Developing Public Safety Technology in Suffolk's Rural Heartland
Tom Fosdick
Tom Fosdick is a software architect whose experience ranges from low level coding through to product management, delivery and customer relationships.
For nearly 20 years Tom has specialised in providing advanced technology to front line Emergency Services both in the UK and internationally.
It could happen to anyone, you’re sat in a great little restaurant in Indonesia and someone suggests that you do a cycle tour of local home industry.
Naturally what I should have said is, “You must be joking! This is Java’s second largest city, the roads have at least 6 times the amount of traffic they can cope with, lane discipline is non-existent, thousands of motorbikes zoom in all over the place at random, I’ve not found a single working seatbelt since I arrived and I’m pretty sure that every single one of the myriad of trucks is on Euro NCAP‘s top 10 blacklist of cycling death-traps”.
Jl. Prawirotaman and The Grand Rosela Hotel
That’s what I should have said. I have however been to India and I still have the image of a very brightly coloured but nonetheless very heavily built truck burnt on my retinas from when my tuk-tuk driver went through the central reservation into the fast lane of the opposite carriageway. Apparently it was “less busy”, apart from the enormous pile of steel hurtling towards us at 50mph, that is.
I have no idea how we got back on the right side of the road – either my brain has chosen not to remember or my peril sensitive sunglasses went blacker than a priest’s socks.
After that I figured that a cycle ride around Yogyakarta was small beer so I put my name down immediately. The trip was actually organised by one of the travel agents on Jl. Prawirotaman – I’m just not sure which one it was because it was ultimately Intrepid Travel that it was done through.
Anyway, at 8am our steeds were ready to collect. There was some degree of choice – although I’m not quite sure how I ended up with the little purple number. Unsurprisingly it was exactly like riding a mid range 1990s mountain bike that’s slightly too small. It was the “too small” element that I found irritating, if it wasn’t for that I might have been tempted to try to sneak off with it…
Purple!
My partner however selected one of a number of more traditional looking bikes. This was a decent piece of equipment – complete with V-Brakes!
Despite the variable age of the bikes they were all well looked after; there were no nasty noises, no frayed cables, the gears functioned without a hitch and the brakes were well adjusted and keen.
Now, you will have to excuse the lack of any real action photographs. You will understand that photography was rather low on my agenda for most of this trip – somewhat below not being run over by a truck, side-swiped by a motorbike or blundering into a drainage ditch full of monitor lizards.
Predictably, just about as soon as we set off there was a mountain of traffic on our tails waiting to get past. That was the strange thing though, it was waiting to get past. It wasn’t nibbling at our back wheels as if our presence on the road was an offence to the gods of motoring. It actually felt strangely safe – each vehicle waited until it was safe (well, safe for Indonesia) then gave a quick “pip” of the horn to warn that it was overtaking. It was all rather civilised and not at all the chaos I was expecting to have to deal with.
The fact is that in Indonesia the roads are full of all types of vehicles that travel at different speeds. In a modern car you’re perpetually behind something slower. So this is what road users in Indonesia expect – they don’t get frustrated with slower moving traffic because even if they can blast past this one they’ll only get a few yards before they come up behind something else slow moving.
In the West we seem to think that we have some sort of right to drive at – or slightly above – the speed limit. As a cyclist the fact that this is not the philosophy of Indonesian road users at all was really very refreshing indeed.
The other refreshing thing about the traffic is that the flows move and change, adapting organically to changing circumstances. Throw out a signal and you can feel the traffic start to adapt, sometimes to the extent that a space appears for you to move into. Road users in Indonesia cooperate with each-other because that way everyone gets to their destination faster.
I was genuinely surprised, I would definitely cycle in Indonesia again, in fact I’d rather cycle in Indonesia than in some European locations and certainly more than in the USA.
So in between marvelling at the road systems we dropped in on a few home industries – this model is big in Indonesia. Small, generally family run concerns just big enough to buy machinery and make some use of economies of scale.
First we discovered how tofu is made – in an anonymous looking farm building all of about 15m square. It was mighty hot in there though – not a job I think I’d have much stamina for. Nevertheless it transpires that making tofu is really quite simple. I may have to try it at some point!
It was on the way to the rice fields when I noticed just how easily I’d dropped back from my modern disk / v-brake “3 fingers round the bar, 1 finger round the brake lever” to the old “3 fingers round the brake lever, one round the bar” that was needed with cantilevers. The importance of this fact is almost entirely due to chickens. In Indonesia it appears they have taken the place of the pheasant as the creature most likely to hurl itself under you wheels for no good reason whatsoever.
Then our guide started complaining about his tan lines. I’m not quite sure who wins, I think we’re about even…
So I now know a lot more about the production of rice and it’s labour intensive stuff, lots of people working long hours in heat that never really drops below 30 Celsius.
Cohabiting with the rice fields are people making bricks. There doesn’t seem to be much set-up as it were, just a couple of buckets and a frame. The bricks are left to dry out in the sun before being “burnt” as our guide described it.
