Joe's Jottings

  • Arthur C Clarke – RIP

    Bugger.

    Like a lot of things, I guess that in my heart of hearts I knew that eventually all the venerable old writers of science fiction, the folks who I grew up with, would all pass away.  When it starts happening it’s a strange experience.  The world has enough obituaries for ACC – here I just wanted to say something about what he means to me.

    When ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’ – came out I was a boy of 7 years old and although it played the local fleapit I didn’t see it.  I don’t remember whether I was too young to go, but I remember my mum wanting to see it.  I never found out whether she eventually got to see the movie or not; I only myself caught up with it after watching 2010, which is pretty arse-about-face.   In other words, I came to ACC not via his most famous work, but in my own way.

    A British ‘boys weekly’ of the 1970s was called, I seem to remember, ‘Speed and Power’, and featured all sorts of machines, vehicles, etc. each week…aong with a short story from ACC.  And that’s where I encountered him first.  I still have a box of these magazines somewhere in the dark recesses of my attic, complete with the short stories which occupied many an evening, and encouraged me to go and find his other books.

    The first ACC novel I read was ‘A Fall of Moondust’ – a disaster story about a ‘moon bus’ full of tourists that gets swamped in dust whilst traversing a lunar ‘sea’, and the efforts of rescuers to get them out.  The novel of his that made the biggest impact on me was ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ – I still remember the first time I read it, and even now it holds up.  Lovely, wonderful, story telling that I never get bored with.  I have to say that I’m very excited about the prospects of a film being made of the novel – possibly for release in 2009.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

    But the short stories made the biggest impression on me.  As the years passed I just grabbed copeis of his collections of short stories from second hand shops, charity shops, wherever.  And of all of them, the ones that made the biggest and longest lasting impression were his ‘Tales from the White Hart’.   Quite why I have no idea – I guess that I just love ‘tallish tales’ that are just, maybe, plausible.  These stories, and those of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, have probably been the major influences of my short story writing.  So much so that I’ve written a collection of similar stories – an ‘homage’, I guess – called ‘Tales from the Oakham Arms’.

    I’m not even going to start on the technical innovations that ACC suggested, starting with his now famous Wireless World item on Geostationary Communication Satellites, that have now appeared in our lives.

    Like someone else said recently, I really hope that as ACC passed away he was able to look deep into the cosmos and utter those final words of Dave Bowman’s…”My God, it’s full of stars”.

    Thanks Sir Arthur.  My life would have been significantly poorer without your imagination.

  • Installing PEAR packages on WAMP

    Well, after getting caught out recently with PEAR on a client installation, I thought it a good move to write a short tutorial for anyone who needs to install PEAR packages on their WAMP installation.

    To start with, for the purposes of this blog, PEAR is a framework for implementing code libraries in PHP.  In other words, it prevents you from having to re-invent the wheel – always a nice thing!

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  • Firefox slacker than IE? Surely some mistake…

    I’m currently working with some other developers creating a PHP / SQL Server 2005 based site.  The division of work is along the lines of I do PHP and SQL, and they take my less than beautiful code and pretty it up.  This has worked very well, and because I tend to run IE6 on my desktop and they run Firefox, we catch a lot of browser bugs between us.

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  • The Gods of the Copybook Headings

    I cam across a reference to one verse of this poem by Rudyard Kipling the other day when I was reading, and given the news at the moment of collapsing banks and general financial turmoil, I thought it appropriate!

    The verse I encountered was:

    “Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
    And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
    That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
    And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.”

    Highly apt in these days when true value in the markets seems difficult to separate from what some over-paid analysts believe a company to be worth.

    As is said in the text, a poem of a man wishing to find solace in a very old fashioned form of common sense, and whilst I don’t 100% agree with his view, I can see where Kipling was coming from here.

    I actually remember being taught to write long hand with a fountain pen in the 1960s, but our copybooks were lacking the aphorisms that Kipling alludes to. 

    I was also reminded of the words of Richard Feynman after the Challenger Disaster Enquiry – “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”  Nature cannot be fooled.  And neither can the basics of life.

    Perhaps we need some copybooks re-printing and issuing to the bankers and stockmarket traders and analysts?

  • Link Listing in WordPress

    WordPress supports the ‘Blogroll’ model for links, which works fine for links but I wanted to be able to put together a series of pages listing links on different subjects for my CommunityNet project.

    For example, I wanted to have links grouped into such topics as ‘Think Tanks’, ‘Animal Welfare Groups’, etc.  I couldn’t work out a way of doing this in a manageable fashion through the existing WordPress functionality.  I had a look around for Plugins but found nothing that seemed sensible for what I wanted, so I decided to ‘homebrew’. 

