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.
About 25 miles into a 33 mile cycle ride I was just starting a climb when I heard a nasty snap and suddenly the back of my bike seemed very wobbly. Instinctively I sprung to my feet and it was then I heard a nasty bump-clank-clank as parts formerly connected to the bike hit the floor. Turns out that bolt that holds the saddle to the seat post had sheared.
Seat-less bike!
So I rode the remaining 8 miles without a seat which was actually quite fun.
What surprised me though was how difficult it is to get a replacement. It’s a 45mm M6 socket cap (Allen) bolt which are ten-a-penny but if you don’t want to buy them by the kilo they’re quite hard to come by.
So I’ll be going out on a mission to find later and if I can’t I may have to order a titanium one from The Internet. I may not look too hard, there’s no such thing as too much titanium on a mountain bike (unless it’s getting in the way of the carbon fibre, or course).
Addendum Aug 13th
It’s lucky I did do an initial search before ordering a titanium one! I popped to Pedal Power Cycles, mainly because it’s closer than any decent hardware supplier. Turns out it’s not M6. So after some measuring I think it’s 1/4″ UNF – I’ve ordered a pair of stainless steel ones from Ebay for next-to-nothing so we’ll see!
1/4″ UNF?
Addendum Aug 15th
Gah! It’s not 1/4″ UNF either. It’s close, it’s really, really close. It’s possibly close enough to work but it’s not close enough for me to have any confidence in it.
So it’s not a common standard size. I could keep looking but I’m going to end up spending more than the cost of new seat-post if keep getting nearly-but-not-quite right bolts. It could be one of any number of little used standards or even a custom thread just for that seat post.
So it might be better to get a new seat post after all. Think I can justify this one? It is titanium and titanium is good!
Reading Time: < 1minuteWhat Are Those Square Things?
So I was looking for something in the rack behind me in the office when I came across my final year project from my first degree. I thought it might be fun to look at the project again and I wondered if it’d still run.
I ran into a small issue though, I no longer actually own anything that can read a floppy disk. C’est la vie!
“A case of plagiarism has been identified that involves your work. You are to appear before The University plagiarism panel…” the email began. I remember being slightly scared but moreover I was enraged, how dare The University accuse me of plagiarism or even being complicit in plagiarism?
That was a long while ago – during my first degree. It occurred to me last night though that something similar to what happened to me could easily happen to someone else now and it’s something students should be aware of.
I went to the plagiarism hearing open minded, but with a very assertive position. The work concerned was a programming task and I’d actually been a professional programmer before going to university, thus it was quite likely that my solution to the problem was similar to one in a text book or to something one of the academic staff may have written.
It transpired that this was not the problem. The line of questioning followed one rather obvious track, to try to answer the question of if I’d either worked sufficiently closely on the exercise that someone else may have submitted a solution similar to mine or if I’d shown my solution to anyone else.
I was a little angered by the first point: was The University suggesting that I shouldn’t help other students? Surely a university is supposed to support learning not discourage it? I found the second point plain insulting, did The University really think I was that stupid?
I think the panel may have picked up on my frustration because eventually they just showed me the two submissions. The one on the left was plainly mine, as was the one on the right. They were almost identical, right down to the spacing and layout. That caused a sharp intake of breath.
“Are you sure nobody could have taken a copy of your work?” asked one of the panellists. This was a welcome change in the tone, “you didn’t leave your terminal unlocked when you went away or anything?”
“No,” I replied, “I worked in a secure environment for 4 years before I came here, I’m fastidious about locking my terminal. I genuinely can’t think how the other student got a copy of my work.”
Then one of the panellists pointed out that there was a mistake in the copied submission and it suddenly dawned on me. Back in those days we submitted printed out listings. At the end of a lab session the printer was usually congested with people trying to print out their work so I’d taken to printing earlier and using the rest of the lab time to double-check my solution. I’d spotted the mistake in the first copy, screwed it up in disgust and thrown it away. I corrected it and printed a new copy which was the one I submitted.