The final home stop of our trip was at Kwt Rahayu‘s modest home, for a lesson about tempeh. Soya beans are wrapped in banana leaves and left in the sun to ferment naturally. The result is partially fermented soya cake – it’s still got some crunch left to it and the fermentation process develops a wonderful flavour.
Kwt Rahayu has a lot of trophies and some of them at a national level – “almost all”, explains our host, “for tempeh”.
We then dropped in on a batik “factory”. Actually it was a showroom and this always makes me a little suspicious about the finances and the working conditions. They weren’t at all pushy however, a fact that gives a certain amount of confidence.
By now it was late morning and it was beginning to get hot so we headed back into the city. On the way though we spotted another of Indonesia’s home industries…
OK, so they’re not actually building planes in small commercial shelters, this is actually for training. But it’s still rather a strange thing to come across on the outskirts of Yogyakarta!
By the end of it all I was really quite fond of my little purple mountain bike, I really didn’t want to have to give it back. I didn’t want to get on the plane back home either – Indonesia is a spell-binding country, I could have easily spent a couple of months there, not just a couple of weeks.
Reading Time: 3minutesTo Finish First, First You Have To Finish
I’ve just been bitten. It’s one of the standard strap-lines of software development teaching – do it properly first time, don’t hack it and think you can fix it later. When the deadline is looming however sometimes we have to make a business decision;
Do we drop the feature (or some other feature)?
Do we miss the deadline?
Do we hack it in the full knowledge that we may be bitten later?
Fortunately for us software developers, technical debt is beginning to be understood by business managers. I explain it to non-techies like this;
I could hack it and get the feature in, but if I do that might be storing up problems for the future. Next time we want to add a feature in that area or even fix a bug we might have to unpick the hack and implement it properly before we even start on new work.
Hacking it now is borrowing time from the future – at some point we’ll have to pay it back and we’ll have to pay a wedge of interest too.
A few years ago I spotted a design problem; we’d assumed that something was always related to a location. In some circumstances however it could actually be related to a vehicle.
We should have changed the database to account for this, but that meant changing pretty much every component of an n-tier system and the deadline was busy whizzing past our ears.
There’s no way we could drop the feature so I had to find a solution. What I noticed was that I could cast a vehicle ID safely into a location ID without any possibility of coincidence. We could then detect in the DAL if it was actually a vehicle and generate a fake location record that actually contained all the information we needed.
A few years later and now we’re noticing that customers are putting a whole load more records in the location table than we’d initially thought and the indexing performance of the ID type is poor. So we want to change the type to something that indexes better. None of the options available allow us to cast a vehicle ID to a location ID any more.
Since those early days the problem has been exacerbated by the fact that more and more code has been piled in on the assumption that you can safely cast a vehicle ID to a location ID.
So we’ve now got a considerable amount of code to unpick, we’re going to have to do the redesign and reimplementation work that we (perhaps) should have done in the first place, then we can start looking at improving the index performance.
In situations like this it’s easy to look back and curse the past decision. Go into any software development office and you’ll almost certainly find a developer (or several) swearing at the screen, decrying previous decisions as “stupid”, “short-sighted”, etc.
I know I’ve made mistakes, I know there are situations where I’ve chosen to incur technical debt where there were better alternatives available. On this occasion though I made the right decision – we have time to repay this debt now. Back then we most definitely did not.
So “never hack it” isn’t a rule, it’s a guideline. But you have to be aware of the business consequences if you choose not to follow it.
Not a Fan of the Empty Catch
We’ve been having a bit of trouble with a small piece of software on a customer site. It’s just not working and there are no indications of why. So I cracked open the source and found a light dusting of these…
try
{
SqlConnection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
//the rest of the Sql code
}
catch (SqlException)
{
}
Oh look, it’s an empty catch. An empty catch is about as justifiable as a goto – I’m not saying that you should never use one, just that you need to have a good hard think about what you’re actually doing and consider carefully whether or not you’ve got the structure of your code correct.
The case against is easy to see above; although it may be normal for one type of SqlException to be thrown and ignored (perhaps as the result of a deadlock), you can’t guarantee that every SqlException is thrown for that reason. In the deadlock example your code should more follow this pattern.
try
{
SqlConnection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
//the rest of the Sql code
}
catch (SqlException ex)
{
if (1205 == ex.Number) //deadlock (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645603.aspx)
{
//we ignore deadlocks
}
else
throw;
}
This tests the SqlException to see if it’s a deadlock and ignores it – if it’s not a deadlock then it re-throws it.
I would argue however that this doesn’t go far enough. Exceptions should not be used for flow control which means that the very fact an exception has been thrown indicates that something has gone wrong. If you’re not going to handle that in code then the very least you should do is enable someone to find out that it happened.
There are many logging and debugging gizmos out there (such as log4net) and they usually contain a concept of levels of information. It would be a rare circumstance indeed where an empty catch was preferable to a minimal debug log, e.g.
try
{
SqlConnection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
//the rest of the Sql code
}
catch (SqlException ex)
{
if (1205 == ex.Number) //deadlock (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645603.aspx)
{
log4netInstance.Debug("SomeOperation caught Sql deadlock => {0}", ex.ToString());
}
else
throw;
}
If this exception is normal and the app is expected to cope then you can turn the “Debug” level of logging off in configuration. If the app starts having problems then you can turn the “Debug” level back on and see all the exceptions that are being thrown. A subtle little thing like this can make a big difference.
