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text:
Everything is just C with bells on
In this post I thought about the world of cool that lies between high-level languages and C. Thought is too strong, it is more of a seed of a thought that has not germinated yet. This is not a fable with a moral at the end.
When I first came across C#, I thought that is much better than Visual Basic, perhaps Microsoft's .Net platform could be interesting one day, but not personally having an obvious project to use it in, I put it to one side and have never touched it since.
When Vala was first announced, I thought wow, that is so sexy and I played with it for about a week. Not personally having an obvious project to use it in, I put it to one side and have never touched it since.
I had pretty much the same reaction to Go (aka golang) - wow that's cool, perhaps not as sexy as Vala but I like the goroutines. I did the trendy web based tour, I installed everything locally and played with the standard library. Then, not personally having an obvious project to use it in, I put it to one side and have never touched it since.
I could go on and on. Whatever piece of tech that comes into (or back into) fashion seems to follow this pattern, Haskell, Erlang, Java, Scala, etc etc. A lot of the developer tools industry and technology media needs something shiny and new to promote this year.
Don't get me wrong, I love all this stuff, I would love to do projects in different programming languages but obviously, as I have a reputation for writing Python or JavaScript or doing system administration, people hire me to do that and don't perhaps think of me for other things.
Maybe there is more too it than that, since in whatever I am doing, in my head I seem to think of any algorithm in Python first as executable pseudocode even if it gets typed in using JavaScript or another language.
I had a long stint as an academic, but basically my whole career in software is as a freelancer or contractor. A journeyman who works to live.
Often the customer has an existing project or specific library, toolkit or team which pre-determines the choice of programming language.
Otherwise, my usual process for creating software is to prototype it in a high level language (normally always Python but sometimes JavaScript). 90% of the time, once it works the customer has solved their immediate problem and wants to move their focus onto their next problem, which may not be software and may not involve paying freelance programmers. Sad I know, thanks for all the fish, I am here, like the song says, etc etc :)
When the prototype is working, there is a lot to be done to optimise it and keep it as a Python application, and almost always there is some specific other bottleneck (such as network, database or some industrial requirement) that means that CPU usage is not the problem and so cutting out the Python interpreter wouldn't actually make much difference in the short and medium time-frames that most companies care about.
Indeed I have seen cases where the customer has gotten someone to rewrite the prototype application in Java, and found that the new version is actually slower. A lot of the heavy duty work in the Python version was actually happening inside a C library that has been highly optimised over the last 30 years; changing the dependency from that to a poorly implemented Java library caused the poor performance.
If we imagine a Python application is like a commissioning a photograph, a C app is commissioning a sculpture. You only do it when you want something to really last or really be the core of something fundamental for your future success.
All the above notwithstanding, the genius of Python's initial design is that once your application has taken a stable(ish) form, it is normally pretty straightforward to convert the application to C.
Most of the standard library inherits Linux/Unix best practice (and even the same function names) and a lot of the best external libraries in Python are just wrappers around the C equivalents. You always have the fully working Python application to test it against.
It takes a long time yes, going through line by line, but you are not troubling the boundaries of computer science or software engineering as we know it. I actually love those kind of cathartic jobs, but I am a freak.
Apologies if I am stating the bleeding obvious, none of the above text is news to anyone, any Python developer knows the same thing, however it is the foundation for what follows.
So the real reason why I have not personally had an obvious project to use a lot of these fashionable and 'cool' languages and toolkits is that they fall in the luke-warm middle ground between the extremely high-level Python (and JS/Ruby/LISP etc) and the low level C language.
For most use cases, all these middle ground languages are slower and less portable than C. If you have decided on a re-implementation, then it takes no longer to rewrite a Python project to C than to Go, Java, C# or whatever, indeed it might often be quicker to C.
I have actually used C hardly at all, far less than I would like to have done, but I have used these middle-ground languages even less. Everything just stays in high level code.
So as I warned, I have no moral for this fable, no conclusion to offer, it is just the beginnings of a thought that ran through my brain, I like to think I will pick up this theme later, but I will probably look back in five years to find I have put it to one side and have never touched it since.
Image credit: Dancer in the Streets by dannyst
Managing Contacts in Emacs with BBDB
This post is about BBDB (Big Brother Database), which is the main contacts application available for Emacs.
Contacts Application for Emacs
BBDB is packaged within distributions, albeit quite old versions of it are packaged within Debian at the time of writing.
Information about BBDB can be found at its Savannah homepage, and most importantly downloads are found here. I wanted the latest version so I downloaded it from there.
The latest versions (that begin with 3, e.g. 3.1.2) require Emacs 23 or 24, an older version of Emacs will require version 2 of BBDB; although it is much nicer for other reasons to use the latest version of Emacs that you can get.
The README gives full instructions to get set up. Basically, like with most other Emacs libraries, you make the library available by editing the ~/.emacs file and using the require function.
(require 'bbdb-loaddefs "/path/to/bbdb/lisp/bbdb-loaddefs.el")
Storage Format
Despite the name ending in DB, contacts are stored in a plain text file at ~/emacs.d/bbdb (where ~ represents the user's home directory).
It is worth knowing that each line in the file is a contact, which takes the form of a vector, this is a LISP data type similar to a JavaScript Array or Python list (but items are delimited with spaces rather than commas).
If you ever edit the file by hand or with code you write yourself, it is important to keep one item to a line, if a line break gets removed then BBDB will reject the file until you fix it.
Since it is a plain text file, you can do back it up easily, sync it between computers, write scripts that do things to it, track it with git or whatever you can imagine.
Importing Contacts
If you already have a load of contacts somewhere, then the best way to get started is to import them from there. I personally had a load of contacts in Google Contacts that had been built up from my Gmail account and Android phone.
I used a lovely little Python script called charrington which grabbed all the contacts from Google and added them to a bbdb file.
Using BBDB
As always, M is for Meta which means Alt on an IBM-PC style keyboard.
Typing M-x bbdb allows you to search for a contact. So if I search for Elizabeth, I get this contact:
The other commands all start with bbdb- for example, M-x bbdb-create allows you to type in a new record. There is almost a hundred commands, but you do not need to remember them. Using tab completion shows them all, they are also organised in a toolbar menu.
If you have imported lots of contacts from Google Contacts, then sometimes different pieces of information about a person are stored under different names.
One of the most useful things is M-x bbdb-search-duplicates, this allows you to merge contacts together and/or delete duplicate contacts.
Sending Mail
When you have point over a record, pressing m will allow you to compose an email to the person. Emacs then drops you into message mode.
Email in Emacs is another topic entirely, but if you put the following into your ~/.emacs file then you have setup the absolute basics:
(setq user-mail-address "email@example.com"
user-full-name "Your Name")
If you have a mail transport agent or relay (such as mstmp) setup then Emacs can pass the email to whatever is pointed to by /usr/sbin/sendmail or you can use Emacs itself to relay email.
Other features
Pressing simply e edits the current line. ; allows you to write an attached note. If the record has a www field then W displays the web page.
You can even phone your contacts directly from Emacs! Typing M-d will phone the current contact; obviously you need to have a modem or some other kind of phone system setup.
Various mail and news packages for Emacs can make use of your contacts to provide auto-fill functions, e.g. in the To: field of an email.
Image credit: Phone Call 8 by johnberd first contact by momo5
Manually Fulfilling Dependencies on Debian
msmtp is yet another Mail Transfer Agent that merely relays the outgoing email message to another (e.g. your ISP's) SMTP server. There seems to be quite a lot of these, but this one seems to be the most actively maintained - see its homepage on sourceforge for more information and documentation. At time of writing, the last stable release is March 9, 2014 which is very recent.
Other similar ones, such as ssmtp, esmtp and nbsmtp, still seem to work, they are pretty simple programs with few dependencies apart from the C environment which basically never changes anymore and they are recompiled and repackaged regularly by the distributions.
I have a machine running on Debian stable but wanted a newer version of msmtp than is packaged for stable. So I cloned the source code using git and compiled it.
However, after removing the default mail transfer agent (Exim), Debian's apt command is desperate to re-install it.
So I needed to tell the system that I already have a mail transfer agent. This post explains how I did it. I don't know if this is the correct 'modern' way to do it, but it worked for me, and it is quite interesting because it exposes a little of how Apt works under the hood.
Fortunately, my problem is the use case given in the old Apt Howto under the section called 4.1 How to install locally compiled packages: equivs there is more useful information there.
The package that helps us to circumvent Debian package dependencies is called equivs, so first I needed to install that. sudo apt-get install equivs
sudo apt-get install equivs
Next I ran the following command.
equivs-control msmtp-git
This created a template Debian control file. I gave it a meaningful name, i.e. msmtp installed from git.
I added the following lines:
Package: msmtp-git
Provides: mail-transport-agent
The Provides line is the key, it tells the system that a mail-transport-agent is installed.
