Stephen Chapman's Blog About Anything and Everything

Back to the Stone Age

Steve — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:02:58 +0000

Tony Abbot’s reply to the budget suggested that massive savings could be made by scaling back the NBN and spending the money on roads instead. If it were 100 years ago then it would be the Labor Government introducing a new thing called roads and Tony Abbot suggesting that massive savings could be made by scaling back the creation of roads and using the money to buy more horses to pull trains instead. How short sighted can one person be. Not that most of the policies that the Labor party have are any better except that they are actually looking to the future by building the NBN to a level that will allow for the necessary expansion of that system in a few years time. Swapping expenses from one year to another just so as to keep a promise about returning to surplus is meaningless. In fact the entire concept of surplus being related to income and expenditure is meaningless. It is the value of the assets (not just in monetary terms) that matters and the most valuable asset currently being created is the NBN.

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Back to the Stone Age

Program Bugs

Steve — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:11:30 +0000

All computer programs contain bugs. That’s why every so often you will find that software needs to be patched – because of a discovered bug that has been patched (hopefully in a way that doesn’t create additional bugs).

When I find a bug in software I generally report it with as much detail as possible so that it can hopefully get fixed. In almost every instance where I have reported a bug that bug has been fixed within a few weeks. There have only been two instances where those responsible have refused to fix the bug I reported and rather interestingly both involve financial web sites.For some reason when their bug affects your finances those responsible appear unwilling to acknowledge that any bug even exists.

I have used three financial sites over the past five or so years and I currently only still have access to one of those having had to demand that my accounts with the other two be blocked from internet access because they refuse to fix bugs I uncovered in how their web sites work that involve unrequested monetary transactions.

I will continue to report bugs as I find them and expect that all those not involving monetary transactions will continue to get fixed relatively quickly after I report them. Should I find any more bugs in finance sites I will report them as a part of my request to close my account with that institution – simply getting them to block access to my account via the web after weeks of arguing with them about whether the bug exists will no longer be satisfactory.

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Program Bugs

Railways on the Diskworld

Steve — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 07:38:27 +0000

In the March/April 2012 issue of the AMRA Journal Rod Tonkin describes his model railway that he has basec on Terry Pratchett’s diskworld novels. That the diskworld might ever have a railway of any sort is something that had never occurred to me but with having an interest in both railways and in the novels Rod’s article has prompted me to consider what sort of railways that I think the diskworld might have. Now Rod actually built a layout based on his concept and so his ideas will have been shaped at least in part by the model railway equipment that he intended to use. Since I do not plan on actually building such a railway, I can look at it from a completely different viewpoint and perhaps end up with something very different from any of the sorts of railway that exist on Earth.

In the more recent Diskworld books there have been a number of technological breakthroughs in various areas equivalent to happenings on Earth around the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries (there were some in the earlier books but the number seems to have increased in the more recent ones with the technology continuing to exist rather than disappearing again at the end of the book as happened with the earlier technological breakthroughs such as “Moving Pictures”). That there might be a technological breakthrough in transport resulting in a Diskworld equivalent to trains seems a reasonable possibility.

In working out what sort of railway might be built on the Diskworld there are a number of things we need to take into account. Firstly the Diskworld has plains and mountains just as Earth does and since railways on Earth that go up steep slopes generally operate in a totally different manner to those on the flat on Earth, the same would most likely be true on the Diskworld. Since mountain railways use all sorts of less familiar things such as cables an d racks, it would be far more interesting to consider the development of Diskworld railways on the flat where Earth railways have basically standardised on relatively small number of alternative methods of traction – steam, diesel, and electric.

So what power sources are available on the Diskworld? Well the coaches that appear to be the main form of transport on the Diskworld mostly use the same motive power as similar coaches here on Earth did prior to the invention of the car – horses. So railways on the Diskworld could start out with laying a track at a suitable gauge to put coaches on and then hauling them along with horses. As there is less resistance on a track to what there is on a gravel road, instead of two horses pulling the one coach along a road there would be one horse pulling two or three coaches along the track.

Less commonly used for propelling coaches on the Diskworld but used at least once is Magic. The Wizards are not all that inclined to want to get involved in the affairs of ordinary people though and so it is unlikely that any attempt to power a Diskworld railway by magic would ever actually take place.