On the one hand we have a quick phone call to one of the customer’s IT pros to explain that their recent security audit has resulted in them accidentally revoking the app’s authentication to the DB and that perhaps they’d like to reverse that.
On the other hand we have you, the developer, being sent to the customer’s site where you have to explain to some very senior people why your application has stopped working and what you intend to do about the poor quality, unreliable piece of software that you’ve supplied.
Never underestimate what can happen to your app on a customer site: Murphey’s Law is one of the fundamental underpinnings of computer science.
I’m a lone wolf cyclist really. Cycling is one of the things I do when I need to get away from people. Sure I’ve ridden with groups in the past but I’ve always found them kind of annoying – everything that should be simple suddenly becomes complicated. Even with off road groups. If I fancy a short detour past a nice café to pick up a bun and a cup of tea I want to just do it and not have to convince a load of other people that it’s a good idea.
I like it when it’s just me and the mountains. Unfortunately I live in Suffolk, which means it’s just me and the slight undulations.
Sky Ride
Sky however are – and have been for some time – supporting a major initiative to get people cycling. It’s called Sky Ride and basically it’s a lot of organised rides all over the country, led by small teams of volunteers. So as a supposed cycling advocate I thought it was about time I stopped being so antisocial and looked into this properly.
The first thing I would say is that if you’re looking at getting into cycling, or picking up a bike again after a long break then Sky Ride is absolutely ideal and you must go on one immediately.
There are three levels of difficulty. Sky Ride is supposed to be a recreational cycling initiative: I’ve had a look at some of the routes and these levels definitely refer to normal human beings rather than Lycra clad loonies.
Easygoing: suitable for anyone including children, even a complete novice who’s only got basic cycling skills and may not be the fittest person on the planet.
Steady: ideal for someone with a basic level of fitness and some cycling ability. May contain hills.
Challenging: whilst these might not actually be that challenging for the aforementioned Lycra clad loonies they’re certainly not rides you want to tackle if you’re a little unsure about your fitness or ability.
All you have to do is plug your preferred location into the web site and it’ll suggest rides (and dates) near you. You can then go ahead and book your place on one.
Incidentally, if you are just starting cycling don’t be frightened by apparently large distances. I wouldn’t be thinking about any 50 mile excursions right away but 5 miles is perhaps a little over half an hour’s ride (at a similar effort level to walking for half an hour).
There just happened to be a 13 mile long “steady” ride near me at a time when I was free so I put my name down.
Joining the Ride
I left plenty of time, so I was about 15 minutes early when I turned up at the rendezvous point – the car park of a local sports centre. There were three people in a prominent position in blue “Sky” cycling tops clutching bikes who looked quizzically in my direction. “Sky Ride?” I asked. “Yup,” said Carol, checked my name off the list and handed me a free high-viz Sky bib. “You don’t have to wear it,” she said, “but it can be kind of useful if we get broken up.” We chatted a bit and I chatted to other riders as they arrived.
There were people with a range of bikes and wearing a range of kit. Some people had the full Lycra ensemble and bikes costing an arm and a leg. Some people had tracksuit bottoms, trainers and a basic high street mountain bike. Most people were somewhere in between. There was even a chap and his young daughter on a tandem, which I thought was exceptionally cool. Refreshingly there was no snobbishness, nobody was sneering at anyone else’s bike or judging anyone because they were wearing last year’s fashion.
Most people, but not everyone, chose to wear helmets. Under 18s have to in order to go on the ride but for adults it’s optional. That’s kind of an important thing to mention because if you don’t have a bash hat it doesn’t mean you can’t come.
Do invest in a pump, a spare inner tube and water bottle however. These are considered essential items. More info here.
The Protocol
Just before we set off the ride leaders explained the protocol. One of the ride leaders would always be at the front, one at the back and one in the middle. The group as a whole always rides at the pace of the slowest rider, except on climbs where we wait for the slower riders at the top. At junctions the ride leaders would organise it so that we’d all go through together.
There were times when the group would need to bunch together and times when we could – and perhaps should – ride two abreast. They’d tell us these things at the appropriate times but would appreciate it if we shouted the orders onwards as someone at one end of the group can’t always shout loud enough to be heard at the other.
Echoing information is pretty normal in any group, you can often hear ripples of “car back!” going from the back to the front or “slowing!” from the front to the back.
Armed with this (and a few other safety instructions) we hit the road.
Trouble at Mill
Important Arterial Infrastructure Road in Suffolk…
Things started off pretty well, once we’d got through the first couple of junctions and had the first couple of orders we’d all settled in. Then we went through Tuddenham St Martin. For a newcomer the climb out of Tuddenham is quite an up. One of the less experienced members of the group had a bit of a dizzy spell so one of the ride leaders stayed back with him while the other ride leaders found us found a safe place to stop. Meanwhile she established any possible medical problems and fed him energy gels and rehydration liquids.