Someone had waited until the end of the lab session and then fished my first copy out of the bin, then copied it verbatim.
“I’m happy with that explanation,” said one of the panel members. The others nodded, “I see no reason to inconvenience Mr Fosdick further.” I later found out, unofficially, that the other student was of low ability and to submit a nearly correct solution was quite out of character. There never really was a question about whose the work was, they only wanted to establish that there hadn’t been excessive collusion between us.
Last night I was thinking that this is unlikely to happen now because most submissions are electronic – there’s no need for people to print out their work. Then it dawned on me that every student these days is walking round with a relatively high resolution camera (phone) and that leaving your terminal unlocked for a short time could easily result in sections of work being plagiarised.
So please be careful, plagiarism is taken very seriously by universities. Even if it’s your work that the original you could still find yourself in serious trouble if you’re unable to defend the accusation that you may have allowed someone else to copy your work, or worked so closely with them / helped them so much that you’ve both essentially submitted the same solution.
Don’t get me wrong – helping people is definitely encouraged, but there’s a line you must stay the right side of. I think of it as this – explaining how to solve the problem is productive, giving someone the solution to the problem is counter-productive (and dangerous).
Being a mountain cyclist in Suffolk is a bit of an oxymoron. So I’ve bitten the bullet and got some road tyres. I have no intention of giving up off-road cycling but it’s just more practical to do the majority of my cycling on the road. What’s more the local forests such as Tunstall and Rendlesham are criss-crossed by well made up trails that don’t really require off-road tyres, so I don’t need to spend too much time on the boring black stuff.
As a side-effect of this I’ve been looking at some online tools to help with route planning and the like. The best straight-up map I’ve found so far is provided by Sustrans, the Sustainable Transport charity.
The only problem I’ve found is the lack on information on the state of some of the off-road, and to some extent on-road sections. Some of them would be unsuitable for delicate road bikes and would require a hybrid if not a dedicated cross-country (XC) bike. The vast majority of routes are no cause for concern, however.
Google also have cycling maps, the cycle tracks highlighted in green…
These include many of the Sustrans routes as well as other cycling facilities. The problem I’ve found is that they’re not entirely accurate. The above example (as of the time of writing) includes a large section alongside the River Deben. Some of it is made-up track, but the surface is very poor and narrow. The rest is just a mud track. I’ve bumped into similar problems elsewhere too – overall I’d recommend not trusting the Google Cycling Layer unless you’re an experienced off-road cyclist.
On my smartphone I have a few apps, but one of the most useful is OS Atlas. It’s pretty basic, its main advantage is that it displays the Ordinance Survey’s 1:25k scale mapping. This is extremely useful for navigating because it contains a good level of detail not just about the roads but about landmarks. It also has GPS integration so it can show you as a dot on the map. The app’s not free but it is cheap. There is a free version but this doesn’t work terribly well. Beware that it does rely on an internet connection.
For full browsers the Ordinance Survey themselves offer the 1:25k scale mapping via their Getamap interface – you need to make sure that you have “Leisure” maps selected.
There are a number of online route planning and measurement systems. For a quick calculation of distance Map-O-Meter is good. The system I use for planning and recording rides however is MapMyRide. There’s a smartphone app to record your rides and upload them to the web site for proper analysis. It has a route and course feature so it will detect when you’re repeating and ride and you can compare performance. It also allows you to jump onto other people’s published courses so you can compare your performance with everyone else who’s ridden that route. You can also search for other people’s routes and courses in any given area, although they do tend to be “my commute to work” rather than “a scenic 30 mile loop around Lavenham”.
There’s one final web site that I’d like to mention – whilst over the past few weeks I haven’t needed it much the rain radar at Rain Today is about the most useful weather forecast I’ve found. It doesn’t actually do a forecast (unless you pay), what it shows you is where the rain is now and where it’s been recently. This is about as good as it gets for being able to predict if you’re going to get soaked on your 2 hour ride.