One other alternative power source does exist in abundant supply in Ankh-Morpork and that is Golems. There are even a number of golem horses. So a Diskworld railway might easily have one golem horse hauling say fifty or so coaches at high speed along a railway track.

As far as the more conventional power sources go, there is no evidence presented in the Diskworld novels to date that any such thing as oil from which to make diesel fuel exists on the Diskworld. There is also limited evidence for the existence of electricity – certainly not in a form suitable to run a railway. Leonard de Quirm could probably work out a way to generate electricity on a small scale but it would be unlikely to be used to run a railway.

Now coal (or something equivalent) must exist on the Diskworld as there are blacksmiths producing swords and horsehoes etc and they would need some sort of fuel source such as that to operate their forge. So some form of steam propulsion would be possible. Of course this would mean that a much larger quantity would need to be mined than would have been previously required. The dwarfs who work the mines are extremely conservative though and so getting them involved in such a project seems unlikely unless a large sum of gold was also involved – which would probably make this far more expensive than any of the other alternatives.

To me it seems most likely that if a railway were to be developed on the Diskworld that it would have local trains that are hauled by ordinary horses with perhaps a through express hauled by a golem horse.

The biggest difficulty in getting such a railway established in the first place would be in actually getting the track laid. There would need to be some significant benefit to be gained by providing a high speed connection between the end points on the railway. This would probably involve some form of freight traffic that is not easily transported by other means. There’d need to be a big demand for some product in Ankh-Morpork that comes from some distance away with the railway initially being installed to meet that demand. So in addition to the passenger traffic you’d have a freight service running to transport this product to the city. Since running these empty in the other direction would be wasteful the city would probably fill the returning trains with souvenirs that can be sold at high profit to those who have never actually visited the city.

The actual construction of the railway could itself have problems with local inhabitants not wanting such a strange device installed in their backyard although since the clacks has spread across the Diskworld those living benefitting from that service are unlikely to be so resistant to the addition of further new technology. So provided that the ground is flat enough the first railway would probably follow one of the clacks routes. This would have the additional benefit that it could be used to assist in maintaining the clacks service. Provided that the appropriate details could be worked out the railway could be quite quickly built by golems – probably in less time once they get started than the time it would take to actually make the arrangements for them to do it.

In my view, a railway of this type would fit reasonably well into the Diskworld where any of the modern day forms of propulsion would not. Perhaps the only reason that there hasn’t been a Diskworld book about a railway as yet is that Terry hasn’t really thought about how railways in our world were operated by horse prior to the invention of the steam locomotive and that the same could happen on the Diskworld with the Golem horses doing away with the need to consider any other form of propulsion.

Terry, if you happen to read this article and decide to write a novel about a railway on the Diskworld then I know that I would certainly look forward to reading it regardless of whether it matches with the ideas that I have suggested above or is completely different. Obviously if you write about a Diskworld railway that is completely different from what I have described above then my concept of what a Diskworld railway might be like that is obviously wrong.

Post from: Stephen Chapman's Blog About Anything and Everything

Railways on the Diskworld

Passwords

Steve — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:58:47 +0000

You should never give your password to anyone. That some countries have interviewers asking for people’s FaceBook password in a job interview is ridiculous. Surely the only reason they would ask is to confirm that you follow the rule of not giving your passwords to anyone and they are not asking for it to breach your privacy.

Anyway, in order to have secure passwords for each of your sites you should have a different password for each. Since you’d never remember them all you should use a password vault program and store all your passwords in that. The only password you then need to remember is the master password to access your vault. As that password will only work on your computer it will be that much more secure anyway.

With proper security in place you wouldn’t be able to comply with the request to give someone any password that they could actually use as you wouldn’t remember any of the ones accessible from anywhere other than your own computer.

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Passwords

Privacy Law Differences

Steve — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:37:52 +0000

Different laws apply in different countries but the internet is starting to blur the boundaries. There have been a number of cases recently where the USA has commenced legal proceedings against someone who lives in some other country and who perhaps has never even visited the USA because of something that the person offers via their web site and where the USA considers that sufficient connection exists for them to take action under US law. It has been suggested that even a site hosted outside the USA where there is no US company involved in any aspect of the site may be considered to fall under US jurisdiction if the site has an international domain name.

This US approach places the entire concept of cloud computing in doubt since with cloud computing the actual location where the data is stored is not under the control of the owner and can be spread across multiple countries. In shutting down one cloud hosting provider because some people were using it to upload stolen material many legitimate businesses who were using that provider to hold their business data in the cloud have now lost it all.

