Neil Hopcroft

More human than human…”But Hey! He strike a imperial pose. How can you explain he is not GOD?…and GOD never stick out little finger while drinking beer!”

Theres something deeply unsettling about the commerce experience we subject ourselves to these days. The Hampton Harcourt shopping extravagansa is really just a big Tesco, but they’ve invited a whole bunch of chains to join them as consessions in their entrancehall. I was awaiting my companion for the day (having decamped from Peterborough city centre) but, having no idea where we were likely to meet I wandered inside to take a look at the commerce available.

By the entrance I found a young lady in a wheelchair with an entourage of petitioners, photographers, who were blocking my view of the map of the centre. Which, of course, gave them a cue to talk to me…normally I’m fairly unreceptive to these kinds of things since all too often people are just trying to get your money and will use whatever tricks they can. However, they seemed like they’d just arrived and probably hadn’t really gotten into the swing of things yet so I figured it was a little unfair to be too negative. They were just attempting to raise awareness of the condition that had afflicted their wheelchair-bound friend. It seemed like a reasonable cause, even if I can’t remember now what that condition is. Hope they don’t turn my address in to the government as a dissenter or anything…

Once escaped from Peterborough we had a lovely day in Stamford where there was a residual funfair, heretic church conversions (Vision Express, in a church? I know, lets just bash out this nice stone wall and drop some neon in instead…) and statues in a closed garden.

Back to HH where we’d left one of the cars, and a quick skim around the shops. Its obviously been a while since I’ve been to these kinds of places – everything has gone a bit gyaru, with earrings the size of football pitches and pseudo-greebo fashions.

Thankfully the mens formal clothes section hadn’t completely lost its sanity in the same way – there was, however, a huge selection of gay ties. When did that happen? What does it mean? That gay men buy a lot of ties? That lots of guys are showing their sensitive side by wearing ties that would be appropriate on gay men? Pink isn’t gay? Don’t get me wrong – this is great, having a much better range of ties available has got to be a good thing. Its just a little disconcerting.

“Dungeons and Dragons…players are detached from reality and automatically given a low security clearance…The army is not indifferent to the unique hobby and is trying to locate soldiers who in their free time dress up as witches and play in forests.”

Zookeepers Train for Level Three Furry Outbreak

“My story is based on fiction,” said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. “It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies.”

There surely must be an easy way to tell between fiction and plans? For instance the inclusion of Zombies might be a bit of a give-away….though you’ll notice that he did leave open the possibility that there were other stories that weren’t found which were, perhaps, a little more like plans.

Where are the lines between conspiracy, thought crime and fantasy?

I’m aware that a lot of people, when faced with a period of not working, lose their sense of rhythm, they fall into a downward spiral of unstructured, unproductive life.

I don’t want to do that. So, although I’m taking some ‘planned downtime’, it isn’t going to be a waste of time. There are things I could learn, perhaps things I could actually do, during this time.

For a start, my current skillbase is rather Symbian-oriented. Right now, this isn’t a bad thing since they’re kicking up a bunch of useful work at the moment. But thats not going to go on forever – either it turns commodity, like VB programmers are 2-a-penny, or it dies altogether. Neither of which sound like particularly attractive career choices.

This all leaves me with a question – what /can/ I do?

Someone I worked with observed, some years ago, that software integration will become an important task. I think we’re there now, and probably have been for a while, most of the software you ever wanted has now been written, it just needs to be made to work on your phone/microwave/ICE/whatever.

After my time in Tokyo I’m quite confident about integration of Symbian applications and systems in general, but my knowlege about other systems is somewhat poor. Which suggests an objective: learn to integrate software on other platforms.

What does that mean? Well, I suppose it means to produce software that works on platforms other than the one(s) it was originally written for. But more importantly it means documenting the process for doing that integration, with a view to making it a recipe sheet to follow to make software ‘just work’ on new platforms. If that is possible, and I’m not sure that it is, then it would be conceivable to create an ‘auto-integrator’ of some kind which would follow the recipe sheet. Of course I don’t expect this to make things work out-the-box, but it should at least mean that things get closer quicker.

To some extent I’m not particularly bothered about re-inventing the wheel here, since the purpose of the exercise, for me, is one of education rather than one of actually producing new things.

Observations? Thoughts on things that would be useful to integrate?

I’m going to start with enlightenment on cygwin, after last weeks windowmanager debacle. But first to put together a webserver/journal/wiki thing to record the process for later review.

Good grief, when did Linux get difficult to install? First I start with an Ubuntu cd I have to hand, which doesn’t contain gcc. What? Whats that about? What kind of linux user doesn’t want a compiler? And virtual PC is showing pixels three times wider than they should be, which means my 800×600 desktop is somewhat falling off the edge of the window.

Rewind. Try again. Construct a Fedora .iso set, but that kernel panics in the idle thread before it can boot. Then the thread doesn’t die properly so it hangs on trying to kill it:

Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill the idle task!

“According to Rosen, we’re already succumbing to our desire for “constant, escapist fantasy” by favoring passive entertainment to active participation in society. We risk succumbing to a “vast cultural impatience” with anything that doesn’t fit neatly into our narrowly defined parameters….Now iPod users are accused of a similar withdrawal from the world at large. They “might be enjoying their unique life soundtrack, but they are also practicing ‘absent presence’ in public spaces,” Rosen writes.”

What now?

I left Symbian without ceremony on Friday. The local pubs were closed ‘out of respect for Fred Moss’, so we didn’t even get ourselves to the pub for lunch. Thats a weird kind of respect – more of a fear of invasion by the mourners. A unique bunch, he was, as I understand it, a traveller who disappeared in the area. Someone has been charged with his murder, even though there was never a body found. They were holding a wake at the Milton village hall at lunchtime. For some reason the whole village seemed to be under surviellance by a squadron of middle age ladies sat in their middle class cars posted at convenient intervals along Cambridge Road and the High Street. Quite disconcerting.

Yesterdays gaming went well, though we only got a couple of games in – Escape from Colditz and half the History of the World – before the crowd started wilting and departing. You’ll be pleased to hear that our history of the world involved the Romans remaining in southern europe and a Byzantine invasion of Britain. Oh, how things would have been….

Respect for Simon deciphering my “KPaBage” as his “King Prawn Butterfly” on the unpacking of takeaway.

So, what next?

Well, I’m actively taking a break now. I don’t know how long thats going to be, certainly a few weeks, maybe a few months, I doubt it’ll run to years, but you never know. I’ve got some ideas of things to do, in the software development arena mostly, I’ll make a seperate post about that later. And a bit of travelling, mostly around the UK, but I’ve got some flights to Munich booked now, too.