Then I created a .deb from this control file.
equivs-build msmtp-git
Lastly I installed the deb:
sudo dpkg --install msmtp-git_1.0_all.deb
Pretty weird but it works.
Image Credit: Atlas - The Titan's Punishment by IndigoDesigns
A Distributed Global Textual Community
In the digital humanities when a scholar wants to transcribe and edit texts such as ancient or medieval manuscripts, that scholar uses her institution's own systems (for the rest of this post I will call this a 'site').
In Birmingham we have the Workspace for collaborative editing that I was the main coder on, this provides editing and analysis facilities for digital text projects hosted or associated with the University of Birmingham in some way. There are several of these kind of sites, maybe even dozens.
Textual Communities is another such site, based at the University of Saskatchewan, wherever that is, however, the difference is that Textual Communities aims to "provide an infrastructure and tools to allow anyone, anywhere, interested in a text to contribute to its study, as part of a community working together."
Here is a photo of some of the main Textual Communities people:
So as part of the Estoria de Espanna Project, I have been using Textual Communities and integrating it somewhat with some display and analysis tools on a server in Birmingham.
Part of the vision from the Textual Communities people is to build a global editing community, which would imply being an open and distributed system, not being based on one server.
Furthermore, there are performance and reliability drawbacks to relying on a single server in Canada to hold the data and pass it back and forth in real time over HTTP.
So the first immediate approach I have taken is to use database replication.
1. Master/slave model
The immediate steps to make Birmingham back up the Canadian site is a simple and low level approach and it is a master/slave model.
Master = Canadian Server
Slave = Birmingham server
1. Every Hour, the slave server checks that the connecting SSH tunnel is still up, if it is not it re-establishes it. The SSH tunnel can be broken by server reboots or network issues.
2. Every time a write happens on the master server, the slave copies it automatically.
3. The code that builds the edition (the public frontend that is one of the key project outputs) works from the local copy of the database which is far more efficient, and if the master goes down, the data is still available locally.
This takes us 50% of the way but there is a big step missing. You cannot actually write data to the slave without breaking the approach, if master is down, and you start writing in the slave, there is no automatic way to get the changes back.
It also doesn't scale very easily, adding a new site to the global textual community is a completely manual process. Beyond three or four institutions it would be a serious labour cost in maintaining the whole thing.
So sooner or later, you need to design a high level approach. The rest of this post is what I have been studying and building little test prototypes for.
2. A textual communities distribution system
Caveat emptor: So this the approach I have been working on, it may not be the approach favoured in the end by the Estoria project or Textual Communities.
Versions of data can be written at different sites and shared between them, yet what is considered the 'approved' or 'best' or 'current' version may be different at different sites.
Therefore the key to making textual communities into a distributed system is to separate the sharing of versions from the interpretation of these versions.
Each site must therefore keep an additional file/directory form of the data for use by the distribution system. These are plain-text files that can be easily backed up and easily analysed (a similar format to the existing textual communities API, see below).
The actual textual community software does not have to be run from these files, e.g. the Canadian site which uses MySQL can carry on doing so, but the internal changes to the database are exported in real time to plain text files in the data directory.
Likewise, changes by other sites can then be read into Canadian MySQL database from the data files (which changes are accepted and applied is subject to its merge algorithm, see below).
The data files are organised in a three level directory structure. The naming of the directories can be interpreted in different ways:
According to an SQL database approach:
Or in a document oriented approach:
Or in object oriented way:
Inside the lowest level directory are files, each file is a version of the data fragment expressed in (or at least wrapped) in JSON. The system of distribution does not actually care what fields are inside the file.
For example, a transcription of a page in the textual communities API is already expressed in this format with a field called "text" which contains the TEI XML text, as well as other fields (id, user, doc, create_date, commit_date, prev, next).
The first version of this data file would be named like this:
New versions are written according to a principle called copy-on-write. When a new version is written, the old file is left alone, the new file is called:
There is also a symbolic link called 'current', this points to what is the current canonical version of the data (for this particular site).
Different people at different sites can generate new versions of the file, which are automatically shared using git. However, what 'current' points to depends on a site specific algorithm.
The simplest algorithm is to point current at the file with the highest integer in the file name, however, sites with editors and crowd sourcing etc will not do that, current will only be re-pointed when the editor (the scholar) has approved it.
Groups of sites can have the same of or different algorithms, it does not affect the system of distribution.
Since data files are tracked and shared using git, this creates metadata that can be used to power a user-friendly web frontend for editors to see new versions, approve/disapprove them and look at history.
When a new version is approved by the local editor, current is repointed to the new file, if the version is not approved, it is just ignored. Undoing a new version is moving current to the older file, the rejected change is just ignored.
Using plain files and git solves many problems with crowd sourcing and distributed editing without having to write the software ourselves.
When the files are used, e.g. they are loaded into the Canadian site's MySQL database, the file pointed to by current is uploaded, the other files can be safely ignored.
Git has an event based system known as 'hooks'. So for example, when a new version of a file is created at a site, various actions can happen, such as notifying the relevant local editors that a newer version is available and can be approved or ignored.
3. Beyond Textual Communities - Digital Editions
While it is somewhat parochial to talk about the project I am working on, others in the global "Textual Communities" may have the same aspirations and problems. Eventually you want to take the live form of the text and turn it into digital editions.
These data directories can, more or less, be exposed via the web server to Javascript as is, just with a few bits of censoring any relevant private information. This is several orders of magnitude more efficient than an application server like Django or Ruby on rails serving the data.
I have been working on a B+Tree representation of the Estoria de Espanna project data to provide search and a fast web frontend, these can be read directly from the data files.
A fast web server like Nginx throwing out static files combined with B+tree index for searches is pretty much unbeatable in terms of performance. It is also pretty future proof - stupid lasts longer than clever! The importance of this cannot be overstated in externally funded projects that exist for their period of project funding and then afterwards are maintained on a while-we-can basis.
Also, I am hoping to produce native mobile applications as part of the Estoria project output, compiling an abridged version of the data files directly into the app is far easier and has far better performance than trying to port web application code to a phone by statically linking in a Python interpreter.
4. The End of the Beginning
Somebody might come up with something better and the Textual communities probably have their own strong ideas, but this is where my thoughts and experiments are at now.
Image credits: When it rains..dear by NaBHaN , Pack-man by NaBHaN , Bplustree by Grundprinzip
Modern Mounting with Udisks2
In this post we look at the changes in disk mounting and then look at the udisksctl command which allows you to automount disks from the command line. Feel free to skip past the background info if you just want to learn how to use the command.
In the beginning (Thursday, 1 January 1970?) to add a storage device (such as a hard disk) to a computer was an infrequent affair, and required the machine to be turned off.
So the classic system of disk mounting on a Posix ('Unix-like') system was for the system administrator to list all the disks in a plain text file systems table, which on most systems can be found in the file /etc/fstab.
Nowadays servers often have the ability to add and remove disks without turning the machine off. Even in desktop computers, SATA drives have this facility too at least according to the SATA drive - but it depends a lot on the manufacturer of motherboard controller actually following the standard so it is not usually worth the risk.
The main thing that has really brought hotplugging into use is external disks such as USB drives and other trendy connectors that come and (mostly) go such as Firewire, eSata, Thunderbolt, etc.
In the early 2000s, the first attempt to cope with this was called HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer, which did what it said on the tin, provided a layer between device nodes and the user of the nodes, so storage devices (and other hardware) can be added and removed without rebooting this system and without rewriting the /etc/fstab file.
Then everything gets replaced a dizzying number of times (DeviceKit, devfs, etc) as better approaches are discovered in a fast moving period of hardware development, udev eventually won and was the main thing for the rest of the decade.
When a device is added or removed from the system, the Linux kernel notices and sends out an event. Udev is a daemon that waits around listening for these events and then responding accordingly. udev runs in user space not kernel space which is good for security as you cannot plug in a USB stick and take over the kernel like on some proprietary operating systems.
In 2012, the udev project merged into the systemd project; systemd is the next generation (or current generation for some distributions) system and service manager. Systemd is really cool and is being adopted by most of the major distributions but it is still a year or two away in some cases depending on their release cycles.
Anyway, the point is that if you want to control disks on the command line and you are using the mount command you are 20 years out of date. Enough history, lets get to the flesh.
Command Line Usage
When you hot plug disks in the system, the graphical interface automatically reacts and provides buttons to mount, unmount and so on. However, if you have accessed a machine remotely, or just like to use the command line, then this post will tell you how to use the same automounting approach as the GUI.
For a system controlled by udev (or systemd), one command line tool is called udisks. It has two versions, in the original version 1, the command is udisks, for the second version udisks2, it is udisksctl.
If you don't have these commands already installed then you will have to install the udisks2 or udisks packages. In the case of the Debian distribution, udisks is in Wheezy and udisks2 is in Jessie. I seem to have both installed for some reason, possibly because I started at Wheezy and upgraded to Jessie.