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  • The Bus Book – w/c 10th March – On Walden Pond (continued)

    As you can see I didn’t do an exceptional amount of commuting last week, and Walden remained the Bus Book for this week as well.

    As I’ve progressed through it I’ve come to the conclusion that whilst I admire his ideas, I don’t think Thoreau would necessarily be a fun guy to spend an evening in the pub with.  I get the feeling from what he says that he was something of an aesthete.  I wonder if the ‘hair shirt’ attitude of some of today’s ‘extreme greens’ partially originated from here.  Sort of along the lines of if you’re enjoying it it can’t be truly environmentally friendly.

    His description of the pond in winter is masterful, with a keen observational eye which brought the whole place to life in my mind’s eye.

    I took a look at the Pond as it is today via the website here and also checked out a map from Google, below.  The map is movable – just hold the left mouse button down and move the mouse around.

    View Larger Map

    Even back then he was within a couple of miles of town – I suppose the invention of the car and the widespread use of bikes, etc. would today mean you had to be maybe 10-15 miles outside of the nearest village to get the same degree of isolation.

    One final observation – in the ‘Spring’ section there is a amsterful description of the patterns made by sand in thaw-water flows, as well as the similarities between natural shapes – leaves, snowflakes, etc.  Given my interest in fractal mathematics it was hard to ignore the fact that had he been a mathematician Thoreau may had discovered fractals 100 years early!

    Anyway…good book, worth a read…just don’t expect to find an easy read!

  • The Bus Book w/c 3rd March – On Walden Pond

    One of the long term running gags in our family is that given half a chance I would either run off to live in the woods or become a hermit in a Monastery.  Well, I spotted this story recently that made me seriously consider it…

    Here’s a guy who did it for almost 2 years – Henry David Thoreau, in the mid 1840s, spent time alone at Walden Pond, a couple of miles outside Concorde, Massachusetts, in a house he built himself.  There he studied his surrounding, wrote and further formulated the philosophies that eventually became part of the American Transcendentalist movement later in the century.

    Part natural history study, part philosophy, the book has become a rallying point and source of inspiration for generations of American environmentalists.  For further information, see the entry on Wiki.

    Last week was spent more at home than recently – so my bus based reading took a hit.  For that reason I’m only half way through the book.  The writing style is occasionally difficult – especially for those of us not well versed in the slang and culture of the mid-19th Century USA – but it is a passionately written and insightful book.

    I’m enjoying it – I’m not able to read it in long chunks, but read a little, chew it over, savour it – think on it and then move on.  Perhaps that’s the way this book should be read.

    It’s a fine book, thought provoking and empowering.  It’s also set me thinking about Bill McKibben’s ‘the End of Nature’ – perhaps I should dig that out soon.

  • WordPress Template Pages

    I use WordPress to run a few other websites, such as my CommunityHost site, and wanted to add a form to support a mailing list.  My hosting company, Servage, supports mailing lists and I’ve used them with some success, so I didn’t need to re-invent the wheel and decided that the best bet would be to somehow get the HTML form that Servage supply on to a WordPress page.

    I did try the obvious – just paste the HTML source code in to a page – and that was about as effective as the proverbial cat flap in an elephant house.  So I then decided to create a new template page containing the code.  And for all who’re interested, here’s what I did in Version 2.3.x.

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  • Jeff Healey – Like a Hurricane

    Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey died this week, losing a battle against cancer.  I have to say that he’s a musician that I’ve heard occasionally and really enjoyed.  He was younger than me when he died – something that always brings me up short.

    Tonight on the Bob Harris show (http://www.bobharris.org/pages/playlist.asp?progcode=s08032008 Jeff’s version of Neil Young’s ‘Like a Hurricane’ – quite a brilliant version of a classic song.  Thanks Jeff!

    I have a definite weakness for this particular Neil Young song. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Hurricane_(Neil_Young_song)  It goes back to my student days when I was introduced to Neil Young by a housemate, who referred to the heavy electric version on ‘Live Rust’ as ‘Like a Steamroller’ – a phrase that I remember and occasionally use to this day, almost 30 years later.

    Like a Hurricane is definitely one of my favourite love songs – I think I’ve found a new favourite version tonight!

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourview/2008/03/memories_of_jeff_healey_1.html

  • The sorry saga of varchar(Max) and ODBC in PHP

    A project I’m currently working on uses SQL Server 2005 with PHP, the database being accessed via PHP’s ODBC library.

    I have to admit that I love my Stored Procedures, and rather than use ‘inline’ SQL SELECT statements in my data classes I’ve usually used Stored Proceduers when talking to SQL databases in the past.

    However….believe it or not this is the first PHP / SQL Server project I’ve ever done that used ODBC and also featured VARCHAR(Max) or Text fields….

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