He was right as rain after that: it was probably just a case of him going out too hard and too fast on the first hill. It might have been a bit of a shock too when all the more experienced riders streamed past him at the start of the climb and he may have felt some social pressure to try to push too hard.
It’s one of the simple facts of cycling though that sometimes, at that time in that group, you are the slowest rider. Even the fittest cyclists have off days and end up at the back. Waiting for people is part of the general protocol of cycling, so if you are on a group ride don’t feel the need to rush up hills, just make sure you get to the top. The more experienced cyclists will often be secretly glad of the break (especially the very, very experienced ones if you catch my drift).
As an aside it’s perhaps worth mentioning that one of the reasons groups break on hills is because of different “rhythms” of climbing technique. Quite simply the techniques people use to climb differ and disturbing someone’s technique by forcing them to go slower than they want to can mean that a hill they would have found easy suddenly becomes rather difficult.
The former patient showed no sign of a relapse, but the ride leaders and some of the more experienced riders checked in with him every now and again just to make sure.
From then on we set about bimbling around the beautiful Suffolk countryside at a comfortable pace, chatting and riding. Sadly I neglected to get it together to take any photos, so the two I’ve used here are actually from another ride this week on a similar route. One which it turned out I didn’t know quite as well as I thought and I accidentally took an 8 mile detour. You won’t have that happen on a Sky Ride!
Confidence
What struck me more than anything else was the level of organisation and professionalism. The ride was well organised, the ride leaders were friendly and chatty but assertive when they needed to be. They managed the pace and looked after the group effectively and efficiently. It all gave an air of confidence, that we were safe, we were being looked after. Even for an experienced cyclist this was encouraging and despite being a lone wolf I actually thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
So this is going to be the first Sky Ride of many I feel, although next time I think I may pick a “challenging” route. I like a nice bimble every now and again but “steady” was just a little bit too bimbly for me…
Reading Time: 5minutesSurface RT: It’s a Nice Idea.
I was on campus at Hull last week and pretty much as I walked in the door the ICT dept. jammed a Windows Surface RT into my hands. “It’s useless,” said a man in a Where Would You Think t-shirt, “enjoy!”.
I was quite excited about getting a Surface RT however, mostly because a lot of our customers do significant amounts of business when out-and-about. Developing for Android and iPad is a bit of a pig for Seed as it’s basically a Windows software house (although we do do it). So having something based on an ARM processor but that runs Windows must be a pretty major innovation for us, right? I mean most of our apps are pure .NET so you’d think it would be child’s play to get them onto the Surface RT right?
Now I understand, from a technical point of view, why Microsoft may want to do this; Windows is still in a transition. Microsoft don’t really want anyone fiddling with that old Win32 stuff because it’s dangerous, but a lot of legacy apps still need it. Whilst Microsoft continue to provide access to the Win32 interface those applications aren’t going to stop using it. So they need to break the chain.
The reason it’s dangerous – indeed something that’s bugged Windows from the start – is that they’re trying to retrofit security. Basically Unix-like operating systems, of which iOS and Android are, start with the premise that as a user (or application) you’re not allowed to do anything. You are then granted permission to perform certain tasks. You can’t get at the soft underparts of the operating system unless you’re a superuser and in the case of iOS and stock Android devices they’re not letting you do it (although you can “root” most Android devices to get such access if you really want).
Windows however started life assuming that the user could do anything they wanted, so security simply wasn’t included at the start. This means that Windows has a heck of a lot more holes to plug than the other two platforms, and they’re not there yet. To clarify, we’re not just talking about hackers and viruses, but a lot of legitimate programmers have been using stuff in Windows – often because there’s no alternative – that can actually destabilise the system. Opening up the device to anything that would cross-compile for the ARM processor would mean they had exactly the same problems on the tablet as they do on the desktop.
Essentially we’re all still paying for a cock-up that Microsoft made in 1981.
There would be a half-way house though, as I mentioned before most of our apps are pure .NET which in theory can’t do anything nasty. The fact that RT is not open to pure .NET apps makes me scratch my head a little. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the current .NET runtime (for desktop) isn’t quite a clean as it ought to be.
So, as a software developer I find the Surface RT frustrating, it has a desktop that I can’t use, I can’t write Windows Services (even in .NET), the only thing I can do is write store apps and even then it’s subtly different to writing a Windows Phone app.
Microsoft themselves have done a reasonably good job of getting their own apps onto Surface RT (e.g Skype, Lync) and there’s a smattering of the top apps that you’d expect to find – Facebook, Twitter, Kindle etc. but that’s about it. There is a woeful lack of applications for the platform. Not only that but even apps like Facebook and Twitter seem limited compared to their Android counterparts. They’re clunkier, it’s clearly that less attention has been paid to them.
So the big advantage of the Surface RT over an Android or iPad tablet is that it runs full Microsoft Office. That’s it. That’s the advantage and to be honest some of the alternative office packages that are available for Android are pretty good. In every other way it’s a worse platform than Android or iPad.
It even needs its own special charger rather than using Micro USB – although to be fair it uses a 12V supply whereas USB is 5V.
Annoying
What Microsoft have done is to pretty much guarantee failure of the platform.