Why is it so difficult for car manufacturers to make cars that play MP3s?
Today’s hire car was an almost new Vauxhall (Opel) Meriva. It has a USB slot so I plugged my USB pen drive in it, “no data recognised” said the dashboard, “you can unplug the device.” There was nothing special about the device, just a plain USB pen drive with a handful of folders in the root dir and in each folder a handful of MP3s with a M3U playlist file. It’s difficult to imagine what could be simpler, so why is General Motors’ entertainment system not able to cope with this?
I’ve had similar problems in other new cars too. I know cars have a long development cycle and therefore we can’t expect all the very latest gadgets in them but there have been cheap commercial MP3 players that can cope with a few folders and MP3 files on the market for more than 10 years. There really is no excuse now.
In contrast my previous hire car was a Volkswagen Golf. Whilst initially annoying that I had to copy my “driving” MP3s to an SD card as this is preferred to a USB slot, the Golf had a neat little menu structure and worked very well.
Yes, there is another argument – most car manufacturers seem to have got Bluetooth integration working, so why don’t I just pair the car to my phone and play music from my phone? Because I want to change the music occasionally. DragonForce isn’t really ideal music when you rock up to the back of a huge traffic jam, perhaps Bat For Lashes or Portishead. Although if mounted to something it’s not technically illegal it wasn’t technically illegal when I wrote the article for me to operate my phone whilst driving it’s still fiddly to use and the voice command is good for a laugh but nothing more.
A simple menu structure and simple easy to use controls beat trying to fiddle with my phone hands down. I really don’t understand why it’s so difficult for some manufacturers to provide it.
In 2013 Glastonbury and the British F1 Grand Prix fell on the same weekend. They’re both enormous events, but the there are some very notable differences. This article in The Guardian gives us a few pictures of the aftermath of Glastonbury – I’ve cheekily linked one of the images to give an illustration.
Glasto cleanup
It is true that charities recover usable equipment from the Glastonbury camp sites for less developed countries but there doesn’t appear to be a hell of a lot of usable equipment in the pictures. I suspect that most of the tents etc. might have been usable when the original occupiers left them with that noble intention, but it looks like a herd of drunken elephants have stampeded through since then.
This however is one of my pictures. It was taken a few minutes before we left Whittlebury Park Camp Site having spent the weekend at the British Formula 1 Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Whittlebury Park on Monday
Is that one single abandoned chair I can see?
It seems rather perverse to me that a festival synonymous with charity and environmentalism could leave such a mess whilst one more associated with reverse barely leaves a trace.
Reading Time: 4minutesBy the time I’ve finished with a hire car…
I felt totally like a rabbit caught in headlights last night when a school-friend asked me to share some of my music with her. Usually when someone asks me what kind of music I like I duck the question, it’s easier that way. I think Duke Ellington put it best “There are two kinds of music, good music and the other kind”, but that’s hardly a useful answer.
The real answer is that it’s all Neneh Cherry’s fault. You see in 1989 I was 14 and I thought I knew the music I liked, I’d started with Rock and Roll (as in Elvis and Chuck Berry) and gone through a bit of a heavy metal phase and by then I was confident that I’d found what I liked in the goth / industrial and general post-punk scene.
I certainly didn’t like “rap music”. Then I heard Buffalo Stance and I did like it, which was all a little confusing. Manchild though was the one I couldn’t deny – I loved that track. This was highly inconvenient, people who wore excessive amounts of black and sat around graveyards talking about middle class contemporary poetry didn’t like Neneh Cherry.
The basic problem was that in 1989 there was still a very strong sense of (youth) culture and counterculture in the UK. Choices had to be made, the music that you liked and the fashions you wore defined you as either mainstream or counterculture. The latter was the harder path, random physical attacks against people purely because they were goths, punks, grebos etc. were pretty common. If you were counterculture you had to learn to talk fast, to fight and to run. So we were naturally suspicious of anything that was too far away from the culture that we identified as ours.
