Lockdown load? It’s one of the topics of the moment; people talking about their weight. Sure, weight is the most practical way we can measure body fat – but I hear people comparing one day’s figure to the next. That’s pointless, I mean it’s good for conversation, but really nothing else.

About ten years ago I saw something worse: people were weighing themselves before and after a gym session. There’s a good reason to do that, but it’s got nothing to do with fat. So I tried it.

Yesterday I repeated that experiment. I grabbed a bottle of water and jumped on the scales. My water and I were 77.5Kg (12st 2, 170lbs) before I started.

At the end, my empty water bottle and I were 75.75Kg (11st 13, 167lbs). Over an hour’s workout 1.75Kg (around 3.5lbs) simply vanished. Miracle weight loss programme!

That echoed the results from ten years ago when I recorded losing 1.5Kg in an hour.

What happened? Annoyingly, calculating fat burn is next to impossible. My spin bike reckons I burnt 1661kcal, but it’s lying. Also, fat is also not the only source of energy when you exercise, so to use the bike’s calorie figure for a calculation would produce a massive overestimate. That massive overestimate would be 184g of fat. We know that’s a massive overestimate (did I mention that enough?) meaning that the amount of fat burnt is way, way under 10% of the weight I lost. I’d be surprised if it was even 2.5% (44g).

Almost all of that missing weight was either in the puddle under the bike or in the atmosphere around me. I lost it in sweat. The only useful information weighing yourself before and after a gym session gives you is a guide to how much water you need to drink to rehydrate properly.

To further prove the point, I rehydrated then cooked some dinner and weighed myself after eating. I was 78Kg (12st 4, 172lbs). In the course of 2 hours I had lost 1.75Kg and gained 2.25Kg, or lost about 3lbs and gained about 4lbs.

There are simply too many variables involved in your weight for it to give any short term indication of your body fat, even if you weigh yourself at precisely the same time every day. If you want to use weight as a measure, you have to look at the trend over several weeks.

I want to make a larger point, however. Us humans have evolved to operate over a pretty wide range of body fat. If you get outside that range, in either direction, it causes problems. We all know this. Built on top of this however is a huge industry constantly pumping out messaging that pressures everyone toward the lowest edge of that healthy range and even beyond it.

The slimmer the accepted, fashionable image of health is, the more people the health and fitness industry can sell their products to. This isn’t a coincidence.

The media also loves this particular train. It’s always full of stories about how this celebrity or that celebrity has gained or lost weight. This idea that people should be way toward the smaller side of the healthy range constantly provides the media with content.

Now, let me show you Steve Backshall‘s Instagram. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a British TV presenter and adventurer with a reputation for fitness. Read what he has to say under the post.

First let me draw attention to the fact that he does have some visible body fat. Not a lot, but if you take a look around his waist it is there. Now let me draw attention to the fact that he trained and dieted for six weeks specifically for this shoot. Yes, that’s really him – but it’s not how he usually looks.

This isn’t real life.

Humans evolved to be able to cope with different and changing circumstances; storing fat in the good times and burning it in the bad. Today’s society where few of us have to worry about where the next meal is coming from is something we didn’t evolve for. If we don’t pay some attention then we can easily end up storing more and more fat for a bad time that’s never going to come.

At the other end, though, it’s still good to have a small amount of fat. It helps us when we’re ill or when we have to deal with other unexpected circumstances. Skinny does not mean healthy.

Being between these extremes matters. The soap opera that is your weight day-to-day does not. The health and fitness industry, the fashion and beauty industries and the media are all trying to manipulate you into feeling that you have a need for their products. Recognise that and always follow your own compass.

It’s not that you shouldn’t lose weight, or that you shouldn’t join a gym, or that you shouldn’t buy the really expensive concealer, but it’s your prerogative; you do it on your terms. Don’t let yourself be defined by people who are trying to take your money.

I’m working on some longer stuff, because one thing that #blacklivesmatter has made me realise is that there are a lot of assumptions being made about racism and there’s a lot of bollocks being talked.

In the meantime, a few bullet points:

• We still have institutions here in the UK that treat people differently according to their race.
• We still have tropes and stereotypes in our society that disadvantage people of colour.
• We still have an embarrassing number of actual, conscious racists (and weird conspiracy theorists).
• A majority group can easily overlook the problems it causes a minority.

For you, personally, not being racist is a good start. If we are to end racism however that is not enough.