Still, it must be useful for something, right? I mean it’s actually quite a good piece of hardware. They detachable keyboard thing works really well too.
It’s certainly better (hardware) than the cheap Chinese Android table I got a couple of years ago. So why don’t I run Linux or Android on it? Well I can’t because Microsoft have locked the bootloader. Before you scream “no fair!” almost everyone does these days, Android included. Some Android manufacturers however release unlocks for their bootloaders. HTC for instance generally do when the device is a couple of years old (via htcdev.com). I can’t see Microsoft doing this.
In conclusion, the Surface RT is not the platform for development that I’d hoped it would be; it’s not very useful for us to develop apps for. Yes it has Office which makes it a useful device to have around for meetings etc. and it’s a lot easier to get in hand luggage than a laptop. It lacks the I/O though to make it a useful presentation device and there’s no chance of running up Visual Studio even if I could put up with it running terribly slowly. For me it cannot replace a laptop for anything other than the most basic business use.
There are cheaper Android devices that are far more capable – and the lack of Microsoft Office on them isn’t really much of an issue. There are x86 based tablets that run full Windows and, whilst they might be a bit slow, are actually viable as a travel alternative to a laptop. Microsoft themselves even produce the Surface Pro series.
To cap it all off the lack of apps puts it way behind the competition as a social and media platform so I’m really struggling to find a use for it. I’ll let you know if I find something a little more involving of technology than this…
We use hire (rental) cars at The University a lot which gives me the chance to drive a range of different cars. Today the hire car fairy brought me a Vauxhall (aka Opel) Corsa SRI. In yellow.
Yellow Peril!
I was quite looking forward to driving it because it’s really popular with car modders, so presumably there’s something a bit special about it, right?
Err, yeah. I found that out really rather quickly, but first let me tell you what’s good about it.
It feels like good value for money. I’ve driven a few cars that feel like pieces of agricultural machinery with a few pieces of friendly plastic Blu-Tacked to them. The Corsa is pretty solid, well put together. Obviously there have been compromises but there’s nothing that rings out as glaringly cheap. Nothing agricultural.
The equipment is clearly a bit of a compromise. Boxes have been ticked, but the features are often difficult to use. Cruise control for instance, it’s there but it’s a bit of a battle compared to more upmarket Vauxhalls.
Nevertheless on the road the car is direct and feels very well connected to the road, you can throw it into a corner with confidence and know that you’re not going to be constantly fighting understeer.
It’s clearly relatively cheap and if you’re not expecting top class then it’s relatively well equipped.
But Where’s the Engine?
Thanks I suspect largely to the gearing the car is very nippy around town. I don’t live in a town, I live in the middle of nowhere. Sure it’s pretty nippy on narrow country lanes too but as soon as you get out onto wider roads you realise that only the first two inches of throttle pedal travel actually makes any difference.
I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much of a journey at 4500rpm trying to smash my foot through the bulkhead screaming “MORE POWER! MORE POWER!”
I can accept peaky small engines that have no guts outside the power band – I drive a Japanese car after all – but this engine has nothing in the power band either.
The Stereo is Woeful
Precisely No Features
A new car that doesn’t have DAB, USB or Bluetooth. Really? Just a CD player and AM / FM radio. Surely there are laws against this kind of cruelty. I wasn’t in the mood for Radio 4 and I’m not old enough to listen to Radio 2 so I whipped out my hand AUX cable and plugged the phone in. No matter how I tweaked the settings though I couldn’t get it to sound good. So when I stopped for a cuppa I tried tweaking the considerably more extensive graphic equaliser on my phone. Nope, the speakers are clearly made of cheese.
Clearly a Good Candidate for Modification
So to summarise, we have a car that handles well, is comfortable, is of generally good quality and comes with a good basic level of equipment. There’s a lot of potential for improvement however, almost everything could use a step up to the next level but I’ll single out the stereo (woeful) and the engine (was there one?) for particular attention. Coincidentally these happen to be the first two items that modders seem to want start tweaking…
I rather suspect that I was not the one person that James thought would be reading his blog article, but nevertheless I did and with some interest. There are many routes to and indeed through university and it struck me just how different my story is to his.
Sadly this tale takes place before the prevalence of digital photography so it’s a little light on images. In fact it really begins at a time when photography itself was in its infancy, paint was the order of the day.
John Constable: The Wheat Field
Never Destined for University
My ancestors didn’t go to university. Most of them barely went to school. They were farm hands and factory workers with the odd miller and dressmaker thrown in just to add spice. In 1944 however there were significant changes to the state education system – changes that meant that both my parents were able to get a far better education that their predecessors.
I was born into what was very definitely a white collar family. I would argue that we were working class – even though my parents made their living with the pen and not the plough we had no central heating, double glazing, car or telephone.
I was a normal child, I loved sport and playing outside, building dens and generally acting like I was a character from a Just William book, or more likely from the Beano. I quickly noticed though that my interest in science and maths was a little more keen than most of the kids around me. The roofs of my dens stayed up and it wasn’t my aerial runway that snapped, dropping Craig derrière-first into some very uncomfortable looking brambles.