Neneh Cherry was firmly beyond the pale, Neneh Cherry was the sort of music that blasted out from a car stereo whilst the occupants decamped to beat someone up for no better reason than daring to wear different clothes to them.
In being insular, even paranoid we gained a lot of protection in sheer numbers. We could have clubs with strict door policies for instance. On the downside it also led to a lot of ignorance and misunderstanding. We thought we were being intelligent and indulging in superior culture but we were missing entire swathes of what was actually great counterculture purely because it didn’t superficially appear to be like our counterculture.
Going even further, it’s not just counterculture we were missing out on. Whilst some (thankfully quite limited) elements of the fans of mainstream culture might be knuckle-dragging degenerate thugs that doesn’t imply that there is anything actually wrong with their culture.
I’d like to say that I had a eureka moment and suddenly realised all of this when I first heard Manchild on the radio. Sadly that didn’t actually happen, what Manchild did was to start me on a journey of listening to ever more diverse music. I’d find an act I liked then try to find similar acts – before there were massive databases of artists on the internet it was actually quite difficult and exciting to try to find new music that you liked. I got to know the staff at the better local record shops quite well and I used to buy different music magazines pretty much at random. Eventually I was forced to agree with Duke Ellington, that “There are two kinds of music, good music and the other kind” and that what label or genre some music journalist or promoter wants to hang on it is no guide as to which kind of music it is.
So what is my music? Even if I had the first idea where to start I’m faced with another problem – it’s shifting sand. It can change between morning and evening. I can listen to an artist solidly for months and then not be able to stand the sound of them for years for no apparent reason whatsoever.
I’ve come to love the chaos that is my taste in music – I am fundamentally a scientist so most of my day is spent dealing with logic and reason and most of my hobbies are pretty heavy on this too. Having something that defies all logic and reason, that is pure feeling and emotion is really important to me and I find that in music. I don’t need to write a peer reviewed paper to listen to Professor Green. I don’t have to calculate the load bearing capability of Alter Bridge. I don’t have to qualify or quantify the beauty of Gabriel Fauré’s composition. These things can just be, there is no logic, no justification and there is no need for any – right now at this moment I like these three things, they speak to me, they make me feel emotions that I want or maybe need to feel. Ask me again in 10 minutes and I’ll tell you a different story. It might involve Bob Marley, or Nuclear Assault, or the Unthanks. Perhaps it might even involve the great Duke Ellington himself.
The only thing I know right now is that it’s going to be great finding out.
I missed a phone call earlier – I’d just stepped out of the office for 5 minutes and when I came back in I had a missed call.
I hate missing calls, because my mobile is the main contact for all sorts of services. A missed call could just be an irritating sales call or it could mean that someone’s just ordered themselves a new Ferrari using my credit card details.
So I’ve taken to Googling the phone number. There are a lot of nuisance call prevention web sites out there and they’re pretty good at filtering out cold callers.
There’s not much chance of me calling this one back, it’s a PPI (re)claim company and not only do I not entertain cold callers but I’ve never had PPI.
As a senior professional in what might be termed the wider software industry I’ve worked with a lot of new graduates. On average I estimate that it takes 6 months for a new graduate to become an effective developer.
This is mostly because there is so much more to being a good developer than just writing code. Yesterday was James Croft’s last day as an intern at Seed, in his blog he takes time to thank us and gives a short précis of how he believes his year at Seed has helped him.
In The University we do the best we can to provide our students with knowledge of the working world. The University of Hull has an excellent reputation for producing well rounded, very employable Computer Science graduates. This is important, especially now that students are being asked to contribute so heavily and so directly towards their degrees: the employability of graduates is key to choosing a university and a course. A degree is an investment and you want to know you’re going to get a return on that.
