Bow for nowt

    Last weekend, I made a bow. Not because I've had a hankering for one, but because I spotted the perfect material and had to give it a go.

    My friend Rebecca was replacing her bed. The old one had a lot of very springy plywood slats, far too good to let go to the tip. So I detached them, bound them up with tape, and brought them back home on the back of my bike.

They're too wide to make a bow on their own, the ends of a bow need to be considerably less stiff than the centre where you hold it. And they weren't long enough to make a bow on their own, I'd have to bolt two of them together.

    So I cut two of them on a taper, leaving a section of a few inches intact where they'd be bolted together. I then drilled three holes for the bolts, and applied a layer of No More Nails glue to the joining surfaces before doing up the bolts. This left me with a long and springy bow, but no means to attach a bowstring to it. Out with the saw again to cut a couple of notches at each end. My bowstring - a knotted piece of the orange baler twine that is ubiquitous on farms - simply hooked over the end of the bow into the notches.

Is it a good bow? Not being an archer I have no idea. But It takes the length of my draw without damage, and it feels as though I'm putting quite an effort into it. And it shoots bamboo canes down the lawn rather well. Next up, a pack of cheap arrows from Amazon, I'm not hard-core enough to do my own fletching.

The most valuable piece of code I ever wrote

    Thinking about a planned interactive feature for the OxfordWords Blog recently I was reminded of a little piece of Javascript which is probably the most valuable piece of code I ever wrote. Valuable in terms of revenue generated for the customer that is rather than value to me, for it took a very short time to write.
    It was a mid afternoon in 2007 or 2008 when one of my customers at the time rang up with an idea for a little feature for his web site. His company is a rather large second-hand vehicle specialist and he's one of those customers for whom I have a lot of respect. No-bullshit, but fair in return and one of those guys you can learn stuff from.
    The second hand vehicle business works over the telephone, if they can get you on the phone they're pretty good at persuading you to part with your cash to drive away in one of their machines. Their conversion problem therefore lies in getting the customer on the phone in the first place.
    So their site, a large catalogue of vehicles, was and still is plastered with their phone number. No need for a shopping cart or online payments, their industry has enthusiastically gone online but their customers still like to deal with someone directly when parting with cash.
    The problem facing my customer was that his conversion rates were still pretty low. Our spiffy site was generating him lots of traffic so he knew the customers were interested, but they were browsing and shopping around rather than giving him a ring in sufficient numbers.
    His idea was a simple one. If they stop on the page for a particular vehicle for any length of time, they must be interested in it. So he asked me to make a little pop-up that asked the question "Do you want us to call you about this vehicle?" the first time a customer stopped on an individual vehicle for more than a minute. Fill in your name and number, click the "Yes" button, and an email went off to his salesmen who'd give you a ring.
    Coding it took about half an hour. A hidden div containing the HTML form, a little bit of Javascript with a timer to unhide it after a minute, a bit of code to set a cookie so the user didn't get bothered by the form more than once, and an extra address for his form-to-email script. Nowadays I'd use a line or two of jQuery code and probably a fade or something, but back then it was straight Javascript. Still, hardly a big job, and I had it ready for his approval by the end of the day and live on the site the next day.
    A second-hand vehicle dealer like my customer buys his vehicles at auction, mostly not very old vehicles in bulk from the fleets run by large corporates. He then services them and gives them a current MOT test and warranty before offering them to his customers. His is the reputable end of the second-hand vehicle market so his customers pay a premium for good quality vehicles with a provable history, something they can't get from dodgy used car lots. He thus has quite a high turnover and running cost, but the margin on each vehicle sold is also fairly large. If he sells a vehicle by a means that didn't cost him much money, he's made a four figure sum.
    Hence my half-hour piece of Javascript was the most valuable piece of code I've ever written. Because it provided him with many more conversions from his web site at a very low cost, the first vehicle sold through it paid for it many times over and it made him many thousands of pounds thereafter. I'm guessing over the years it will have generated an astounding amount of money, for even though the company I worked for then has since folded in the recession and the customer's site now runs on a different platform it still features an updated version of my pop-up form.
    I'm glad that it was such a small piece of code that did so well for my customer. The customer went away happy and rewarded us with more business and lots of word-of-mouth recommendation, and I learned something important about calls to action and that not all industries fit the same web shop model.
    If only all my code proved to be of such value to the people paying for it!