In the early 1980s home computing was taking off and my elder brother wanted to be right at the cutting edge. We couldn’t afford that, but we had a steady stream of second hand equipment that he’d push to its absolute limit. I was a bit young for this but I tried to join in, I think I annoyed him quite a bit but these were valuable lessons to me. I learnt to program a computer when I was about 8 years old, about the time I learnt the offside rule.
I found school frustrating. I had trouble concentrating in the classes I wasn’t interested in and trouble coping with how slow the ones I was interested in moved. Nevertheless I did quite well, but I’m sure there were a few teachers tearing their hair out in the full knowledge that if I actually applied myself in their classes I could have done so much better.
I knew what I wanted to be though. I knew at 8 years old that I wanted to be a computer programmer. These were exciting times and the more and more I heard in the media and the more equipment I managed to get on the bench in front of me the more I was sure. Studying history was just not where it was at. Who learned anything from history anyway? Computing, that was where you had to be. Computing was going to be increasingly important in society and it was going to be where I made my career.
There was a problem however. My parents were quite remarkable simply because they had both stayed on at school to get O Levels and not left to find work at 14 (or even 11). A Levels? University? It wasn’t something that was in my culture. Besides, by age 16 I felt that I’d had just about enough of formal education, I felt I was being babied by the system, it was channelling me down a very generic route and actually preventing me from studying the things that would be best for my future.
British Telecom Research Laboratories
Fortunately for me, British Telecom’s world renowned research facility at Martlesham was a comfortable cycle ride from where we lived and at 16 I joined their Trainee Technician Apprentice scheme to train to be an electronic research technician. I never had any intention of actually working as an electronic technician though, by that point it was clear that electronics research in the UK was all but dead. If BT were going to continue with research it was going to be in software, not electronics.
The training group had tried their best to alter the apprenticeship to reflect this, but in reality they hadn’t gone anywhere near far enough.
BTRL – Now Called Adastral Park
I was young and rather petulant, the course wasn’t what any of us needed and I was – on reflection – rather obnoxious about this. I almost got fired. Several times. They really weren’t happy with me doing just enough to scrape through the electronics stuff and using the time and facilities to learn more the kind of computing that I thought I was going to need. To them I was pig-headed and insubordinate. To me they were irretrievably mired in the dogma of a dying industry. I was just – but only just – smart enough to toe-the-line enough not to actually get fired, even so I sailed pretty close to the wind a few times. I even wrote a farce called “BT Terminated” which loosely chronicled the battles I had with the Training Division. They found a copy of it and did not see the funny side. I almost got fired for it.
Nevertheless I did actually enjoy my time as an apprentice and the TTA scheme was hugely important to me, a lot of the skills that I still use today were learnt on that programme.
For some reason I thought a purple silk shirt and braces was a good idea.
BT’s Operations and Maintenance Centre
I graduated from the training scheme and went into the OMC team. At that time the Operations and Maintenance Centre was a network of computers that controlled the vast majority of telephone exchanges in the UK. This was very different to the systems I’d been working on as a trainee which were generally small experimental developments.
The OMC team wasn’t really my first choice, the problem was that I was very conscious of what the training division thought of me and there was no guarantee of a job at the end of the apprenticeship, so I thought any job in software development was a good outcome.
Unfortunately I walked straight into the same kind of problems that I’d battled throughout my apprenticeship: the OMC used some rather dated technology and methods and wasn’t really compatible with my enthusiasm for being on the front-line of technology.
They viewed me as a having a dangerous obsession with the cutting edge that was putting the UK’s telephony infrastructure at risk and I viewed them as dangerous Luddites whose desperation to cling on to the 1970s, use defunct and irrelevant methodologies and archaic technology was putting the UK’s telephony infrastructure at risk. The truth of course, was somewhere in the middle and if we hadn’t all been quite so pig-headed I think we could have achieved something rather significant.
It was in the OMC team though that I first learnt the realities of trying to build and maintain a large mission critical system that required extraordinary resilience. A lot of the lessons I learnt then are very much still with me today.
I was conscious though that my technical skills were falling behind the curve and that was going to make it difficult for me to find a more suitable position. I needed to get out of there or my career would suffer. Unfortunately at the time the OMC team was deemed to be under-performing which made it very difficult for anyone to transfer out. If I was going to get out, it was almost certainly going to be out of BT.
Then a few things kind of happened at once. Firstly, a new boss arrived – he’d come through the graduate programme which wasn’t unfamiliar to me, I’d worked with graduates during my training programme and these were some of my favourite times, their theories and my practical ability were a good combination in the research environment. We made some pretty remarkable stuff happen.
That did not happen here.
The new boss was a nice guy and he was doing his best, but he was a new graduate trying to deal with an embittered and demotivated team and he wasn’t shining. To me it was really obvious: he had no special ability, no great knowledge of how to develop software that had been imparted to him in the hallowed halls of some arcane seat of learning. He was now just like I was when I was 16, starting out learning his trade, it’s just that he was doing it as a manager not as a technician.
Some time around then, one night in the darkest corner of the dingiest nightclub in town a girl I’d met a few weeks before said something that would change my life forever.