Anyway, we will look at the newest one, udisksctl.
The main commands follow, there are several more that can be seen with:
udisksctl help
To see a list of disks attached to the system:
udisksctl status
For a very in depth list of disk information:
udisksctl dump
To mount a filesystem:
udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb1
You don't need to give a location, it will sort that out automatically for you. On my system it mounts the disk at /media/username/label where username is obviously your username and label is the label of the disk partition, other distributions may deal with it differently.
To unmount a filesystem:
udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb1
Note that the command is unmount with an N, not umount like the classic command.
Note that these command names autocomplete which is kinda cool.
The old udisks command is pretty similar except instead of giving a command name, you give an argument, e.g. to get the full disk information:
udisks --dump
Instead of status, it has –enumerate. This option lists partitions instead of physical disks like in the newer udisksctl.
Go forth and mount
So udisksctl is pretty cool, we can now mount and unmount disks from the command line in the same way as the GUI. Do remember that the disk information from the udisksctl dump command can quite be useful when wanting to know about the disks attached to a system.
Python's Disappearing Long Type
Note: everything below refers to the default (missionary position) C implementation of Python.
If you are converting Python code from Python 2 to Python 3, you might notice that the conversion tool transforms any uses of long() into int(). If that confuses you, this post will hopefully make it clear.
Before Python 2.2, there was a clear distinction between two of the Python numerical types, the int type and the Python long type.
Firstly, Python's int type was implemented as a signed long. So a Python int takes 32 bits of memory, which while not as efficient as some really optimised approach using shorter types, is still very fast indeed.
Secondly, Python's long type is an integer of unlimited size (well until you run of RAM - which would be an unrealistically massive number not useful for anything).
Python's long type does not map directly to a C type, it is a custom type implemented in the Python source code somewhere which I guess uses a C struct or whatever. As you might imagine, using the Python long type is significantly more RAM intensive and slower than the Python int type, but in reality it is rarely a problem (see below).
Hans Fangohr did a little performance testing and found that Python's long type is about three times slower than the Python's int type.
Unified ints were brought in for Python 2.2. This starts off as a Python int but transforms magically to a Python long if it needs to. Here is how it works in Python 2.2 to 2.7:
>>> import sys
>>> sys.maxsize
>>> type(sys.maxsize)
<type 'int'>
>>> sys.maxsize + 1
>>> type(sys.maxsize + 1)
<type 'long'>
>>> long
<type 'long'>
Note that when we add 1 to sys.maxsize, the result has an L suffix to denote it is a Python long and no longer a 32 bit number.
In Python 3, it works in a similar the way, however the fact you are no longer using a 32 bit type is now completely hidden away from the user:
>>> import sys
>>> sys.maxsize
>>> type(sys.maxsize)
<class 'int'>
>>> sys.maxsize + 1
>>> type(sys.maxsize + 1)
<class 'int'>
>>> long
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'long' is not defined
This time, when we add 1 to sys.maxsize, the result has no L suffix; trying to call the long constructor function causes an exception because it does not exist anymore in Python 3.
Of course, the fun of Python is that being a high level language, we normally don't really care as long a we get a number; this is it rightly got changed it to be one unified type.
One might design a high performance application not to use the Python long type if it turns out to be a bottleneck. However, normally you would have other bigger insurmountable bottlenecks in your software/hardware/network stack so you don't care about this.
However, if you are working on a multi-language project, especially if you are using Python alongside a lower level language like C, then it is useful to know what is going on underneath the Python types.
The Python float type is implemented as a C double. This doesn't change across versions. Several other numeric types are available in Python of course.
So if you see long being converted to int by the 2to3 conversion tool, now you know why.
Image Credit: The Spiderbot by Raikoh
The Digital Text
In this post we will example the digital text and how and why it is encoded.
Wars are often an unexpected event, and a lot of the major currency developments in the 19th and 20th centuries were due to wars. In the ancient world it was no different. The requirement to quickly gather resources required an efficient form of money.
During the Second Punic War, in 211 BC, Rome brought out the Denarius, which means 'containing ten' - because one silver Denarius was worth ten bronze (later copper) Asses.
During the Third Punic war, in 140 BC, Rome decided to go hexadecimal, where one silver-coloured Denarius became worth 16 copper Asses.
The silver-coloured Denarius was considered a day's wages for a soldier. The gold-coloured Solidus varied in value but eventually stabilised by the 8th century as 12 denarii.
The Romans carried spread currency around and in Britain, the denarius became the penny but was still written as d until 1971 e.g. 5d for 5 pence.
12d made a shilling, which is the Anglo-Saxon term for the Solidus. The shilling was in the 16th century pegged to the value of a cow in Kent market.
Twenty shilling made a pound which was named after the unit of mass, a pound in cash was originally worth the value of a pound weight of silver (which is now about £300).
The pound of a unit of mass is itself Roman of course, from libra, which is why pound is shortened to lb. The pound £ sign was originally an L. 1 lb in mass is 16 ounces.
Part the deal when Britain applied to join the European Economic Community in the 1960s and 1970s, was that we got rid of all these crazy measurements and adopted metric, also known as scientific measurements, which we did eventually, to a certain extent. For example, milk, beer and cider are officially sold in units of 568 mL!
So until recently, the idea of non-base 10 measurements was completely normal.
George Boole was a theologian who was also one of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th Century.Boole understood mathematics and religion as intertwined. George Boole believed that studying mathematics would help reveal a new understanding of God.
More on George Boole: http://zeth.net/archive/2007/07/19/what-is-truth-part-3-all-you-need-is-one-and-zero/
The core idea that all knowledge and thought could be reduced to two factors nothing (0) and God (1), had long been discussed, for example by the the Jesuit Gottfried Leibniz writing in the 17th Century. However, Boole had the mathematical knowledge to take the idea and build a complete system of logic around it.
Everything is either True (God - 1) or False (nothing - 0):
1 or 0 == 1
0 or 1 == 1
1 or 1 == 0
0 or 0 == 0
1 and 1 == 1
0 and 0 == 0
1 and 0 == 0
0 and 1 == 0
not 0 == 1
not 1 == 0
Everything that is not God is nothingness, everything that is something is God. God fills the nothingness but the nothingness cannot conquer God.
Any number can be represented by any sequence of bits. A bit is 0 or a 1.
Traditionally, eight bits was called a byte (more correctly it is an octet). Four bits is a nibble.
A computer processor has lots of microscopic transistors. The CPU in my laptop (the Intel Ivy Bridge) has 1.4 billion of them. Each transistor is like a switch with an on and off state.
Binary is very low level. The first level of abstraction over binary is called hexadecimal.
In previous lecture, we looked at how and when and where computing was developed. These early computer developers choose the most efficient representation. As we mentioned earlier, until recently non-base 10 measurements were completely normal.
Hexadecimal ('hex' for short) is counting in base 16, here is the table from above with hex as well:
Now it is easy to convert any binary number to hex. You just split it up into nibbles from the right.
So this number:
Split up is:
0111 1101 1110
7 d e
So in hex it is 7de.
What number is it in decimal? Well that is more complicated. Going from binary to decimal requires you to split the binary number up into parts:
10000000000 1024
1000000000 512
100000000 256
10000000 128
1000000 64
10000 16
1000 8
100 4
10 2
1024 + 512 + 256 + 128 + 64 + 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 = ?
So data is electrical impulses in a transistor, which represent 1 and 0, which are then hexadecimal numbers.
Now we have numbers, we can now encode characters. Each character is given a hex number.
So 41 in hex (which is 65 in decimal) is "latin capital letter A".
There are different encodings (mapping between numbers and characters) but the only one that really matters in 2014 is called UTF-8 commonly called Unicode (although there are other forms of Unicode which did not win).
UTF-8 has room for 1,112,064 different characters and symbols which aim to represent all of the world's languages.
The first 128 characters are carried over from an older standard called ASCII. The first 32 of these are historic control characters for controlling printers and teletype devices (remember those from a previous lecture?).
20 in hex (so 32 in decimal) is the empty space, then we get punctuation, then we get the numbers and so more punctuation etc then the letters in upper case then some more symbols then the letters in lower case etc.
This gets us to 7E (126) which is ~, and we have all of the English keyboard covered. The next 129 characters are Western European languages (German etc) and then it carries on after that through all the world's letters and symbols.
Including some really fun stuff added to give compatibility with Japanese mobile phones:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f302/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/miscellaneous_symbols_and_pictographs/images.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
So a digital text is a series of these hexadecimal numbers representing characters and symbols including spaces (20 in hex/32 in decimal) and control codes such as line breaks (0A in hex, 10 in decimal) and so on.
