“Day 13: We are not digital creatures.”

Those who know me will know that I'm an analogue photographer. Like most people who shoot film, I have a lot of cameras. And like other film photographers, I just need one more ;)

Film photography is tactile. From loading film into your camera, winding it between shots, swapping films when needed, loading it into the developing tank, juggling the times and temperatures of chemicals, everything you do is physical, you touch it. And then making prints in the darkroom is definitely my happy place, where time and the outside world disappear, and I finish with some printed photographs (of variable quality). Afterwards my hands will smell of fixer.

Our bodies are analogue organisms. Every digital process is presented back to the human in an analogue form: a printed output; music coming from a loudspeaker; moving pictures on a screen. And when we see a live performance, it is the connection between the analogue audience and the analogue performance that makes it special.

All musical instruments (except the pipe organ) are wholly analogue: the way the player touches the instrument affects its tone and timbre, from the brass player's embouchure to the string player's bowing technique. It is the difference between sweet music and a terrible din. The striking action of a piano affects the timbre as well – the organ is the only digital instrument, where a note is either playing in its standard tone or silent.

So let's celebrate our analogue lives by writing in a notebook with a pen, smelling the flowers and listening to birdsong.

This post is day 13 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

“Day 12: Looking at the world through sceptical eyes”

The World Today

In the internet age information is plentiful and attention is scarce. Everyone has the means to share their knowledge and insight whether that is well informed or specious.

This is not new. At the very start of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2 we see the personification of rumour telling us:

Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?

(Do take a couple of minutes to read Rumour's opening monologue at Project Gutenburg, immediately below the boiler plate)

Today we have fantastically fast channels for sharing information, insight, rumour and prejudice. Fantastic channels for presenting them all with parity of esteem: Is this snippet I just read true? —– It's the reader's responsibility to make that judgement.

Our brains are equipped with a lot of short cuts that we have learned through our lives – activities that initially need explicit thought get committed to procedural memory (often call “muscle memory”). Driving a car or playing a musical instrument are good examples. Without this ability to proceduralise common actions we wouldn't function as a species.

The problem is that this proceduralisation, the taking of cognitive short cuts, spills over into our evaluation of information that's presented to us. When we hear something that sounds reasonable, our first instinct is to believe it. And this leads on into credulousness and superstition, which are the enemies of reason.

Rolling Back The Enlightenment

We do love to come up with labels. “The Dark Ages” weren't really that dark, and “The age of enlightenment” wasn't really that enlightened, but the time from the 17th to 19th centuries did see the spread of knowledge, of education and of reason. It saw the beginning of the scientific method, of Newtonian mechanics, and progress in literature and music.

This process now seems to have passed it's peak, and we're now regressing to new Dark Ages. Which brings me to three books you should read.

Book 1: “How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World”

The author, Francis Wheen, has worked on Private Eye for years. In a series of essays he lays out how conspiracy theories, quackery and general bollocks has come to be mainstream. You think I exaggerate?

• We've seen a mainstream TV Presenter join the “5G is spreading Coronavirus” mob
• And alongside this, we see USB EMF shields being put on sale
• We see John Lewis selling a “premium” HDMI cable for £70

Wherever you go, you'll see quackery abounding.

How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World

Book 2: “Bad Science”

Next up, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

Ben teaches you how to read stories about science, particularly medical science. He shows how we have arrived it the use of randomised double blind trials, and how science stories are very often reported: without peer review; with small samples; with only anecdotal evidence; without a control group. He trains your eye in how to skip the lurid headline and first paragraph, and go straight to the method statement.

Given that it is so easy to understand what is valid to report, it is disappointing that so much bad science is promulgated.

Book 3: “Flat Earth News”

Flat Earth News completes our threesome.

Written more in sorrow than in anger, Nick Davies explains modern jounalism to us: “Thou shalt fill the space”.

Pity the modern journalist: fewer people buy newspapers, while they have more pages, they have far more competition for advertising space so the rates are lower, and they often have to populate a news site as well as produce copy. There is no longer space for Woodward and Bernstein, their copy would be 100 times too expensive today. Davies coins the term “Churnalism” to describe the story that is present in all outlets for a number of days, the different outlet all feeding each other. The political “row” is the embodiment of this: every time someone new wades into it, there is more copy.

What do you get when you put them together?

We must stop taking things at face value. Always, always take whatever you read back to its original source, or as closely as possible. Telling your neighbours “I read in the paper that you shouldn't eat <x>“ without checking the source is, today, to join the centuries old practice of spreading rumour.