I’m proud to be a member of the Computer Science Dept. at Hull, but no matter what we present in formal learning we’re never going to be able to teach what it’s like to be a software developer. That’s where Seed Software comes in.
We run a professional software development practice from right within the Department of Computer Science. We’re not playing at it either; Seed is not an academic’s idea of what a real software house would look like. Most of the software we develop is in use by the Fire Service. Currently 15 fire services in the UK use our software, ranging from risk management applications to the very systems responsible for taking calls, selecting and mobilising fire engines and assisting the crews by providing communications and information at the scene. Commercial software development doesn’t get much more critical than this.
So how does this benefit our students and where does James fit in? James worked with us as an intern – he took a year out of his degree (between second and third years) in order to work with us. This is a paid position, we don’t expect people to work for nothing and there are several positions available. Currently we have 2 intakes, roughly one before and one after each summer.
Students can also work for with us part time as a module in their MEng or MSc programme.
I couldn’t write a syllabus for what Seed teaches, but I see how our students and interns grow over their time with us. Some come in over-confident and quickly realise that the real world is far more complex than they had imagined. Others come in lacking confidence and realise that they actually do have the required skills. Seed often puts people outside their comfort zones, being a good developer is so much more than sitting behind a computer and writing code. It’s about teamwork, it’s about communication, risk evaluation, it’s about prioritisation, estimation, strategy, presentation, politics. I could go on.
That’s what we do in Seed, we take students and we turn them into real world software professionals. As a professional business person myself I would employ every single intern that we have ever had in Seed, perhaps not as they started with us, but by the end of the internship all have proved that they have what it takes to be a valuable asset to our industry.
So I’m proud to be a member of the team at Seed, proud of what we do and of what we’ve achieved and I genuinely look forward to the future, to making Seed even better and more effective as we ourselves learn and grow.
I’m the lucky owner of rather a good turntable – I came by it almost by chance some 20 years ago. Despite the advent of CD and MP3 I kept it primarily because I own quite a lot of music that simply has never been released on CD. That isn’t why I dug it out of the store, and it’s not because I needed something “vintage” to go with the enormous tiger striped beanbag.
I dug it out of the store because I wanted to listen to music. I’m not going to pretend that vinyl sounds “warmer” or in any way better than CD or MP3 because it’s a plain lie. OK, so with a top quality deck and a brand new pressing you could in theory get better quality than a CD but that’s just not how it works. Dust happens, scratches happen, wear happens and you can hear all of it. So why listen to an inferior reproduction system? Because putting on a record is a ritual, you don’t put on a record to play in the background. As Pooh Bear says that “When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen,” when you see someone putting on a record you can be pretty sure that they’re going to Listen to Some Music.
So I’ve been working through my record collection and rediscovering the world of vinyl and how much more flexibility it gave artists and record producers. There are coloured records, shaped records, picture discs and there’s enough room in a 12″ pack to neatly fold all sorts of things, but especially posters. Then of course there are gatefold sleeves and the whole world of cover art. I used to have a wall display that was made out of record covers – 12″ of square cardboard is large enough to make an impression. The cover art of a record really matters, I’ve bought a fair few of them on the strength of the cover art alone.
There are a few less well known charms too, like run-out groove etchings. One of the most famous that appears on a lot of records, is this.
A Porky Prime Cut
“A Porky Prime Cut” is the signature of renowned record cutting engineer George Peckham. Quite often the band themselves get in on the act too, often with weird and cryptic messages. One of the most notorious is the run-out groove etching on the Sisters of Mercy’s 1983 Temple of Love original 12″ single. I think we can safely assume that they were not fans of the temperance movement.
Clearly it’s not worth buying a load of vinyl and forking out a small mortgage for a top quality record deck. Vinyl is easily damaged, it wears out, it’s inconvenient to store and to play and it weighs a ton. But it has a charm than CD and MP3 simply don’t have and for that reason alone I love it.