Here is a nice chart version of the first 127 (ASCII) characters: http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/c/ascii-table.html
So you can decode these characters (with some spaces added to make it simpler):
41 6e 64 20 74 68 65 72 65 66 6f 72 65 20 6e 65 76 65 72 20 73 65 6e 64 20 74 6f 20 6b 6e 6f 77 20 66 6f 72 20 77 68 6f 6d 20 74 68 65 20 62 65 6c 6c 20 74 6f 6c 6c 73 3b 20 49 74 20 74 6f 6c 6c 73 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68 65 65 2e
To make it clear that something is a hex value, it is often prefixed with 0x or x or U+.
This is as good as it far as it goes. But to make practical use of the data, just loads of text doesn't help that much.
If we want to make a digital representation of a humanities artefact like a manuscript, we need to use a file format. Otherwise the digital text is of limited use for other scholars and software.
Why not use a word processor?
A word processor is an approximation of a late 19th century typewriter. A word processor will not help in transcribing this:
Let alone this:
What about this:
How about this:
In the 1980s and onwards, a group of humanities scholars created the TEI, which is a set of guidelines for digitally representing humanities data:
These Guidelines apply to texts in any natural language, of any date, in any literary genre or text type, without restriction on form or content.
The guidelines can be found online here:
The TEI was initially SGML based then became XML based. What this means is that the text of the artefact is typed up, and meaning and extra information is inserted into the text using angle brackets.
An example of a text encoded using the TEI format: http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/718/1/47.xml
So in this simple line here:
<w n="6">testimonium</w>
The element <w> which means word, has an attribute n with value 6 which quite obviously tells us that it is word number 6. The text of the word then follows, and then the word ends with a closing tag: </w>
As explained in the preface to the TEI guidelines, part of the reason for them was to enable sharing of data and a new generation of shared TEI-supporting software to emerge.
Sadly that never really happened. The problem with the TEI is that it is a huge standard that doesn't really simplify the problem space in any way. There are hundreds of available elements and every author of a TEI document uses their own subset it in his/her own way.
Churchill famously said that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
TEI is the worst form of encoding, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Wizard of OZ
Current interest is in storing text in JSON. Here is a really simple example:
It shows a single verse.
Plain Text formats
Collating is comparing texts together. Show examples.
The politics, ethics and social context of digital culture
I thought it might be useful to give a non-digital example first. We will see whether it really helps or not!
Trams: a case study in technology
In 1700, what we now call South Birmingham was a patchwork of small subsistence tenant farms, but as people left the land to work in factories and other industrial jobs, these farms gradually became larger.
Here is a map of Birmingham in 1831, as you can see South Birmingham does not really exist yet. The built up areas are what is now known as the city centre:
One of these larger farms was called the Grange Estate, in the following image, Isaac Bate and his family pose outside the farmhouse in 1876:
At the turn of the 20th Century, there was a massive housing boom and the Grange Estate was bought in 1895 and zoned for housing and roads.
It is like Sim-City, everything needed for the good life is provided, including shops and the important combination of a church and a brewery.
Victorian industrial workers would walk or cycle along quiet tree-lined avenues and then take the tram and train for longer distance travelling.
So far so good. You will notice there is no car parks, no off street parking, no garages. The total number of cars in the world was at this point was approximately 25, most of which were Benz hand made cars in Germany.
However, after the war, the brave new world required that the trees, train station and tramlines were all removed to make more space for the motorcar.
The Grange Estate is now overflowing with cars, and the Alcester Road is a traffic jam for much of the day. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for children and Birmingham is one of the most obese cities in Europe.
Car ownership in Birmingham peaked at 50% of households, one of the highest rates of car ownership for a large city. There is not, and never will be, enough space for everyone to own a car in dense urban areas like Birmingham.
Cars socially exclude people who do not own them, and are dangerous to people walking and cycling, and prevent community building as you cannot talk to other residents while stuck in a small metal box.
There are currently 380,000 cars in Birmingham (8000 are added every year). As the population of Birmingham is predicted to continue growing, the car is becoming increasingly unsustainable. The council have produced a plan:
You guessed it, the plan is to reopen the train stations and put the trams back. Getting us precisely back to where we were in 1896.
The new Birmingham trams have a maximum capacity of 210. Cars in Birmingham have an average occupancy rate of 1.2.
A car driven for an hour every day, spends 4% of its time in use, 96% of its time rusting and getting in the way.
Cars are overproduced and inefficiency used. However, this overproduction has provided large numbers of good jobs - 145,000 in the UK alone currently work in the automotive industry.
If everyone moves to trains, trams and bikes, where do the jobs come from?
If Birmingham gets its comprehensive tram network, it needs just 120 tram sets to provide transport for the whole city (service every 6 minutes each way).
What does Birmingham's 60 year love affair with the car tell us about technology?
- Increased technological efficiency destroys jobs (while creating others).
- Sometimes you have to go "back to the future"
- Not all new technologies are necessarily a good idea
- Technology is never un-invented, everything survives somewhere but the rate of growth or decline is the important thing to notice.
The history of the computer is much like the history of the tram.
The real history of computing (short version)
The first programmable object is the Jacquard Loom in 1801, it used punch cards which allowed different weaving patterns.
The digital age almost begins in 1843, when Lady Ada Lovelace (the daughter of poet Lord Byron) wrote the first computer programme, algorithm for Charles Babbage Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers.
The programme was written as part of a set of examples of what could be run on Charles Babbage's computer the Analytical Engine. Sadly, the British government decided to cancel his research funding so this machine was never finished, but it would have been the first general purpose digital computer.
Here is his earlier machine called the difference engine:
The digital age tries to begin again in 1936 when Alan Turing explains in a seminar paper that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language, i.e. it is "Turing complete".
Turing went on to create this, the Bombe, a machine designed to decipher encrypted German messages during World War II.
The successor was called Colossus, and is starting to be a recognisable computer.
Alan Turing was not appreciated during his lifetime, to put it lightly. However, now he is a man of many memorials, including these:
After that we have the first non-military computer, the Manchester Mark I in 1949, and pretty much from here the digital age has begun.
The next image shows the Atlas, also at the University of Manchester, the world's most powerful computer in 1962. It had more computer capacity than the rest of the United Kingdom put together.
This is the 1970 PDP-11 operated here by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
Thompson is sitting at a teletype terminal. Where you code into the keyboard and the computer responds by printing out the result.
Shortly afterwards, video terminals were invented. Such as this one:
It may look like a computer, but it is actually just a screen and a keyboard, all the processing happens in the mainframe computer elsewhere.
These type of computers can and normally did had multiple terminals, sometimes in other rooms or other buildings.
In the 1970s, it was called time-sharing. Hundreds or thousands of terminals could share the same mainframe - which would be maintained and updated by specialists.
I love this next photo, the guy in the front looks like he has the universal programmer's tense expression, i.e. 'Why the heck is this not working now?'.
These mainframes ran an operating system called Unix started by Thompson and Ritchie. The different terminal users could communicate with each other and collaborate.
The terminals got smarter over time, and even had graphical front ends that looked something like this:
This was the start of the modern era of computing. Many programs that were written in the 1970s are maintained today. There is a continuous thread that runs from Lovelace and Babbage, through Turing to the real beginning of the digital age in the 1970s.
So far so good. This is our tram. Next, comes the car, or indeed two of them.
1. Personal computers
Here is an early attempt from 1969 to market a home computer.
This particular model was a commercial failure.
When the PC came out, such this example from 1981, compared to the Unix systems of the 1970s and 1980s, they were giant step backwards.
No networking, a single process at once, focused on really dull office tasks like typing a letter. The biggest problem looking back was the software.
2. The rise of proprietary software
Until this point, the source code of all programs had been shared among the largely academic computing world. Everyone could study and improve computer programs and share those improvements back to the community.
With the new idea of proprietary software or closed source software, you don't legally own the software anymore, you have merely licensed the right to use it under certain conditions.
The source of the software is not shared, you just have compiled (unreadable) copy of it. There can now be a difference on what you think the software does (something useful) and what it actually does e.g. spy on you.
When you understand this point, you suddenly a realise it is a bad idea to licence or use any software that cannot be publicly peer reviewed and fixed.
Proprietary software comes with multiple pages of legalese and asks you to tick that you not only read it but also understand it. You have to lie in order to start it, and goes downhill from there.
The Snowden revelations printed in the Guardian have confirmed what we already knew, that Microsoft software has built-in backdoors for the NSA to spy on its users. Even scarier is that secret backdoors created for Microsoft and the NSA could also be exploited by criminals.
Proprietary software, especially in the form of Microsoft Windows, is a temporary aberration in the history of the digital. In 50 years time, Microsoft Windows will be considered as important as this device:
So lets get back to the trams. There were two massive and related developments which happened almost in the background, but would come to dominate the digital world.
The rise of free/open source software
In 1983, a famous programmer in MIT called Richard Stallman began the 'Free Software' movement. As well as being a well known software developer (he invented the concept of a live real time text editor and started the most widely used compiler today - GCC), he best known as a digital philosopher.
