And now for something completely different My secondary school was Morgan Academy, Dundee. In my class there were two people who later became professional newsreaders - Susan Rae and Craig Millar - that can't be very common. Susan was already well-known as an award-winning singer. But I particularly remember Craig because it was through him and a friend of his whose name I can't remember now that…
Sadly, 2021 must be rated as Failing To Meet Expectations . The target for 2022 is Must Improve . If the required standard is not met further action may be taken . I'm afraid I neglected this blog throughout 2021, I hope to give it some more attention in 2022. Like everyone (except perhaps our Prime Minister) my and my families lives were limited quite severely by the restrictions made necessary…
I wish you a very happy Winter Solstice/Christmas/New Year/(substitute your midwinter festival of choice) 🎈🎈🎈 Here are a few recent pictures - Canvey Island Seafront: We're all feeling the pinch these days - the Bentley dealership in High Barnet has closed: The shining wit of Barnet: Family selfie: John with our Christmas Tree:
This is a technical post about a project I've been thinking about on-and-off for a while. The idea is to use Redis as the middleware for a heterogeneous network of processing agents. Clients would write requests for particular computations into Redis, servers would pick these up, do the computations and write the results back into Redis, from where the clients would pick them up. I haven't yet…
Not much time to post anything as we are now in Family Lockdown No. 2. Every Monday evening my son John goes to an activity group run by Resources for Autism which he enjoys. But a week ago they emailed to say that one of their staff who was at this group had been confirmed to have coronavirus, so everyone who had attended the group, including John, needs to self-isolate for two weeks from that…
What the ****! I started this blog thinking I would be speaking to maybe a dozen people. At the weekend I posted my usual grumbles about the general lack of appreciation for my favourite programming language Tcl. My former colleagues at Bloomberg must have been fed up of hearing me repeating this stuff. Anyway, someone I don't know linked my post on "Hacker News" and 24 hours later it had 15000…
I'm a big fan of programming in Tcl , the "Tool Command Language", although it is distinctly out-of-fashion these days. When I have the freedom to choose, I tend to use Tcl for anything that doesn't need to run at maximum possible speed (and probably C++ for anything that does). One of my colleagues at Bloomberg once asked when I would give up writing utilities in such an ancient language as Tcl…
Me at Isle of Wight last year John at Isle of Wight last year A slice cut through the clouds over High Barnet The Mimmshall Brook Raiders of the lost cause ;-) Shoeburyness looking Southwest Shoeburyness looking Southeast Autumn leaves at Ravenscroft Park
The relevant song can be found at Still Crazy After All These Years . To keep doing the same thing but expecting a different result is popularly described as a sign of madness. Each time I am asked to accompany my wife Eleni to a meeting about our son John's care/education/welfare etc., I think this time could be different. Perhaps we will have a rational, respectful discussion where I will be…
My son John: John at his house with his Ipad John celebrating his 23rd birthday A couple of pictures taken from the Bloomberg office early one morning before the lockdown: Looking West to St. Pauls Looking East towards the Mansion House Last visit to the Bloomberg office to clear out my desk: Entrance and St. Stephens Strangely empty desk in a strangely empty office Me outside Me and Eleni outside