This post is day 12 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

“Day 11: we embrace the 21^st Century”

The Story So Far

Humanity has been running IPV4 for 40 years, since a time when computers were expensive, network connections were expensive and 32 bits of addressing space was considered infinite.

It quickly became clear that computers were getting cheaper, networking was getting cheaper, and that this infinite addressing space could no longer be considered infinite. And so two things happened in parallel:

• Workarounds were devised to eke out IPV4 space (CIDR, NAT)
• A new protocol with a bigger address space was devised (IPV6)

(I'm not going to explain CIDR and NAT here – there are good articles to be found that will do a better job than I can.)

The world responded to these two things in exactly the way you'd expect: grasped onto every bodge that would keep IPV4 alive and ran it into the ground.

Why is IPV6 better than IPV4?

Firstly there's the Spinal Tap answer: it's two better.

Secondly there are speed benefits: IPV6 headers don't include checksums (these usually exist at layers 2 and 4, so can be omitted at layer 3); IPV6 packets can't be fragmented, so the headers and processing for fragmentation can be omitted.

And thirdly, there are enough IPV6 addresses (2¹²⁸ instead of 2³²) that there is no need for NAT anywhere: every IP address is fully qualified. This is a big deal because almost every IPv4 connection passes through multiple layers of NAT, so connection tracing for diagnostic or security purposes is frustrated.

How do I use IPV6 as a client?

Sign up for an ISP that includes IPV6. In Great Britain that includes Zen Internet, Sky in most cases and my ISP Andrews and Arnold. My home is allocated a /48 block of RIPE address space (IPV6 network aggregations are always on 4 bit boundaries and subnets are always /64, so a /48 block allows 4 layers of subnetting) and I have actually active a single /64 network.

Almost every device running an IP stack from the 21^st century will support IPV6 out-of-the-box (Windows, GNU/Linux, iOS, Android, Sky box, Nintendo Switch, my Sony Bravia telly ...) so you don't need to do anything.

How does my client know whether to connect with IPV6 or IPV4?

When any piece of software needs to resolve a name into an IP address it places a system call. This will normally spill over into a DNS call.

In an IPV6 connected system, the DNS client will search for an AAAA record first which, if resolved, will return an IPV6 address. If the AAAA request returns not found, it will then search for an A record which returns an IPV4 address.

It's instructive to add the extension IPVFoo to either Chrome or Firefox. This extension shows the names resolved in rendering a page, and the associated IP addresses.

The easy way to use IPV6 as a server in AWS

The reason why you should use IPV6 for your IaaS in AWS is the converse of why JFK said we should go to the moon. We use IPV6 in AWS not because it is hard, but because it is easy.

The short version in AWS:

• Tick the IPV6 box when you create your VPC
• Add routeing rules so that your /56 is internal and the default route (::/0) is your Internet Gateway
• Allocate IPV6 ranges as well as IPV4 when you create subnets
• Add IPV6 rules in your Network ACLs alongside your IPV4 ones (usually allowing traffic from ::/0
• Include IPV6 rules on the Security Groups you create

And that's it. When you create instances in this VPC, they will have IPV6 addresses as well as IPV4. And the IPV6 address is the same both from inside and outside the VPC.

You can then add both A and AAAA records to your nameserver. I'll normally add two AAAA records, one to match the A records and another with the prefix ipv6.<fqdn> for debugging purposes.

The lazy sysadmin will, of course, put all this into a set of Terraform modules.

Is there anything else I should know?

Yes. Raw IPV6 addresses contain colons (e.g. 2a05:d01c:4bf:3100:0123:4567:89ab:cdef). There are many contexts in which the use of colons already has a different meaning (e.g. in a URI). In these cases you should enclose an IPV6 address in square brackets, so a URI would look like http://[2a05:d01c:89ab:cdef:0123:4567:89ab:cdef]:8000/here/is/Splunk/on/port/8000.

Why am I writing this post?

For many technical people IPV6 is considered a bridge too far, a closed book, not wanted on voyage. But there really will come a day when IPV4 can be switched off, like analogue television, and unless you're a networking professional it's really not hard to use.

This post is day 11 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

“Day 10: In which I tell you about how I didn't get bowel cancer”

They always say you either come from a heart problem family or a cancer family. I come from a cancer family – I won't name family members, but there has been lung cancer, bowel cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer in my family. I wouldn't say I have a fatalistic view of my destiny, but family history suggests a correlation with a higher than average risk of cancer.