Stallman argued that software developers had a moral, ethical and political duty to enable co-operation and prevent restrictions on the ability of users to study, examine, peer review, modify and share software. He argued that proprietary software was anti-social, corrupt and ultimately self-defeating.
It is important to understand the difference between the terms 'commercial' and 'proprietary'. Software can be 'commercial' - i.e. made by a company for profit, with or without being proprietary. Likewise a proprietary program may be made available at cost or at no cost.
He illustrates the concept by comparing 'a free beer' with 'free speech'.
Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens created a later related concept called 'open source', which emphases the practical aspects rather than the political and ethical ones. For example, the vast majority of software is not created for sale in packaged boxes but is created use within companies and institutions where software is not their primary purpose. So if this software is shared and improved in a community, it gives added value to those who engage in it.
Almost every major software development of the 1990s and 21st century has happened within the Free Software/Open Source world including Linux and Android.
Most importantly, the most famous piece of free/open source software of them all, the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web
In the early 1990s, the best designed and most powerful information protocol was called Gopher. However, despite its technical strengths, Gopher eventually lost out because the copyright owner, the University of Minnesota, wanted to sell it as proprietary software.
And finally a Brit again!
Tim Berners-Lee created World Wide Web, which while technically inferior to Gopher, was free software. Anyone could develop a server or a client without having to ask or pay anyone for permission. When WWW became widely shared in 1993, proprietary Gopher was toast. Gopher was eventually re-licensed as free software in 2000, but it was too late, WWW had taken over everything.
Finally, desktop computers had similar networking capabilities to 1970s mainframes. While they are a lot of people still using Windows, these are merely like the 1970s dumb terminals, 83% of web servers are running free software. Now with Apple OS X (based on FreeBSD Unix-like system), Linux desktops like Ubuntu and the rise of Android based phones and tablet (Android is based on the free software operating system Linux), almost everyone is running a system which is based on the 1970s Unix. The 20 years of the Windows aberration is coming to a close.
Go Linux, go WWW, go Trams, go bikes!
Academia and Open Source Software
Most UK and EU funding bodies now require that any software produced in a research project is released as open source software. Software developers within the academy, especially those in the humanities, are unlikely to be allowed to large pay licensing fees and are expected to use open source tools wherever possible.
Any project that uses the digital is likely to involve some open source software.
Beyond Open Source
The WWW has enabled collaboration in many areas, not just software. Principles and ideas from open source have been applied to other fields.
- Freedom of Information - providing open access to government documents through the Web
- Open Access - unrestricted access via the Web to peer-reviewed journal articles and primary data.
- Crowd sourcing - creating content by soliciting contributions from online communities - Wikipedia being a prominent example
- Crowd funding - funding projects through soliciting contributions from web users - e.g. Kickstarter
Digital Conduct
Collaborative and creative online communities are self-selecting. People form communities to create something, should they also be responsible for social justice?
Should these collaborative communities enabled by the web and by free/open principles have standards of behaviour, if so what should they be and who polices them?
Increasingly these creative communities have published codes of conduct, especially regarding communication and discrimination.
Developing-world criticisms: does attempting to regulate conduct in digital creative communities risk the danger of western (especially US west-coast) cultural imperialism? How do diversity and social policies relate to freedom of speech?
Does forcing participants to use real names instead of pseudonyms cause problems for those with fear of harassment?
How should gender be dealt with in largely male dominated online communities? Are those who run these communities responsible for addressing gender imbalances?
Communities that work primarily online but have conferences or social meetings pose particular issues in terms of harassment/unwanted attention. E.g. conferences with male to female ratios of 10 to 1 are not uncommon.
Some further reading
Karen Sandler, 2012 Keynote, (first 25 mins about hacking the software on her defibrillator), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XDTQLa3NjE
Happy Hacking, The Keiser Report, Russia Today, 2012 (start at 12m) http://youtu.be/3o82P4V1vu0?t=12m9s
The Zen of Python, Tim Peters, 2004 http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2002 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf
The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond 2002 http://www.unterstein.net/su/docs/CathBaz.pdf
Revolution OS (2001), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjaC8Pq9-V0
Biculturalism, Joel Spolsky, 2003 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html
The Code Of Conduct, Jesse Noller, 2012 http://jessenoller.com/blog/2012/12/7/the-code-of-conduct
Geek Feminism: Timeline_of_incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/
Three Crunchbang Linux Tips
As talked about previously, my main computers currently have the Crunchbang Linux distribution, which is a version of Debian GNU/Linux using the Openbox window manager.
These tips might also be useful for some other Debian or Ubuntu based systems.
Setting the keymap for an Apple keyboard
While laptops might need flat keys for portability (though I might argue the point), I hate typing on them. I like full-sized keys, not flaccid little flat ones.
I once bought an Apple Mac G4, I don't use it anymore but I still use the keyboard I bought for it. Using Linux, it is not too much of a problem just to use the IBM layout without (i.e. remembering that the double quote mark is above the 2 key for example) but it is worth setting it properly in case someone else needs to use my computer.
I also have an Apple Macbook Pro laptop for work reasons which also has the same key layout.
Anyway, I edited the file called /etc/default/keyboard and set the following option:
I am in Great Britain, so I also need to be sure that the following option is set:
Maybe there was a way to change this using a graphical tool, but this way worked.
Creating screen layouts with ARandR
ARandR Screen Layout Editor is a wonderful tool for setting up your monitors. You can drag them around, change the resolution and rotate them in order to create your perfect screen layout.
To save the configuration, click on 'Layout' then 'Save As' to save a particular configuration.
You can reload this configuration within the program, but the configuration file is itself a simple shell script (which calls xrandr with arguments representing what you have picked in the GUI).
So to automatically configure your screen layout when the graphical session first starts, you can append the script to the file:
The fact that a configuration is just a shell script means you can easily have multiple layouts for different situations, and either call them yourself on the command line, assign desktop shortcuts or use other tools to call them, e.g. you can use cron to change the screen configuration at a certain time or write an upstart/systemd script to execute it based on some system event etc.
Dealing with not-found commands
When using the command line in Ubuntu, if you try to call a command/program that has not been installed, it says something like:
The program 'tuxpaint' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install tuxpaint
Here is a more complicated example:
The program 'a2ensite' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install apache2.2-common
What actually happens here is a Python script appropriately named command-not-found is called which then looks up what package is needed to run the program.
If you want the same behaviour on Crunchbang, just do:
sudo apt-get install command-not-found
The problem with this utility on older hardware is when you accidentally make a typo that is actually a valid command somewhere, you get a second or so delay while it searches Apt's cache, which could get annoying quite quickly.
If you want to search for a particular package, you can just use the pre-installed apt-cache command, e.g.:
sudo apt-cache search tuxpaint
All the packages to do with tuxpaint are listed in the terminal. However, this does not go down to the file level like command-not-found does. For example, the other example of a2ensite finds nothing:
sudo apt-cache search a2ensite
I don't know a way of searching for a package by command using the stock Crunchbang install. However, you can install the apt-file package, which allows searches like:
apt-file search filename
Installing Multiple Versions of Firefox
So I want to test my web application using multiple versions of Firefox, especially the latest version, but I do not want to mess with my default system version (which is in fact Iceweasel :).
You can make this as over-complicated as you like. The simple way is to ignore apt and your system packaging system and run the test browser completely in user space.
The downside of this is that you will not get automatic security updates, so you have to keep an eye yourself for them and download new versions yourself. On the bright side, the browser is running as an unprivileged user and you are only testing your own site.
So you just download the archive from Mozilla. So I am using 64 bit Linux and I speak British English, so I used the following URL:
You can edit the URL as appropriate and then unpack it e.g.:
tar jxf firefox*.tar.bz2
Inside the new firefox directory there is an executable named, somewhat unsurprisingly, firefox, call it in the following way:
./firefox -no-remote -P
This will pop up a little dialogue that allows you to choose the user profile, so create a new one:
You can see I have created a profile called Firefox26. In this way, the new Firefox version will not mess with the main system version. Click 'Start Firefox' to launch it. Having a new profile for each test version will keep things both sane and nicely decoupled.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Belgian waffles are traditionally topped with whipped cream and strawberries, but we've opted for blueberries. Or serve them with your favorite syrup or fruit.
Fast-acting yeast calls for liquids that are slightly warmer than regular active dry yeast. The safest way to judge temperature is with a thermometer. These waffles are very easy to make…about the only way they will not perform is if the milk is too hot.
To make waffle batter ahead, fill storage container half full, cover loosely and refrigerate up to 24 hours; stir down if batter rises to top of container.
© 2017 ®/TM General Mills All Rights Reserved


text: The Santa Ana (I-5) South Corridor Improvement Project hit its second milestone on August 29 when reopened the newly constructed Alondra Boulevard Bridge in Santa Fe Springs. The first structural milestone was marked by the newly rebuilt Shoemaker Avenue Bridge that opened in May. The prior 57-year-old Alondra Bridge was demolished in June 2013 and rebuilt 84-feet longer, and 40-feet wider from a four-lanes to six-lanes within 14 months. The contractor is C.C. Myers, Inc.