Bye bye analogue telly

   It is with some sadness that I note today sees the turning off of the final UK terrestrial analogue TV transmitter in Northern Ireland. Not because I miss Ceefax or because I hanker again for the days of only three, four, or five channels, but because analogue TV was what gave me my start in electronics when I was a teenager.
    When my contemporaries were doing more conventional 1980s teen stuff like riding BMX bikes or burning away their money on Pac-Man, I was hunting through skips for discarded TV sets, fixing them, learning how they worked, and using them as sources of components for my other electronic projects. I must have had hundreds of them pass through my hands, mostly the sets from the colour TV boom of the early 1970s. I learned the foibles of the Philips G8, the Decca Bradford and the ITT CVC5, I understood how an analogue PAL decoder worked and I picked up what is now one of the most useless skills around for an engineer, converging a delta-gun colour CRT.
    I remember some of my projects, the UHF transmitters fashioned from tuner cavities and the scary spark generator using TV EHT parts. My DX-TV setup, my home-made satellite receiver, and those weird Lockfit transistors. And the FM bugs made in IF cans, or the stereo valve amplifier using dirt-cheap PCL86 TV frame output valves. I made a lot of awful projects, some useless projects, other scary projects and one or two really good projects from discarded TV parts.
    As you might expect, I never had to pay for a TV until I was 35 and wanted an LCD panel.
    I still have one or two sets left over from that period. A few black and white sets of varying sizes, and a solitary ITT CVC5 colour set, rather battered. I sometimes fire one up with a Humax set-top-box, but there's no practical reason for me to keep them. Too good to throw away though.
    I feel privileged to have grown up as an engineer in the 1980s. Not only did I get the explosion of 8-bit microcomputers, I was also lucky enough that the electronic devices of the day were accessible enough to understand. I pity today's teenagers for whom electronic devices are highly integrated and surface-mount, they have such a restricted opportunity for experimentation.
    So bye bye analogue telly. I can't say I'll miss you in 2012, but I'm indebted to what you gave me. I doubt I'll see your like again.

Baby killer

    My car was involved in a collision with a teenaged cyclist this morning. As far as I am aware she's shaken but OK, with little worse than a nasty graze to show for the incident. Nothing I'm particularly proud of but fortunately in the view of the police officer who interviewed me it was a fairly unavoidable accident caused by another motorist making a sudden risky manoeuvre hiding me and the cyclist from each other's view. I'm a cyclist, pedestrian and motorcyclist as well as a motorist, and turning it over in my head I can't imagine another outcome. The cyclist wasn't doing anything bad crossing the road in the context of what she could see and I was using a road I've used thousands of times in the last twenty years. My reaction times, good brakes and in the view of the police officer non-excessive speed meant she lives to ride another day.
    What did shock me though was the actions of other motorists. I'm a man driving a small hatchback. It's a 5-door family model that has a small economy engine chosen for diesel MPG rather than BHP so it's no sports car, but to them I was obviously a reckless young baby killer in a hot hatch. So they proceded to paint a picture of the incident so ludicrous in its level of malicious falsehood that the policeman said in as many words that he was far more interested in the facts of what had really happened.
    It started when I got out of the car. I suddenly had this crazy woman from another car haranguing me. Sorry love, I've just been involved in an accident, I don't need a silly bitch screaming at me. In fact the girl who's just limping to the side of the road doesn't need it either. Shouty woman was lucky, I'm sure someone other than me might have engaged with her as aggressively as she did and she wouldn't have liked that.
    Meanwhile I went over and made sure the girl was OK. Her mother was there and turned out to be a lovely lady who had seen the whole thing and said in effect "Don't worry love, I saw what happened and you weren't to blame".  Thank you very much for that, I can't express how much that meant to me.
    I could see several other motorists who had stopped, discussing it amongst themselves. This was where it started to become scary. I could hear them going over what they had happened, sharing tidbits and embelishing their stories. By the time the police arrived I heard them saying the most outrageous things in their statements, turning an everyday Oxford manoeuvre into something from a particularly boisterous touring car race. I had it seemed swerved around all over the road at an impossible speed, narrowly avoiding killing them all before moving down a helpless child. As I said to the policeman when he came to me, I considered those things to be barefaced malicious falsehoods that I would vigorously contest, and I was able to easily and quietly demonstrate both my lane discipline and with my relatively short stopping distance, evidence of my lack of excessive speed. I consider the fact that the policeman informed me that he would not be recommending any further action as vindication of my actions and if I hear any more credance being given to the lies I will vigorously defend myself.
    But I can't help being worried at how close I came to getting into trouble based on someone else's malicious falsehood. In effect, those people made up some lies with no consideration of the effect it might have had on their target. As I told the policeman I am completely certain they wouldn't like someone doing it to them.
    I am well spoken, approaching middle age, and the driver of a spectacularly unexciting car. By telling the truth I was able to foil any lies and describe what had happened to the satisfaction of the policeman who interviewed me. But what if I had been driving a performance car? What if I had been a so-called "chav", a non English speaker, or perhaps from an ethnic minority? Would I have had the same experience? I hope the answer would have been a "yes", but I can't help think my path would have not been so pleasant this morning. I also can't help thinking that people who are so ready to lie to put someone in my position in a bad light are not helping either justice or themselves, and that there should be some form of censure for people who do that. Because without it. we're all at risk of being accused of the most outrageous things. Me, you, those lying motorists, everybody. Do you feel comfortable with that? I certainly don't.

My travels over four decades

  While planning a holiday with my wife a few weeks ago I was left wondering where in the UK I had yet to see. She doesn't hail from these shores, so I wanted to show her something new.
   I started with a map book, but soon realised a broader stroke was required. I can get too engrossed in maps. So I found a blank topographical map of the UK, loaded it into Paint Shop Pro and started work with a virtual marker pen. I had to rely on memory because I haven't kept a travel diary over my lifetime, but over four layers I was able to arrive at a pretty comprehensive itinerary of my life.