I've never smoked, so am skewing the odds massively in my favour for lung cancer. I have a PSA level taken each year as, even though I'm only in my mid fifties, that which might be compared to a firehose is rather gentler in nature – so I don't expect prostate cancer to take me by surprise.

And then, a couple of months after my fifty-fifth birthday, I got an invitation for “Bowel Scope Screening” (I assume “flexible sigmoidoscopy” is too complicated a term for us muggles). I take a consistent approach with NHS appointments: accept the first date you're offered and re-arrange anything else around it. So about a fortnight later I went into Rugby hospital suitably prepared using the enema pack they'd sent me (top tip: keep repeating the procedure until all the enema solution is used, this way you'll ensure visibility further up the colon).

Instead of an all clear, I got to learn some new words: adenoma, pendunculated and then later tubulo-villous. They found a large polyp (adenoma) that was on a stalk (pendunculated) and I was referred to the University Hospital in Coventry for a full colonoscopy and its removal. Colonoscopy preparation is fun: starts with some stuff called Picolax which just opens the sluices, followed by two waves of Moviprep – fascinating stuff, it goes in clear and comes out yellow.

The excellent consultant firstly piloted the colonoscope up to the ileum and showed me the villi at the end of my small intestine (I remember those from O-level Biology), then came back to the mushroom shaped polyp which, on closer examination, had another bit growing sideways off the stalk. It's removal was fascinating to watch (there was a screen I could look at), the removal was done by lassoing it with a resistive wire and passing current down there and back through the return electrode that was stuck to my bum cheek. As my bowel had been inflated using CO2 there was a puff of smoke, but no risk of the rest of my colon “going on fire”. They wanted to retrieve the pieces for biopsy, so a little net was deployed down the colonoscope – on the screen it looked like a Bugs Bunny themed First Person Shooter as he went round my bowel hunting not “Wabbits” but “Polyps”. And then finally I got my first and only tattoo – the site marked with tattoo ink for subsequent re-inspection (which has happened twice so far).

So why am I sharing this with you? Because the polyp they removed had a high chance of becoming cancerous (it was assessed as tubulo-villous, which is a pre-cancerous stage). And because, just now, all this sort of work has stopped. The Bowel Scope Screening programme isn't universal, I was lucky to be in the subset of 55 year olds who got the screening. Endoscopy departments are currently not working, the staff diverted to Covid-19. My life changing (for the better) treatment would not have happened, and it is likely that in the next 10 years or so I'd have developed bowel cancer.

The “excess deaths” from Covid-19 will come over a range of time: some will be soon, from people not seeking prompt treatment for symptoms. Other will be over much longer times, where screening has been cancelled.

This post is day 10 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

“Day 9: A long relationship with text terminals”

I never used a VT52, but I did use VT52 compatible terminals, and I used genuine VT100s. Later I used VT220s. At university these were connected onto VAXen either directly or via Gandalf switches, then once I started work they hung off GEC4000 series machines. Later we would put SPIF boards onto our Sun boxes (Serial and Parallel InterFace) and for some years I worked at a desk with a VT220 directly onto a Sun box.

This was when I first used GNU Screen. On the big screens on the Sun workstations there was a window manager running, so you would have multiple windows open for your different working contexts. On a terminal I used GNU Emacs as a quasi window system – buffers for editing source files, buffers for running make, or running grep, or running a shell. Hell, for years I used Emacs RMail mode as my email client.

But tools were moving on. My email was on a remote IMAP server, and I defected to PINE. And my colleague introduced me to GNU Screen – a session manager for terminal windows. Its USP for me was the ability to run multiple sessions on a single terminal and switch between them using a Control sequence (as an Emacs user I quickly changed the escape character from Ctrl-a to Ctrl-z).

I hadn't thought about GNU Screen for years and years until today. Almost everything we do lives in its own window, and you can start another context at the click of a mouse. At times you will end up with many PuTTY windows open, and have to do beat them into submission, but that's just how it is. Then I was watching a video signposted by Kev Quirk about git (which I strongly recommend – you'll learn what git does and then how to use it). The instructor was moving freely between contexts in a full screen terminal session, and it turns out that not only is Screen still a thing, there is a new emulator “tmux”.