text:
This church, re-dedicated in 1900, is based on the remains of fifth-century house the Relics of St. Stephen built by the Empress Eudocia.
Stephen was the Greek Christian commissioned by the leaders of the Jerusalem church to look after the Greek-speaking poor of the city as part of the church's mission.
The original church was built by the Empress Eudocia at the end of the fifth century to house the Relics of St. Stephen, the first Christian Martyr, and the adjoining Monastery complex was so large that by the beginning of the sixth century it housed close to 10,000 monks. Having been destroyed in the 12th century by crusaders not wanting to give Salah id-Din a base outside the walls, the new church was re-dedicated in 1900, based considerably upon the remains of the old. The world famous Ecole Biblique (Bible School) was founded in 1890.


text:
Puzzle Levels
Download a FREE Solution for your puzzles!
Axis & Allies - D-Day
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Product Information
|Avalon Hill
|War Games
Product Description
Morning of June 6, 1944.
The fate of Europe is in your hands! Presenting Axis & Allies D-Day, a new, stand-alone extension of the classic strategy game Axis & Allies. Axis & Allies D-Day lets players to command, or conquer, the largest amphibious invasion in history.
Axis & Allies D-Day features detailed game components including a new blockhouse piece and an oversized game board. Other elements of this new Axis & Allies variant include a card deck with three card types -- Orders, Tactics, and Fortune -- adding depth and complexity to gameplay. Order cards determine play sequence and break turns into distinct phases; Tactics cards offer players varied strategic opportunities; and Fortune cards add an element of unpredictability.
Axis & Allies D-Day begins as Operation Overlord, the invasion of German-held Normandy -- 130,000 soldiers of the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States poise to assault Fortress Europe. You and your fellow world powers control their fates.
One player controls Germany, whose Axis forces have turned the beaches of Normandy into a near-impenetrable stronghold. Set to breach those defenses are the Allies: the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
Axis & Allies D-Day, designed for two or three players, can be played in two hours. The game is the third Axis & Allies variant, following the successful Axis & Allies Europe and Axis & Allies Pacific.
Age: 12+
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text:
Micro Innovations MM705H Deluxe In-Ear Headphone
The MM705H MICRO BUDS Deluxe in-ear stereo headphones feature Compact Ear buds and lightweight design.
Arriva cordless iPod Shuffle 2G headphones with ipod-type earbuds, regular white
Listen to your iPod 2G Shuffle with this comfortable, lightweight headphone with iPod type earbuds, supported on the back of the head, easy to use controls, no dangling wires, perfect for runners, skiers, workouts. Also very comfortable under helmets. Shuffle player not included in purchase.


text:
US 'no-negotiation' hostage policy should be changed
Thirty years ago, when I was snatched off the street in Beirut by radical Shiites calling themselves "Islamic Jihad," the world took my plight and that of other Westerners kidnapped in Lebanon's long war to heart. During the nearly seven years I was held, countless demonstrations were staged on our behalf by churches, journalists, hometowns in America, France, Britain, Ireland and many other countries. Miles of yellow ribbon were tied to oak trees, and newspaper editorials ceaselessly demanded our release. When I finally emerged from the Lebanese gulag, the longest-held Western hostage, there were dozens of boxes of letters waiting for me, from school children and ordinary people across America, along with grand welcome home parties in New York and Washington.


text:
There are many attributes that are common to all that lead. Business leaders, Military leaders,Pastors, Scout Leaders.. you get the point.
Of those attributes there are 4 that all leaders need to have to be effective in their leading toward the High Performance team. They are competence, Committment, Courage, and Compassion.
Competence because no one wants to follow a knuckle head that does not know what he is doing. Its that simple, you need to know how to lead and you need to know or at least understand what the task is and how to complete it to get other to follow you. Now you don't have to be an expert, but you need to be competent enough to surround yourself with those that do know how and then use their strength to enhance your weakness.
Committment. You must be committed to both the task and those that you lead. If you lack committment, those that follow you will mirror you level and you will never be a high performance team. You need to be committed enough to get to know how to do the task, that means get educated. You need to be committed to the needs of those you lead. You need to be committed to the reason for the task and the desired outcome. We make commitments daily in leading our families, our Scout units, and working at our jobs. You know, the jobs that pay for our Scouting hobby.
Courage. A Scout is Brave. Sometimes doing the right thing is not the most popular and the leader is always the one that gets either the evil eye or the attitudes when he makes decisions that are not popular. Doing the right thing is always the right thing to do, so you must be courageous in decision making. You may not be the most popular, but in the end you will have done the right thing and your team will be better for it.
And Finally, Compassion. Meeting the needs of those you lead takes a lot of compassion. You need to know your people and what makes them tick. To be an effective communicator and leader, you need to be able to dedicate time and energy to getting to know the folks you lead. This way you can feel what they do and react to why they may be done, up, or somewhere in between. To be a high performance team you need to understand the needs of the led and they will appreciate you as the leader for it. Genuine caring leadership is the best way to move to High Performance status.
Well there you go 4 solid attributes of the leader. Have them and you will be effective, don't have them and you will have to settle for second best.
Speaking of second best, our Troop worked on Pioneering tonight at the meeting. They built the Gateway that they are going to assemble at Camporee. The JASM set a challenge for the patrols, the Patrol that had the best knots would all get an i pad. The younger guys one and here is their prize!
Yeah, we have a lot of fun in our Troop. They all had a great laugh and then we closed with Vespers!
Thanks for all the feedback lately. I really appreciate the comments and emails, keep them coming.
Have a Great Scouting Day!


text:
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Tofino Report
I did a trip a couple days ago to Tofino.
I spent most of Monday futilely casting my popper over 40' feet of water looking to get coho to come to the surface. I finally got with the program and learned to bucktail the Weigh West way, which is to troll the fly five feet behind the boat very very slowly on a 350 grain sink tip. If a concentration of fish are found, then everyone would begin blind casting. The accepted B.C. stripping motion is long and slow pulls.
The takes on the trolled flies were always visual, that is, if you could deal with the tedium of staring down at your fly sometimes for hours on end. The coho have been known to hit the boat and have even ground their noses in the prop as the rocketed to the surface. The prevailing theory is that the boat bottoms are painted black and that the coho mistake the hulls for bait balls as they look up toward the surface.
Tuesday morning and afternoon were extremely slow until we hit a spot at 6pm that had been hot a few days previously. My trolled chartreuse clouser hadn't been in the water for more than ten seconds when I hooked my largest coho of the trip, a brute of a hook-nosed beast between 12-15 pounds. After releasing the fish, I immediately grabbed my dryline setup and tossed my popper out. My boat-partner, Craig Nakagawa, continued to bucktail while I experimented with my popper in the propwash. I found that if I zigzagged my fly by tossing short left and right mends, I would get the fish to rise. The slashes and strikes this evening were downright violent. I caught two more big coho on my popper before we had to leave in order to make the docks at 7:30. We couldn't wait to hit this spot the next morning.
It rained all during the night and the wind was howling as we left the dock. The fishing sucked for all of our last day except for a brief period in the afternoon. I saw some fish jump and we immediately motored over and trolled until Craig hooked up. I tossed and trolled my popper to no avail and I caught and lost a couple more trolling. At the end of the day, one good-sized fish slashed at my popper and grabbed Craigs fly as it went by.
It is amazing to see how different methods work on the same fish. Slow and close trolling would have never entered my mind for coho. On the other hand trolling in general is hard for me. These late season ocean fish seem a lot harder to fool than the July to mid August fish. Probably fewer of them though.
We finished up with almost all top water, cast flies at Neah Bay at the end of August. Fish finally came in on the beach which made the trips much more plesant with a bit of cover from the weather. Great memories of fish coming sideways from 90% to the fly with fantastic back-out-of-the-water hits. Learned a lot this year but so much more to understand.
Drove out to Neah Bay last night to bring back the trailer. Note to anyone going to Sikeu. Take highway 101 and turn at Sappho. The coast road is out somewhere around Silver King. Cost us an hour and a half yeaterday. Got in at 2 AM but really slept well.
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Family: Pinaceae, Pine view all from this family
Description Relatively low-growing conifer, a shrub at timberline. Straight trunk, rarely krummholz. Branches short, thick, frequently extending to ground. Bark thick, light gray turning reddish brown. Needles 5 per bundle; 2–4 cm. long, deep glossy green on the outer face, and white on the inner faces; persisting for 10–15 years. Cones 6-11 cm. long, dark purple ripening red-brown, with soft, flexible scales each with central prickle.
Dimensions Height: 6-15 m. (20-50 ft.)
Diameter: 0.3-0.6 m (1-2 ft.).
Habitat Mountains.
Range California.