(1)The complete picture:

    No prizes for guessing from this map that I've spent my life based in the south Midlands, or that I've spent a lot of time in Yorkshire. Growing up near Oxford and attending Hull University explain those two. You can also trace some of my childhood holidays in Devon, Dorset or South Wales. But the rest is a surprisingly disjointed array of trips to see friends and relatives, plus road trips to seek out interesting places. This map might be a lot less diverse if I didn't own a motorcycle.
    Surprises: I've never been to North Wales, or central Devon. Somewhere to take my wife on holiday, mission accomplished!

(2) The 1970s
Childhood holidays and trips to see my aunts. Memories of sticking to the vinyl seats of an Austin Allegro or British Rail in the Age of the Train.

(3) The 1980s
    Confessions of a teenaged train geek. Four kids with a Family Railcard. Plus yet more family holidays to Yorkshire, this time in an Allegro with velour seats. That's progress, that is.

(4) The 1990s
    Someone gives me a driving licence and a succession of tatty old gas-guzzlers take me further afield. How much petrol did I burn in that decade?

(5) The 2000s
    Finally I'm old enough to afford a nice car and I've got an entire country to show my wife. So how did I manage to miss out North Wales, most of Devon and the Scottish Lowlands?

Worthless by degree

    In the wake of the recent student protests over tuition fees, I have heard more than one conversation recently on the subject of students, their resources and the courses they are taking at university. Most of these conversations have passed me by, there was little point in my participating as the scale of the ensuing argument would be out of proportion to the scale of the points I might make.
    One friend of mine annoyed me enough to pull out my keyboard though, with the assertion that "worthwhile" courses like science and engineering should be fully funded while "worthless" degrees such as art history or media studies should receive no funding. The speaker expected my agreement, as my degree is in electronic engineering, and was quite surprised when I rather vehemently expressed opposition.
    You might expect that I'd be about to say that all degrees are worthwhile, and that art historians and media students deserve support as much as electronic engineers. And I won't disappoint you there, after all my sister is an art historian who spends a lot of her time ensuring that media studies students have at least one course they have to put in some serious work at to pass.
    But what you might not expect is that I would attack the notion that an engineering degree is a worthwhile degree that should be viewed as more important for funding than any other. My experience of having an engineering degree is that once outside the walls of the university it really hasn't been of much use to me directly other than as a bit of paper, the teaching was designed to breed engineering PhD students rather than equip us for life in industry and everything I have done for a living since has either been learned on the job or based upon something I learned outside university. Yes, my whole career as a web developer started with Microsoft ASP back in the 1990s, which being a BASIC scripting language was a skill I built on something I learned as a spotty kid long before I reached university.
    "But the country needs engineers!" I hear you say. And I'd have to agree with you there. Though I think the meaning most people would ascribe to that sentence is rather different to the meaning I would ascribe to it.
    To me, the country needs engineers rather than simply people with engineering degrees at all costs. In other words, the country needs as its engineers people who are born to engineering as a vocation, a gift even. It's never been viewed as something particularly special but it should be, I doubt I'll hear many middle-class parents enthusing about their offspring's aptitude for Meccano or coding in the same way they would if their little Tarquin turned out to be a musical prodigy. And just as there are born engineers, so are there born art historians and even born media students who would be utterly wasted on an engineering course.
    If we have created a world in which tertiary education is near-mandatory and a degree certificate is required to embark on careers for which a school certificate would have been required for our grandparents' generation (and yes, I count my career among those), it seems to me crazy to force people into degree courses purely for ideological reasons that they are never going to find any value from and which will have little bearing on their eventual careers.
    Far better to have degree courses on which places are earned by merit and whose subjects depend on the aptitude of the student. Oh wait, wasn't that what we had twenty years ago?

Strabismus

   This morning I stumbled on a site that made me think a little. It's a site promoting an ebook by the parents of a child with a strabismus, detailing their child's treatment. I left the following comment.

I have to admit to reading this site with mixed emotions. I’m a 40 year old British person with a significant strabismus, something I’ve had since birth. I don’t have hardware 3D vision and never will have, my eyes are like separate cameras meaning I can switch between two views of the world.
This has never been a problem for me, it has only very ocasionally been a problem for others. It has never held me back in life, education or the workplace. So I can never be a fighter pilot, but does that matter?
I understand why you were horrified by it in your son but speaking personally I am very glad my parents did not put me through the pain and risk of surgery when I was too young to understand what was going on. I’ve always seen it as very much a part of me and have no desire to seek any treatment for it as an adult.
So those are the effects of strabismus on someone who’s lived it. If one of my kids is born with it I’ll leave it until they are old enough to understand before I ask them if they want surgery.

    It's probably a bit off-message for them so it may not pass their moderation, but I felt it needed to be said. I understand the pain of a parent whose child doesn't meet their idea of perfection, but as one of those imperfect children I squint and I'm proud!