You can do more simply by looking within yourself to see if you have unconscious biases. I’ve been an active campaigner against racism for about 25 years and I still find the odd little quirk in me.

You can do more by listening to minority groups when they try to explain ways in which our society discriminates against them.

You can do more by reading, watching documentaries, etc. “Natives” by Akala is a good start. In recent years many good resources have been produced when it comes to the experience of black people in the UK.

Accessible resources about other forms of racism are more difficult. For instance, I learnt about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre when I was stood in Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar). A lot of what I’ve learnt about other forms of racism comes either from visiting other countries or from talking directly to people in the UK. I’m currently trying to collate some resources on this.

It all went rather wrong in the early 2000s when we realised that the the last Sunday in October had two hours that both claimed to be 1am.

In the mid 1990s the company I was working for made an intelligent GPS radio modem. It was a neat little device that you could put in a car and it could do some basic processing, even run a small touch screen, and could communicate remotely with a central server.

We think nothing whatsoever of this today – the smartphone that most of carry all the time is way more capable than anything we were dreaming of then. In the 1990s however the idea that you could communicate with a vehicle and that it could tell you where it was, that was pretty cool.

Government organisations, in particular, were keen on us. There were other solutions on the market that were cheaper to buy, but we had the lowest running costs. Sending data across the airwaves was expensive and we spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that it was done as usefully and efficiently as possible.

For various reasons, some of which were historic, the Product Manager decided that it should operate in local time (including daylight savings time). Unfortunately it was also local time that got send back to the server. To make matters worse, to save on over-air costs, we cut the data right back to just the time. We didn’t include timezone or daylight savings information.

That might sound stupid now, but back then the primary business requirement was very much operational: customers wanted to know where their fleet was at that moment. Historical reporting was distinctly secondary.

My first job at the company was to change that, to develop a historical reporting function. That’s when we started to notice problems.

When British Summer Time switches back to Greenwich Mean Time we say that “the clocks go back”, we get to 2am and then we put the clocks back to 1am. Our intelligent radio modems faithfully did this, when they got to 2am they reset the clock to 1am. The result was that, in our database, we had two sets of records both claiming to be between 1am and 2am and it could be impossible to tell which was which.

If you’re a business this is a pretty irritating, but it’s something you can live with. When your customers are The Police and they need to know for evidential purposes where a vehicle was at any given time, this is a serious problem.

It was an easy enough software fix, to make the device always send the base time, not daylight savings time. Rolling those updates out and dealing with the potential data problems caused by the switch was far from trivial.

Hot on the heels of that problem, we then sold a system to a country that had multiple timezones.

Fortunately we predicted the problem this time. We locked ourselves in a room and went through every scenario we could think of, every way of working it and the conclusion we came to was that the date and time should always be sent and always stored in UTC. That way you know the data is always valid, it’s an absolute, there’s no question.

The situation has changed a little now because data storage and communication is much, much cheaper. There’s no reason for us not to send all the qualifying data. Back then however every single bit mattered.

As a systems integrator however I still run into problems with times quite a lot. Customers often tell me that this system works in UTC whereas some other system works in local time. They’re usually wrong, under the covers most systems either fully qualify the date and time or use UTC and convert for display. It’s not always the case though and APIs are not always explicit about it either.

My advice is simple: never store or transmit (internally) an unqualified time that is not UTC. If you’re using local time always make sure that it is qualified with the timezone information (including any applicable daylight savings). Never let the base time get separated from its qualifying data. This is still an easy mistake to make when writing to a database or transmitting via an API. If, for some reason, you cannot transmit or store the qualifying information, convert to UTC.

In the .NET Framework CLR there are 2 DateTime types that you should be aware of: DateTime and DateTimeOffset. Microsoft have produced some guidance on when to use which, (but basically use DateTimeOffset if you have the qualifying data, use DateTime for UTC).

It hit me like a train when I realised that one of my toughest battles against racism would be with myself, simply because of the environment I grew up in.
My parents were against racism, my schools were against racism. 1/6

— Tom Fosdick 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺 (@sinibar) August 1, 2019

In fact all the institutions I dealt with were [or claimed to be] against racism. They were however white. Books were white, TV was white, culture was white, science was white, the law was white, power and influence were white. That gets baked into you whether you like it or not.