She said “You must meet my friend, I think you’ll like each other”.
Some Kind of Stranger
You know those things that really only ever happen in films? Your eyes meet across a crowded room, you tip your hat, smile and calmly wander over to where she’s stood. Something witty immediately springs into your mind and everyone lives happily ever after. Yeah, it didn’t go anything like that.
I’d never been formally introduced to a girl who I was supposed to like before and it was all a little awkward. We both – almost immediately – pursued relationships with other people. Nevertheless I couldn’t get the girl out of my head so I was glad that we started turning up in the same place a lot of the time. I was more glad that I wasn’t the only one doing it deliberately. With the pressure off we’d chat a lot and, well nobody was surprised when those other relationships didn’t last so long.
One of the first things she told me however is that she was going to University next year. I knew that almost all long distance University relationships fail – and fail quickly. I didn’t want to lose her.
I’d long held the idea that when I was a bit older I’d take what amounted to a career break and go to University. It was a target that I’d chalked onto the wall of things that I’d like to achieve at some unspecified point in the future.
Right now I was going nowhere in my job. I knew that this was the kick up the arse that I actually needed.
I looked at the new boss’s salary and mine. I looked at the progress that I could possibly make in 3 years if I stayed. I did the sums, I calculated the opportunity cost. It was clear that getting a degree for me at that time was a good investment.
At the time the web was taking off and the opportunities for software developers were rapidly increasing. I thought it highly unlikely that I would struggle to find a job even if university didn’t work out. The girl however, she was definitely for keeping.
BT did sponsor people to go university but they only allowed the cream of the crop to apply and not only did I have a the under-performance of the OMC team to contend with but the fact I’d narked off pretty much everyone in my command chain throughout my entire career up to that point.
BT were however offering voluntary redundancy which, if used wisely, might just see someone through 3 years of study.
Suffolk Wildlife Trust
Unfortunately the redundancy scheme was closing and it would leave me with a 9 month gap until until the start of the next academic year. So I took a career break and I actually ended up working for Suffolk Wildlife Trust. They needed IT skills which I could provide, at the same time I was able to get out into the meadows and woodlands of Suffolk as part of their habitat management function. Spending 9 months of my life not chained behind a desk was just the sort of break I needed.
A lot of this work actually meant leading teams of volunteers and this was one of the most valuable experiences of my life. These people wanted to work, but a lot of them – for a variety of reasons – had been tossed onto the scrapheap of life. Many of the people had learning difficulties and this is one of the times I remember my perspective on the world suddenly whirling round to a totally different angle. I had to find a new way to lead because what worked in the lab and on the sports field wasn’t going to work here. I learned compassion, patience, understanding. I learnt to lead by not just giving orders but also by supporting people and enabling them to get the job done. Mostly it was simple things like not sighing when I had to explain for the 19th time that day how to use a brush saw. Seeing someone’s expression turn from sadness to joy just with the simple words “You’re doing a good job!” is a powerful thing indeed.
The skills I learned at SWT have helped me in so many ways in so many different parts of my life I can’t even begin to try to quantify. I was genuinely sad when my time with them came to an end.
Going to University
…from my student card
Hull got short-listed almost by default, it was one of only six universities that offered both the degrees we wanted. Outside of Oxbridge it was the second highest rated. We also both knew people at Hull and it came with good personal recommendations.
It’s worth mentioning that I was 21 at the time which meant that I counted as a mature student and the fact that I didn’t have A levels or equivalent academic qualifications was therefore not an automatic bar to my acceptance onto a course. Having said this I did still have problems getting traction with quite a few places. I realise it was easy to overlook my application, I’d done an apprenticeship in electronics but that probably just meant that I was just really good at soldering. Similarly I’d worked for a software house as a software technician but that could mean that I was just loading copies of Word onto people’s PCs. Hull was one of very few establishments that I believe properly considered the detail of my application rather than simply dismissing it on face value.
I wasn’t exactly the normal first year student. I’d already been through the phase of being young and away from home. I’d also come from an environment where not turning up in the morning because I’d overdone it the night before wasn’t an option. I went out a lot, but I knew when to call it a night. Having said that there are plenty of weekends that I plainly don’t remember.
So in a remarkable turn-up for the books I turned out to be a model student. I’d finally got myself into the environment that I wanted, actually studying the subject I wanted. Sure there were aspects of the course that I didn’t agree with but I’d grown up a lot since leaving BT. Yes I was still annoyed because I believed my time could be better spent in some areas but I’d gained a sense of perspective, the problems really weren’t that bad and the overall result was very much for the better.
At the time the big software corporations hadn’t got involved as much with student activity. There were a few events, notably The British Computer Society Challenge which is the reason you’ll find my name etched into one of the plaques on the wall in the department.
The department itself also ran a number of challenges which I always seemed to manage to unintentionally avoid, usually through strange coincidences such as them happening to book the closing date on the same day as a major music festival.
I had fleeting involvement in Freeside. When it started the main aim was to explore free, open source software and to get such operating systems (not just Linux) running on any hardware it could get its hands on (not just PCs). I would have liked to have spent more time on/in Freeside but it just didn’t happen, by the time I really became aware of it I was moving into my third year and a lot of extra-curricular activity was dropped so I could concentrate on the important things.