This is day one of using tmux. It solves a specific annoyance: having multiple PuTTY windows open onto the same host for different purposes, and finding you're in the wrong context. So, for example, you can have a window as your regular user and another windows as root. You can have a window open in the config file directory where you're hacking, and another window open in the logfile directory. But tmux goes further than that: you can divide the window into panes, so you can have a pane running “tail -f .log” while you restart a service in another pane. All within the same PuTTY session. And tmux retains the ability of Screen to detach and reattach a session: apart from anything else, this means that if your connection gets dropped for some reason you haven't lost your context.

I'll need some weeks of usage to settle into my modus operandi with tmux, but it's clear that from now my UserData for new instances is going to include “yum install -y tmux” immediately after “yum install -y emacs”.

#100DaysToOffload

Day 8: Disintermediated television

When you watch live events on television you can quickly forget how extensively they are produced. There are lots of cameras with operators and a control room where the output stream is mixed. There are VT inserts and cutaways to hosts and commentators. The greatest fear is “dead airtime” when nothing is happening.

Sometimes this need for a well produced stream gets in the way, and the producers get into an arms race of presentational devices. On “Strictly Come Dancing” they've introduced steadicams – devices that stabilise the output from a hand-held moving camera. The operator will run around the dancing couple pointing the steadicam at them. Perhaps it improves the atmosphere for some viewers, for me I have to look away or I'll feel queasy.

I also remember the BBC coverage of the river parade for the queen's diamond jubilee in 2012. A parade of significant vessels sailed down the Thames past a pavilion where the queen and other dignitaries watched (and poor Prince Philip got a chill). The BBC coverage was so full of “now over to Fern Cotton who's with XYZ” inserts that we didn't actually see much of the flotilla, and those of us who wanted to know the significance of each vessel were left in the dark.

There is already a reaction to this with the advent of “Slow TV”, where something is filmed and shown at the speed it happened. Last year I enjoyed the trip of Flying Scotsman on the Severn Valley railway, enough interpretation was added that you knew, for example, when the train was climbing or on level track.

Today those of us who are churchgoers can't attend in person. While the Church of England has (until very recently) instructed its clergy to not enter their churches, Catholic clergy have been saying mass alone in their churches. A proportion of churches have been kitted out for live streaming of Mass to housebound parishioners, and these streams have come into their own during lockdown.

In most cases the live steaming is done to a decent standard. The sanctuary area of the church is well lit, the cameras have decent optics that have been well set up, and the clergy are used to using microphones so the sound quality is good. And there is no production suite between me and what's going on in the church: there is no chit-chat before mass, just dignified silence; there is no cutting between cameras, for example to close-ups of readers; and there is no cutting away to insert segments, breaking the flow of the mass. Better still, at mass I can listen to the organ voluntary without interruption from a continuity announcer telling me what's on next.

The hallowed Reithian values are to “educate, inform and entertain”. Perhaps to these should be added “To show events as they are”.

#100DaysToOffload

Day 7: Thou shalt fill the space

We have too much news. There is rolling news, and news websites and newspapers and evening bulletins and social media presences and ...

When we valued news more, reporters would be paid properly to produce it. Local papers would have a few young reporters who would sit in on the local magistrates' court and council meetings. National newspapers would employ seasoned journalists who would ferret around for stories. Broadcast television news was the pinacle: I remember when there were “Newsnight Special Reports” where a journalist and crew might go off for a week or two to produce an extended report on an under-reported story. Newspapers have always competed for readers, with a good “scoop” bringing them great value.

For most reporters today their primary duty is to fill the space, to produce voluminous copy as cheaply as possible. This gives rise to a number of phenomena:

• The placed story: – The story that came from a PR department and can be used as copy with minimal further effort
• The wire service story: – The story from Reuters or PA that can be pulled and used
• The contrived row: – The story that keeps giving, so a reporter can get copy every day with minimal investment of time

The first type, the placed story, is particularly insidious. Here an unholy alliance develops between PR departments, targeted on their weekly column inches, and reporters with an impossible quota to fill. These are the articles that start with “a new study says that...” which can be translated as “a study that hasn't been peer reviewed yet can be cherry picked to give this juicy titbit”. Two days later social media is buzzing with “Did you know that X makes you live longer” and some university PR department are smiling while the researchers are weeping at how their work has been trivialised.

Just now there are two contrived rows running: one about Covid testing and one about PPE. Both are important, and both have been trivialised in order to provide easy copy.