One recent article I was reading suggested that it is only a matter of time before someone ends up in a situation where it is impossible for them to avoid breaking the law. All it will need for this to happen is for the US to demand access to data that an Australian has stored on a server in Australia where the site uses an international domain name. The USA will consider that to be sufficient for them to claim the right to access to that data. Of course such a small connection would be insufficient under Australian privacy laws to permit such access and so anyone complying with the US law in that instance would be breaking the law in Australia and so would have no alternative but to disregard the US law in that instance. It will be interesting to see if that arises whether someone can be extradited to the US in such a case for breaking the US law where not braking that foreign law would be illegal under local laws.

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Privacy Law Differences

“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”

Steve — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:23:20 +0000

Was rereading this book by Robert Heinlein. When I first read it the book seemed wrong in the way the odds of success were being calculated. The odds in the book were going up and down based on the amount of risk involved in the individual tasks currently being undertaken whereas it was already known that those tasks were needed and so that risk should h

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“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”

Old Science Fiction Books

Steve — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:52:13 +0000

It can be rather interesting when reading science fiction written many years ago to consider what things mentioned in the book that were considered part of the SF setting at the time the book was written that are simply a part of our everyday life now. Consider for example Robert Heinlein’s book “Space Cadet” where in the opening pages one of the main characters calls his father on his phone and another main character mentions having packed his in his bag. On reading this now you might wonder why he didn’t simply turn it off. Of course the book was written several decades before the first mobile phone. Later in the same book they send their phones home because they would be out of range from space. Of course you wouldn’t do that with today’s phones because even if you can’t use it as a phone you could still use it as a computer – something that is completely missing from the book even though computers were invented long before the book was written.

Another of Heinlein’s books, “Waldo” is in some ways even more interesting in that one of the main aspects to the story is that radiation from transmissions that we ourselves make might be harmful to us. The story discusses radio transmission of power but it closely parallels the real world concerns about transmissions for mobile communications. Of course that book also directly influenced the name given to another device mentioned in the story that didn’t exist at the time but which has since been created for real. Both in the book and now in the real world those devices are named after the title character of the book.

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Old Science Fiction Books

Star Trek

Steve — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:54:23 +0000

I have been rewatching some of the Star Trek Next Generation episodes recently. I had forgotten how annoying and inaccurate the opening of that show was with the comment “to boldly go where no one has gone before” where there wasn’t a single show in which they went anywhere without meeting someone who was already there. At least the original series used the comment “to boldly go where no (hu)man has gone before” and they did often go to places where no human had previously visited. Even the original show never went where no one had gone before because there were always aliens there already in the shows that didn’t already have humans there. A show in which they went somewhere where no one had gone before would be a very short show because there wouldn’t be very much that could happen on that show apart from the crew going crazy due to having no aliens to interact with.

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Star Trek

Japanese Whalers

Steve — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:57:39 +0000

There’s been a lot in the news lately about the Japanese boats in the southern oceans and the conservationists attempts to interfere with what they are doing. Perhaps a more appropriate response would be to send a scientific expedition into southern waters to capture and dissect these Japanese whalers in order to see if there is some physical reason for them to want to kill creatures that are far more intelligent than they are.

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Japanese Whalers

Spelling

Steve — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:06:07 +0000

Even those who know how to spell seem to rely too much on the spill chucker (sic) built into whichever application on their computer they are writing with. What they all seem to forget is that even though it can check if what you have typed is the correct spelling of a work, it still can’t check if it is the right word. There are lots of words that are similar enough to one another that the spell checker will not detect their mistake. Seldom a day goes by without my seeing something that contains the word ‘loose’ where that word makes no sense whatsoever. Of course the simplest way to check if a given word makes sense in a sentence where an antonym for the word exists is to check how the sentence reads if you substitie that antonym with the word ‘not’ in front so that the sentence should retain the same meaning. So any sentensce containing the word ‘loose’ should be able to have ‘not tight’ substituted since the sentence will still have the same meaning (if any) that it originally had. Of course if the word ‘loose’ mistakenly had one of the ‘o’ left out to make it ‘lose’ instead then the switch would be with ‘not win’ or ‘not find’ instead (depending on which meaning of ‘lose’ was intended.

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Spelling