Why was there a brouhaha when black actress (Noma Dumezweni) was cast as Hermione Granger in The Cursed Child? Because people, many of whom would say they were against racism, just assumed Hermione was white.

Rowling‘s description of her doesn’t specify or even imply: it is distinctly indistinct. Instead it concentrates more on her character and how clever she is. We – me included – just assumed she was white. Why?

Because she’s privileged, because she’s bookish, because she’s clever, because she’s powerful, because she’s a heroine. All these cues refer back to the environment most Westerners grew up in and they all tell us that she’s white. We don’t think about it, we just assume it.

We might not think this matters because we think we make all important decisions consciously where we can weigh up the evidence objectively. That however is far from the whole picture. We make thousands of decisions every day without them ever fully surfacing into our consciousness. Similarly we send out thousands of signals that we’re not consciously aware of.

Those biases that have been baked into us by our upbringing do still have an effect, a very subtle effect, but it’s there nonetheless. If it’s just one person then it’s insignificant, the problem is that we’re not just one person, those of us who grew up in an almost exclusively white environment are a majority. On top of this almost everyone in the UK grew up – and continue to grow up – in an environment where the vast majority of significant institutions are predominantly white.

What can we do about it? We can’t undo decades of programming simply by wishing it away. There is no silver bullet. We have to acknowledge that it’s there, to be aware of it. We have to be aware that no matter how much we believe in equality, we can occasionally be guilty of accidental racism. We have to accept that, for people with my kind of upbringing, just being ideologically opposed to racism is not enough. If we are not actively fighting against racism then we are subconsciously contributing to it.

We have come a long way to eliminate conscious racism from the majority of the Western World. We still have a battle to fight, especially at the moment, but we are making steadily making progress and in the end we will win.

You may well have seen this meme going around Facebook and other places. As a general rule, unless you can trace information like this back to an actual emergency service or other reputable outlet, you should assume that it’s fake.

In this case it’s inaccurate, but it does contain some information that’s true.

The Full Fact article does a reasonably good job of explaining, but I can add little more detail from a different perspective.

When you make a 999 (emergency) call in the UK, the emergency services have access to some extra information about that call that they don’t get for other calls. This happens automatically whether you dial 55 or not.

If you call from a land-line or telephone box, the emergency service has access to the subscriber details for that line. This includes the name of the person that the line is registered to and the address.

If you call from a mobile, the situation is a little more complex. The emergency service can request the location of the mobile phone – and usually does so automatically. That request gets passed to the mobile phone company. Before the days of GPS, the mobile company would return, if it could, an estimate of the location based upon the signal strength and the location of the cell masts nearest to the phone. It can sometimes provide quite accurate results, but other times it’s not so good.

The mast information is still sent to the emergency services. Now however almost every mobile phone has GPS so new methods have been developed so that the phone can also send its location data all the way through to the emergency service control room. Not every phone can do this, so you can’t rely on it, but the more time that passes, the more phones are coming on-board.

It’s worth noting that a mobile phone’s own location data isn’t always accurate. It’s usually pretty good, within a few metres, but there are a number of factors that can throw it off, sometimes by just a few metres, but I’ve seen examples of phones thinking they’re on a different continent.

Again, to be clear, you do not need to dial 55 or perform any secret handshake to make your location available. If your phone can do it, the mobile network can do it and the emergency service can do it, then your phone’s location data gets sent to the control room. It’s all automatic. This is what I think the meme is talking about as “new technology”. Otherwise, the mast data is almost always available.

Where dialling 55 comes in is if you’re in a situation where you can’t talk. If you’re hiding from an attacker for instance you might not want to talk as it may alert the attacker to your location. The mobile operator may well ask you to dial 55 if you’re there and are in danger. That’s the point of dialling 55 – it lets the operator know that, although nobody is speaking, you have not dialled 999 by mistake.

I should point out here that the emergency services do not always respond to silent 999 calls. They have to assess each call individually and decide whether to respond, whether the person talks or not.

Ultimately then there is some truth to the meme and I suspect somewhere, underneath it all, someone knew what they were talking about. It looks however as if it’s been through a few people and by the time the meme was made some of the messages have got a bit mixed up.

To conclude:

• The emergency services can always get your location and usually do automatically. You do not have to dial 55 to make that happen.
• The “new” bit is that the emergency services can now get the location data direct from many smartphones, instead of having to rely on mast data.
• Only dial 55 if you are unable to speak for some reason. The operator may ask you to do this anyway if you don’t speak. If you can speak however, do.