Discussion Closely related to the bristlecone pines, being classified in the same subsection Balfourianae; has been hybridised with the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine in cultivation, though no hybrids have ever been found in the wild.


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|Classic Atlantic Salmon No pursuit rivals salmon rivers, flies & legacy
|Topic Review (Newest First)
Any policy based on varying the length of the season is not likely to be a runner here because of the economic argument in a fairly remote area. There are a lot of jobs dependent on Spey having a very long season from February 11 thru Sept 30. This does not leave that much time for ghillies/guides to do maintenance work & have holidays, bearing in mind they work a 6 day week in season. There is also the hotel income issue.
In areas where springers are really in peril, the above issues would not rate, but on Spey the spring run is just significantly reduced but not in peril. It can stand say 5% mortality from responsible C & R. As an indication, our 2.5 mile, single bank, 6 rod beat has just caught 51 salmon to May 31, & I am pleased to say 35 have been returned in the first year we have advocated a C & R policy.
We are not keen on doing too much stocking except where juveniles are known to be deficient; we have a succesful strain of fish & we would like to keep it that way & not decrease their 'wildness'.
Most rods fish for a week & their catch expectation would be nil, one or possibly two in spring. If we can get that first fish put back, we will preserve perhaps 60% of the run that would otherwise get knocked on the head. That's probably the most likely outcome.
Great lakes salmon and steelhead luckily, do not have fish
return issues, so special catch and release, or no kill for hatchery or wild fish is limited. Lots of fish returning annually to each river, they do not even count them here, only estimated returns are made.
Some sections of high quality blue ribbon waters have special regulations of fly fishing only and/or no kill. Rivers which have essentially all wild salmon or steelhead have their head water nursery sections closed during the peak salmon and steelhead spawning periods.
On the blue ribbon wild fish rivers a strong catch and release philosophy has been adopted over the last 10 years. More anglers are realizing how precious these wild fish are.
Lets hope this philosophy continues to grow since this is a finite resource we need to protect for the future.
One other control which started last year on one river and is now spreading is citizen patrols by anglers who have been trained by the fishery division on how to monitor anglers for proper fishing methods and catches. If a violator is found they call a fishery officer who is close by to review the situation and approach the angler in violation.
Kerry, how so? Got to admit that it does sound
like an oxymoron.
I will add one more to your list. At least up here in Washington State. "Maximum Sustainable Yield." The motto of the WDFW and the most damaging of all rules to anadromous fish in Washington.
Anthony -
First, it's a privilege to have the views from such an important part of angling heritage present in our community. Glad you decided to join Malcom in our online global angling club.
I am not familiar with any regulations that are based on gender of the species, nor do we have even/odd retention rules. The most fundamental rules (other than length) for salmonids include:
If the C&R mentality of the US and Canada catches on in other parts of the world, it might be a way we can give something back for all that we've gained from centuries of angling lore and wisdom.
Welcome to the Forum!
R Spey & restraint policies re male Atlantics
Fortunately the Spey is very undeveloped too. In 100 miles there are only about 6 large villages & one that is called a town. Water quality is excellent, (I hope you have drunk some with the addition of some malted barley!), & it is the fastest flowing major river in Britain. Great for the fly. Spey casting a virtual necessity on a good proportion of the pools, & some like me have found they get greater & more reliable distance this way with the double handed rod.
The committee I chair is considering a range of possible restraint policies for Spey on which to canvas opinion. An outside possibility is to allow the killing of all grilse but only identifiable male salmon, particularly as it is difficult to sex springers. Anyone know of any such policies in Atlantic Canada, based perhaps on a minimum length of the male salmon's kype? It is probably not workable but worth asking?
Favourite policy is probably that practised on River Tweed here, i.e. first & third etc springer salmon per rod week must be returned, second & fourth etc may be killed.
Are there examples of this sort of policy in US/Canada, & have they been able to stick?
Great information Anthony; keep the Faith!
Too many Rivers in the US have pretty much shot their bolt, (or in Washington State that should be spelled "Bolt," as in Judge Bolt)especially those which had large runs of Atlantic Salmon. Many Pacific Northwest Rivers are in somewhat similar condition. Over-fishing, netting, etc. But the fellows/gals in Washington and Northern Oregon get the brunt of this.
The great thing about having the Rogue River in my back yard is that very little of it has any development at all from the mouth up to river mile post 155 where the dam is located. Of the 155 miles, 'development' of any kind may touch 10 or 12 percent of the stream. The rest is still total 'boonies.'
With luck we'll stay that way.
River Spey tribulations
Just found this forum, & no surprise to find Malcolm has found it before me. Malcolm does a lot of his fishing on the syndicated Spey beat I chair, & observations elsewhere that he must be a top Spey rod are pretty well founded!
He is also very responsible re Catch & Release. Restraint generally is our most topical issue over here at the present time. I say this as a member of the Spey Fishery Board & just appointed as the Chairman of its Research Committee. Salmon better not become extinct on Spey in the next 3 years! The long term average rod catch is still just under 10,000 salmon a year.
Largely private fishing may have stopped Spey runs from being overexploited historically, but there is no denying that the springer element is significantly reduced at present. It may be just a cyclical phenomenon, but river managers must do what they can & not rely on runs reverting. The overall problem of lower nos returning to rivers is felt to be most to do with global warming & a colder N Atlantic, but the evidence for it at present is purely circumstantial.
Meanwhile river managers attempt to optimise smolt output. Fortunately there are only small areas of the Spey catchment, which are not naturally turning out decent nos of juveniles. We have two small hatcheries to supplement the deficient areas.
Our current problem lies with getting rods to do their bit & practice restraint voluntarily. Although many UK rivers need 100% catch & release for springers, & the Environment Agency in England & Wales has mandated this, in Scotland the new Executive in Edinburgh is reported to have itchy fingers, but the handful of rivers including Spey, whose spring runs are reduced but not endangered, feel that 100% C & R is unnecessary. It may be that the most appropriate policy for these is that currently employed by the Tweed, where the first springer must be returned, but the second, fourth etc per rod week may be killed.
Responsible rods like Malcolm & myself return every springer we catch, but there are a lot of selfish rods out there with dinosaur attitudes (some proprietors too), who still want to kill everything & bring the heavy hand of Edinburgh ever closer with each swing of the priest.
American practice is at least 10 years in front of us on ths issue; we have a lot to learn from you guys.
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Focus on Funds
Fannie, Freddie and Fairholme: the Downside of 'Active Share'
High-conviction fund managers have a quality academics love, called "active share." It's a measure of a manager's willingness to deviate from a generic market exposure. Simple logic and math suggest you need it, maybe even a lot of it, for a chance of beating the market by any notable margin.
The corollary, of course, is Live by the sword, die by the sword.
This week's example comes via Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FMCC), which are owned by a number of high-profile managers. The pair are down 40% in two days after U.S. senators released a blueprint for winding the government-backed mortgage-finance giants. The plan is to replace them with more modest government mortgage guarantees.
You can guess the effect on all those high-risk bets on Fannie and Freddie.
The Wall Street Journal estimated a paper loss of $300 million in Tuesday's selloff for Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management. It must have been painful, too, for Bruce Berkowitz's Fairholme Fund (FAIRX), another notable owner. Fairholme Capital Management owned 150 million common shares at last check. Those investors, of course, bought in months ago, so unlike latecomers they're still well ahead in the positions.
The bigger takeaway for the average investor is to underscore the downside of a high-conviction manager.
Fidelity Investments, which has a dog in the fight, given that many of its managers have little to show when it comes to "active share" -- remember that's the academic term for high-conviction investing -- recently published a paper entitled "Active Share: A Misunderstood Measure in Manager Selection."
A more accurate title would have been, "Active Share: Not All That." Fidelity's authors Tim Cohen, Brian Leite, Darby Nielson and Andy Browder are keen to show that, while, yes, in theory, you need active share to beat the market, there is a greater dispersion of returns, more risk, and lately, it hasn't worked out too well for investors.
The most convincing piece of evidence comes from the chart above. The chart shows that, over the last year or two, managers with the greatest active share were more likely to undershoot the market than to beat it.
You have to go back to 1999-2002 for the salad days of high active share. This period happens to coincide with the bursting of the technology bubble, a period when managers were forced to choose whether to go along with outrageous tech-stock valuations, or fall behind the index by avoiding them. In the end, contrarians were rewarded richly, but it was painful to get there.
These days the average manager with a lot of active share appears to break even with the standard index.
While Fidelity's purpose may be to underscore the merits of mutual funds which take less risk than the active-share outliers, another takeaway could simply be ... go simple.
If you can't find a high-conviction manager whom you're certain is above average, just stack the odds in your favor with simple low-cost index funds and ETFs like iShares Core S&P 500 (IVV) or Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VOO).


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You have to look at it at a non-party view:
he tried things...they didnt pass....some things passed with the ok, of congress, and they didnt work.....
point is, not enough was allowed to happen.
