.
‘Would it not be easier to simply suggest to Microsoft that it should have an option in Word to reverse the case? Surely this would be a much more economical option,’ says Michael Lang at Nielsen Media Research, who rather flatteringly seems to have overestimated our influence.
We have a long and unsuccessful record of giving unprompted advice to Microsoft, starting from a day many years ago when Bill Gates, then still chief executive, solicited our opinion on a new release of Microsoft Windows. Backbytes launched into a carefully prepared and devastating criticism of a technical flaw. ‘That is not the question you should be asking,’ said Bill, turning to someone else.
So in the interests of brevity, we bring what we assume will be Microsoft’s response: ‘Can’t you just type properly? We are busy.’
Doubt the enemy
We are feeling a little cynical this week, as is Steve Messenger at Reuters. He was reading in Computing about Westminster Council introducing payment systems for parking meters that use chip-and-PIN payment.
He does not believe that £50,000 is stolen from Westminster’s parking meters every week.
‘I suspect this has less to do with theft and more to do with being able to instantly deduct the parking penalty from the victim after 14 days,’ he says.
‘The hapless drivers would then have to try to get their money back rather than the council trying to get it from them.’
Place your bets
Peter Hastings at Denplan comes from Cornwall, so read this in a thick Cornish accent: ‘My friend Sebastian Carley and I were pleased to learn that Intel has decided to name one of its latest technologies Penryn, which is a town of our home county. We look forward to a whole series of Cornish place name chipsets. Our bets are on Chacewater (has a lot of traffic, and steals resources from neighbouring addresses) or Truro (combines three streams and does little else).’
Any more place name chipsets?
Stack attack
‘I was horrified,’ begins Kevin Campbell at EDS. Horrified: Why? ‘…to read the suggestion that there is no such thing as a FIFO stack.’
Frankly we are a bit more easygoing about this technical debate, which must be in the top five most obscure that we have ever had. And that is saying something.
However, Kevin points us towards US Patent 4062059, granted to Seigo Suzuki and Yoshiaki Moriya: ‘In an information processing system comprising a central processing unit, an input/output unit and a first-in first-out stack connected between these units there is a buffer control circuit provided for detecting the full and empty states of the first-in first-out stack…’
Well that, we conclude, puts the tin hat on it. Unless you know different.
Half measures
All this talk of stacks encourages us to mentally pop out for a pint to The Stack, where the Backbytes pub is still looking for a landlord.
‘Chris Jefferies clearly cannot have any claim to the rights of being the landlord of The Stack as he seems to think a glass is better half full than half empty,’ says Roger Audley at Nottinghamshire County Council, whom you might recall once removed half the shoes from the Freemans Catalogue.
‘As a landlord, it is far better to convince the punters that a glass is half empty, so forcing them to buy more of an identical product that perhaps they were not quite ready for, that they were not sure they really wanted, that they knew would ultimately be a mistake…’
You know where he is going with this, don’t you?
‘This principle has also been clearly proven by the arrival of Windows Vista.’
Our survey says...
Our old mate Anthony Hawkins at Sheffield University has been looking for a publication on the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors web site, the home of people who measure things very precisely.
After searching for ‘Planning, Public Policy and Property Market’, he got 11 pages of results: ‘All but the last result on page 1 have a relevance of 1165.5 per cent. The next eight results are a mere 1165.49 per cent relevant – after that, the results tail off very rapidly, plummeting to just 100 per cent on page 2.’
What makes a result 0.01 per cent less relevant? By the end of page 11, the last result is sadly only 99.98 per cent relevant. That is quite a library they have got there.
Fun and names with projects
‘Some years ago I worked at a company developing a product whose project name was Sam (serial advanced multiplexer),’ says Ian Cummins at Network Instruments. ‘When it was finished and the next project started I asked the head of development what the new project would be called. “Son of Sam” he said.’
Ian pointed out that this wasn’t very inventive. ‘Oh no,’ said the head of development. ‘We thought hard about this name. This one really will be a serial killer.’
And a correction to one of our earlier stories about the Uniplex project Jason from Les Miller at UBS Investment Bank. ‘The project was called Jason because the development was planned to start in July, continue through August and so on to November. When the finish date was delayed the project ended up being called Jasondjfmam.’
Ahead on pints
Chris Jefferies at UniWiki manages to promote his claim to be the landlord of The Stack, by complaining about the other nominees. ‘It seems one nominee for the landlord post at The Stack is “a firm believer in the glass being half empty rather than half full”.
‘Whatever you do do not appoint an engineer or we will never get more than half a pint. While optimists say the glass is half full and pessimists declare it is half empty, engineers simply say the glass is too large.’ In our experience, not when it’s the glass they are holding.
Signs of madness
It seems we have a competition for the most out-of-place automatic signs. ‘I too remember the M1 junction 28 sign saying there were problems on the M25,’ says Roger Audley at Nottinghamshire County Council.
‘However, this has been bettered by information at junction 34 in Sheffield that the M20 in Kent was closed from junctions 11 to 12.
‘Timely notification of this might be useful for the odd continental traveller, but not commuters in South Yorkshire 240 miles away.’
It depends if you are going to work via south London. And Fran Paterson at Peterborough City council writes: ‘These messages also appear on the M6 at Coventry. When the M25 is blocked, heavy lorries from Scotland and Liverpool heading for the east coast cut across the M10 at Hatfield, or to the M11 and A10 via the A14 at Northampton.’
So if your quiet commuter road this morning was jammed with trucks on their way to Poland, blame technology.
WiFi wickedness
After last week’s launch of the City of London WiFi network, Neil Plumridge at Intergraph has the device of choice for the rest of us.
‘My monthly spam from Orange says it is offering the PVP WiFi Max for £12.95,’ he says. He quotes: ‘If your laptop, PVP or radio picks up WiFi, you will need to know where those invisible rays are located, so you can log on for some fun. This little key ring will tell you where the signal is and how strong it is. You never know, standing outside businesses with WiFi might just give you free access to the internet. Cheeky, eh?’
As Neil points out: ‘I think any buyers of this might find that standing outside businesses with WiFi might just give them free access to a 9ft x 6ft cell.’
Capital idea
If you’ve been reading Backbytes so far, not only can you disable the caps lock key and put a rubber band under it, or indeed buy a Mac if you’re a really rubbish typist, but now you can also invest in an idea by Ian Cleator of Axa Insurance.
‘My own solution involves a tone being played whenever the caps lock key is pressed. This ensures that you become aware of the problem within a character or two rather than after several sentences.
‘For a mere £99,000 I will reveal how you can use toggle keys in the accessibility options of the control panel to cause a tone to be played when the caps lock key is pressed.’
Well, that’s £99,000 saved.