Finally, don’t assume when you call that the emergency services do have your location. Things can go wrong, the more information you can give them over the phone, the better.

Tom Fosdick is a software engineer who is responsible for the system that several UK emergency services use to get 999 call locations.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Someone recently accused me of replying too slowly on WhatsApp. “First Class post” I replied, “is the most rapid form of communication of which I approve.” I wasn’t joking.

The fact that you’re not going to get a reply for at least 24 hours, if not the best part of a week, tends to rather focus the mind. You have to concentrate on exactly what you want to say, no more, no less and ensure that your communication is complete. There’s no “soz, not what I meant lol” if you botch what you were trying to say.

Writing someone a letter makes you value the communication.

I’ve never been comfortable with the telephone, I consider it a step too far. A letter arrives on your doormat. You might pick it up and open it immediately, or put it aside for later. It’s your choice. You can then think about your reply whilst you’re cooking or re-glazing the east wing.

The telephone however screams “STOP!” when it rings, “whatever you are doing cease it now! Someone wants to talk to you!” It’s just plain rude. On top of that it might not even be a conversation that you wanted to have at that time.

No, the telephone is an abomination and the mobile phone doubly so. There are numerous reasons why one might not answer a house telephone. There is no escape from the mobile, it’s there, in your pocket, constantly buzzing, continually demanding attention.

We now have so many ways of near-instant communication that we have lost all respect for the privilege that technology has brought us. Instead we spend every waking minute in cataclysm of indistinct missives trying to make sense of a world projected into our hands by people who are at best as misinformed as we are.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent the past 20 years delivering ever-improving communication technology into the hands of our emergency services. I’m very much in favour of the technology.

I am more that happy that I have in my pocket a device that lets me communicate in a variety of ways with almost all of my family and friends, with businesses, government and even write articles like this that will be read by complete strangers.

I however respect the fact that I don’t know what the intended recipient of my communication is doing at that moment. I respect the fact that they may not want to reply immediately. I don’t believe it’s asking too much for that respect to be mutual.

Reading Time: 2 minutesSo you know about the Trace facility in System.Diagnostics, right? If not then you should because it’s really rather handy. It provides a set of static methods that you can call to write out trace information to any number of connected “Listeners” which you can define in code or in config.
The default trace listener writes to the Win32 OutputDebugString stream, you can view this in Visual Studio’s “Output” window or using a viewer such as Sysinternals DebugView.

Sure if you need more extensive logging and tracing then you should look to something like log4net, but if your requirements are simple then System.Diagnostics.Trace and System.Diagnostics.Debug are really handy.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this article.

Quite often I end up writing non-production apps – little gizmos for this or that – which could do with informing the user of what’s going on via some sort of rolling log on the UI.

So I wrote this tiny little class to help.

public class CallbackTraceListener : TraceListener
{
    public event Action<string> WriteToOutput;

    public override void Write(string message)
    {
        if (null != WriteToOutput)
            WriteToOutput(message);
    }

    public override void WriteLine(string message)
    {
        Write(message + Environment.NewLine);
    }
}

It’s a Trace Listener just like the one that writes to OutputDebugString. You need a little bit more code to make it work, in the initialisation of the your application you need to register an instance of it as a trace listener…

public MainWindow()
{
    var uiTracer = new CallbackTraceListener();
    uiTracer.WriteToOutput += UiTracer_WriteToOutput;
    uiTracer.Name = "UITraceListener";
    Trace.Listeners.Add(uiTracer);
    Trace.WriteLine("Debug window initialised");
    Trace.WriteLine("Ready...");
    InitializeComponent();
    ...
}

Now every time you use any of the Trace methods that write output, the UiTracer_WriteToOutput callback will be called with the string that’s written. You can add the strings to a ListBox, or put them through any other kind of processing you want.
It’s a really simple and useful way to subscribe to up your own Debug/Trace stream.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteOne of the beauties of the Raspberry Pi is that it’s so low power [in comparison to a PC] you can afford to leave one on all the time.  When I got my first Pi I tried using it as a mirror of this blog. It worked, but it was rather slow.

The Raspberry Pi 2B has got a lot more beans that the first version of the Pi. I got one for Xmas, so I thought I’d revisit the mirror idea. Assuming my little script is working properly, there should now be a mirror of this site on my Pi 2B.