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You have to look at it at a non-party view:
he tried things...they didnt pass....some things passed with the ok, of congress, and they didnt work.....
point is, not enough was allowed to happen.
And dont even get me started on this Libyan incident. The man has no spine when it comes to dealing with Jihadists.
what did he do? he decided to try to pass something that most DEMOCRATS in Congress and the Senate didn't want to pass...he wasted his first 2 years convincing his own party to let him pass something no one wanted...he could have gotten soooo much done without republican opposition his first 2 years...he CHOOSE not to.
Well, newsflash, the Fed is a private corporation, and benefits from both good and bad economies, so are you really surprised? There hasn't been backing to our dollar since around WW2, and this is EXACTLY what was going to happen by design. It was a system designed to fail. Sucks, doesn't it?
It's so depressing to me that people don't know how the Federal Reserve works (I'm not saying you don't...this is just a general statement).
I just can't understand the logic of those who think that their president didn't TRY to make things better. It didn't matter who was in office this term, everyone still would have complained. I'm horrified that people think Romney is fit to run a country. Absolutely horrified. Despite the terrible economic situation just prior to the 08 election, this is the one I'm going to remember, because it's so ****ing scary.
ok ok....youre always right, im always wrong....
I forgot how many conservatives are in this thread lol. It's like arguing with my dog who just barks back.
what we needed was a "Hayek" based model...those two models are pretty much polar opposites....Obama only knows how to use and apply one (and it seems he has a limited knowledge of economics all together most likely because he's never run a business...he's been in politics his whole life...all he's done is teach "theories" and doing community organizing...it's not HIS fault...but the simple answer why we are worse of right now then we were when he took office is that he is simply not qualified to be the president of the united states...he doesn't have the experience or knowledge base to make the right decisions in SOOOO many areas, he's an eloquent speaker, he's very charismatic, he's a great leader.....but he doesn't have the qualifications to lead this country.
Romney is smarter when it comes to the economy....that said I don't really like him either...he's a waffler (but so is Obama and most other politicians)
I'm not voting FOR Romney I'm voting against Obama.


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Program Recognizes Innovative Educators from Ohio State University, Bainbridge Graduate Institute and University of CaliforniaDavis
CENTER VALLEY, Pa., March 23, 2009 - Olympus, a precision technology leader creating innovative opto-digital solutions in healthcare, life science and consumer electronics products, today announced the 2009 winners in the Olympus Innovation Awards Program: Michael Camp, Ph.D., academic director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Ohio States Fisher College of Business; Gifford Pinchot III, president emeritus, and Jill Bamburg, dean emeritus, Bainbridge Graduate Institute; and Andrew Hargadon, associate professor, Graduate School of Management, University of CaliforniaDavis. The national program, executed by Olympus in partnership with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), recognizes individuals who have fostered or demonstrated innovative thinking in education. The winners received their awards at NCIIAs 13th Annual Meeting last week in Alexandria, Va.
The Olympus Innovation Awards Program, now in its fifth year, represents Olympus ongoing commitment to technological innovation and education. The Program includes three awards: The Olympus Innovation Award, the Olympus Lifetime of Educational Innovation Award and the Olympus Emerging Educational Leader Award.
We are pleased to celebrate our fifth consecutive year as a partner with NCIIA and sponsor of the Olympus Innovation Awards Program, said F. Mark Gumz, president and chief executive officer, Olympus Corporation of the Americas. As an industry and business innovation thought leader, Olympus is proud to recognize the excellence in academia responsible for educating the next generation of business leaders in the competitive global marketplace.
Our partnership with Olympus continues to grow and for the past five years, we have recognized a wealth of talented candidates that exemplify excellence and innovation in higher education, said Phil Weilerstein, executive director, NCIIA, based in Hadley, Mass. The fact that we are able to reward these individuals during a challenging economic climate speaks volumes for the passion and dedication Olympus and NCIIA have for those educators stimulating and inspiring innovative thinking in students.
Michael Camp, designer of the Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (TEC) Academy and the TEC Institute, won the 2009 Olympus Innovation Award for his work at Ohio State University, where he trains business and science students in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship. The Olympus Innovation Award recognizes a faculty member who fosters an environment of innovative thinking among students through inventive teaching methods, projects and case studies. The TEC Institute is the outreach/community development arm of the program and gives OSU students access to various technologies resulting in business concepts emerging from the more than $1.4 billion in R&D spending in central Ohio alone.
Andrew Hargadon, associate professor, Graduate School of Management, University of CaliforniaDavis and a former design engineer for IDEO Product Development and Apple Computer, captured the Olympus Emerging Educational Leader Award. This award recognizes an individual who has inspired innovative thinking in students in a discrete area and whom the judges believe has the potential to make even greater contributions to the field in the future. He was recognized for his strong curriculum and notable success in moving technologies from the lab to the marketplace. The UC Davis MBA program has been ranked among the top 50 in the U.S. for 13 consecutive years by U.S. News & World Report. Hargadons further recognition stems from his outstanding research and teaching efforts at the undergraduate (as Director of the Technology Management Program) and graduate level (MBA courses in organizational behavior and technology management).
Gifford Pinchot and Jill Bamburg, co-founders of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, were jointly granted the Olympus Lifetime of Educational Innovation Award for their significant impact on the university and local region. Their development of programs has motivated students and colleagues to think innovatively and their curriculum infuses sustainability and social justice principles throughout traditional MBA disciplines that focus on the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. BGIs curriculum has been adopted by several other graduate schools, and is considered a leader among sustainable business programs. The Olympus Lifetime of Educational Innovation Award recognizes faculty members who have demonstrated a sustained contribution throughout their careers to stimulating and inspiring innovative thinking in students in their own universities and throughout academia.
About Olympus
Olympus is a precision technology leader, creating innovative opto-digital solutions in healthcare, life science and consumer electronics products. Olympus works collaboratively with its customers and its affiliates worldwide to leverage R&D investment in precision technology and manufacturing processes across diverse business lines. These include:
Olympus serves healthcare and commercial laboratory markets with integrated product solutions and financial, educational and consulting services that help customers to efficiently, reliably and more easily achieve exceptional results. Olympus develops breakthrough technologies with revolutionary product design and functionality for the consumer and professional photography markets, and also is the leader in gastrointestinal endoscopy and clinical and educational microscopes. For more information, visit www.olympusamerica.com.
The NCIIA was established in 1995 with support from The Lemelson Foundation. Its mission is to foster invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship in higher education - components of the higher education curriculum that are vital to the nation's economic future. The NCIIA accomplishes its goals by supporting curricula and programs that encourage the development and the work of E-Teams - multidisciplinary teams of students, faculty, and industry mentors working together to take an idea for a technological innovation and bring it through prototype development to commercialization. The "E" stands for excellence and entrepreneurship.
Editors Note: For more information on the Olympus Innovation Awards Program, as well as photos from the awards ceremony, please see the backgrounder at www.olympuspresspass.com, contact the NCIIA at firstname.lastname@example.com, or visit www.nciia.org.
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Elizabeth Sullivan, Olympus, (484) 896-5005, email@example.com
Meredith Klein, GolinHarris, (212) 373-6022, email@example.com
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text:
My two middle dogs were raised around chickens and I have no problem with drive. Believe it or not they learn the difference between the yard and field. Now if they happen across a chicken in the field I may be in trouble.
They are smarter than you think.
I also raise game birds and they run right past the pens. Take them to the field to run upland and its game on.
Like said earlier this issue may be with grandma and what she does if pup messes with her pets.


text:
Petroleum refining, conversion of crude oil into useful products.
Distillation of kerosene and naphtha
The refining of crude petroleum owes its origin to the successful drilling of the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, U.S., in 1859. Prior to that time, petroleum was available only in very small quantities from natural seepage of subsurface oil in various areas throughout the world. However, such limited availability restricted the uses for petroleum to medicinal and specialty purposes. With the discovery of "rock oil" in northwestern Pennsylvania, crude oil became available in sufficient quantity to inspire the development of larger-scale processing systems. ... (100 of 11,918 words)


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text: hey so do any of you guys smoke i've been trying to quit doing the whole cold turkey thing, ive tried a few times this year but i just never manage to stick to it. the long drives to school and the long work hours are usually what make me cave. i also cant help waking up and wanting one with a cup of coffee ya know? anyway just wondering if anyone here has successfully quit cold turkey and how you went about doing it? especially when people around you smoke? Granted i am not a pack a day smoker ill have maybe 4-5 a day but thats still pretty bad and it adds up. I've been looking to clean my diet up a bit and try to start working out, i'm not really in any kind of bad shape, but theres definitely some potential im not maximizing and i know i would feel a lot better if i cleaned it all up. did you all start eating a lot more when you quit smoking? i mean i find that when i have tried to quit i just replace the stoges with excessive food, especially at the wrong times, and also coffee and stuff. thanks for any advice