I don’t remember much about the third year, I don’t remember a single exam and I only have the vaguest memories of graduation.
Graduate Life
Apart from a brief sortie into the world of database middleware development I stayed in the area of communications and large public safety systems. Something had changed though, I was no longer that petulant child trying to fight against everything I saw as wrong. All that natural drive and energy were now being used in a positive direction, they were making a huge difference in my career and were really helping the businesses that I worked for.
The Seed Office at about 8am…
In 2008 however I was ready for a new challenge, something that I knew was going to be different and take me to places I’d not been before. So 8 years after graduating I rejoined the University of Hull, this time not as a student but to lead the development of the Brigid Command and Control system. Seed Software has undergone a few changes since then and my role has changed and developed. Being a student at Hull was the first time I really felt at home with my career in computing. Being there as a leader and a mentor is an immensely fulfilling role and one I hope to be able to continue for some time to come.
If you’re wondering what became of the girl, I saw her recently. She’s doing well, has a very successful career. She lives in a little Georgian Cottage in Suffolk with a small black and white cat and her husband, who just happens to be a certain Computer Programmer.
I’ve noticed a lot, particularly in Windows 8, that I get phantom windows. Perhaps the application wanted to create an invisible window but for some reason it gets displayed. This is very annoying, especially when it sits permanently on top of other windows like this little example here.
Thankfully there’s a quick and easy way to get rid of them using the rather handy Process Explorer from TechNet.
At the top of the app are several buttons, one of them looks a bit like a targeting system and is labelled "Find Window’s Process"
Simply drag that button onto the offending window and drop. Process Explorer will then highlight the process responsible, which you can deal with.
In this case it was Outlook and simply restarting the application fixed the problem.
I end up using the IP Webcam Android application for all sorts of things. It’s really easy to prop or jam an Android device pointing at something you need to keep an eye on or even push the device somewhere where you just can’t get your head. Then fire up a web browser and monitor the output stream.
Today’s issue was that I forgot to boil some eggs for lunch, so I propped my Wildfire S against a spare pan and went back to the office. There I monitored the webcam and started the timer when I saw the eggs boiling. They were ready in perfect time.
…British APCO, or simply BAPCO is the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials. At Seed we produce not only communications systems for the emergency services but many of the applications that use them: in-vehicle systems, hand-held systems for mobilisation and data capture and our Command Control mobilising system.
So being represented at BAPCO’s large annual event is important for us. In previous years we’ve piggy-backed on some of our partners’ stands but this year we decided that our portfolio was significant and mature enough that it warranted its own stand.
The results were pretty amazing, there was a real buzz around the stand with people from all over the emergency services and public safety spectrum coming to talk to us and find out more about who we are and what we do.
It was a lot of hard work though; it’s nearly a week later as I write this and I’ve just about finished tidying up all the admin. For the other guys it’s been a much longer road. I was able to simply turn up to the stand on the first day. There were weeks’ worth of preparation effort before that – design and planning. Then the guys had to put everything in the van, drive it to Manchester and get the stand set up. We don’t have people to do any of this for us, so it was great experience for our young software developers to be part of the process right from the graphical design to screwing shelves into the wall.
They were also in the front line on the stand, talking to people and demonstrating our software. In the average business only very senior technical people get to do this, so to be able to give them that kind of experience – and just the experience of being at such an event – is a great benefit.
It wasn’t all work and no play though. We had some fun, such as the reaction training (computer) game at the official dinner – well there was only ever going to be one winner of that! We now know who plays the most shoot-em-ups too, and it wasn’t who we thought.
As a business, BAPCO 2014 gave Seed some great opportunities. Firstly we were able to connect with our existing customers and partners. As we don’t have any customer relationship managers every opportunity to spend time with the people we currently do business with, to talk about openly about their needs and where they see those needs going is really important. Getting those discussions out from drab meeting rooms and into an environment of seemingly limitless possibility is also important because at Seed we’re always looking forward, trying to work out ways that we can use technology to benefit our customers and our society.
We were also able to get the message of who Seed are, what we do and why we’re different to a much wider audience. Sure just about everyone in the Fire Service has heard of Seed but not many knew that nearly a third of England’s Fire Services have a Seed system. Not many realised that we started back in 2005 and that since then we’ve grown a lot; we’re not just in-vehicle terminal (MDT) providers any more, we have a full portfolio ranging from data capture to our own Command and Control mobilising system.
Seed is not limited to the Fire Service either – some of our products are as applicable to other emergency services as they are to Fire and further even that that. Our mobile forms product for instance is applicable anywhere where field workers have to fill in forms that need to be centrally collated.
Being able to stand in a room where most of the UK’s public safety organisations are represented and give those messages loudly and clearly is a hugely positive thing for us. We’re all very glad we did it. I enjoyed it too, sure it was tiring but it was very definitely worth the effort.
OK, so they’re not actually building planes in small commercial shelters, this is actually for training. But it’s still rather a strange thing to come across on the outskirts of Yogyakarta!