The Covid tests aren't very good, with people hospitalised whose tests come back negative, and positive results from people who've recovered. The informative way to do testing would be to have a cohort of people who are tested every few days to give a sampled measure of infection rate in the general population: the repeated testing would give a four dimensional view of the progression, and a good view of how many people have at some time been asymptomatically infected. But instead we get angry stories of “why haven't I been tested” and “here's a target number we can set and then catch you out for missing it”.

There have been a lot of errors made in every country during this pandemic. The Nightingale hospitals would seem, happily, to not be needed. The surge in the use of PPE has been worldwide and resulted in supply chains failing to keep up – if there were more in Britain then some other country would have less.

We've commended Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, who has spoken calmly and openly with “Team NZ” every day. But then she's not had Laura Kuenssberg treating the briefing process like a parlour game – “will the minister in front of today's microphone fall into the dastardly trap I've set?”.

“Stay safe, stay kind”. If we were kinder to our elected leaders then they would be able to serve us better. But then our reporters might not have enough copy to fill the space.

#100DaysToOffload

Day 6: Missing the mood

Advertising is a funny business. It's a business where the outcome is in the future. This gives advertisers the perfect place to hide: if a campaign didn't work, the solution is another campaign whose success can be assured because it, too, is in the future. And a truly successful campaign can only be recognised years after the event.

A lot of advertising at the moment is quasi informational: retailers and institutions telling you what they're doing as practices must change very fast. Lenders telling you what to do if you're having trouble with repayments; supermarkets telling you the times reserved for particular groups; charities both soliciting for donors/volunteers and urging those in need to come forward.

It's not a great time to be launching a new product, but if you have lots of stock of finished goods then it's going to be better to put them on sale than keep them warehoused. And advertising is a good way to say “here's a new product you could buy and that is available”.

Which brings us to the iPhone SE. I don't know much about the relative merits of different iPhones through the years. My work phone is an iPhone from quite a few years ago and I'll use it as long as it keeps going.

Promoting a new iPhone just now is going to be difficult. The Apple stores are shut, as are the phone shops. Many people don't want to spend money: they may be on furlough, or self employed and stopped from working. Thousands are being laid off. A new iPhone is the preserve of someone who's still working and is confident about the next few months.

The television advert for the new iPhone SE has two sequences: in the first the box it's packed in is held by the top as the base slowly comes down; in the second the protective film is shown being peeled back as a crowd cheers on an ascending note. And that's it. “Here's the momentary high you get from unboxing something that cost hundreds of pounds”. I know the campaign was probably conceived months ago, but we've seen many organisations pivot their tone in a moment. While holding good production values, much advertising at the moment is front line staff talking directly to camera.

And against this background Apple's latest campaign jars, evoking a time of rampant consumerism.

#100DaysToOffload

Day 5: “Nice straight stripes”

There are two sorts of lawnmowers: the ones with a spinning blade on a vertical axis that decapitates the blades of grass; and the ones with a spinning barrel of blades on a horizontal axis that strike against an edge and slice through the grass.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, a barrel blade that sliced the grass was the norm. We had a push mower: my parents minimised the physical exertion this involved by having four children. Our neighbours didn't have children, instead they had a Suffolk Colt petrol mower. It was around this time that the first FlyMos came out: initially they were petrol powered, later there were electric ones. The FlyMo created a strong down draft and moved on a cushion of air which regulated the height of the cut. It allowed a steep grass bank to be cut by attaching a piece of sash cord to the handle and lowering the mower down the bank on its air cushion.

Today almost everyone uses a rotary mower, and nowadays they typically are supported on driven wheels. Cylinder mowers with a striking plate are the preserve of those with a rather precious disposition.

I got my first cylinder mower in about 2001, not long after moving to where I now live. For reasons I can't remember I was dawdling in Sainsbury and so looked at the board of small ads. I saw someone nearby was selling a 17” mower and went round to look (an aside, domestic barrel mowers come with 14”, 17” or 21” cutting widths, though today they're expressed in centimetres)(a further aside, as an engineer I recognise metres and millimetres as valid units of length).

Reader, I bought it there and then. A 1970s Webb that cut beautifully and could hold its own on my street: I have a neighbour who repairs and runs a classic car, a neighbour who repairs and runs classic motorcycles and a neighbour who repairs and runs a classic tractor. I paid someone else to do servicing and repairs, but I could stand proud running a classic walk-behind mower. Being from the era when petrol had lead in it, I put a few drops of Redex lead substitute in every tankful to keep the valves lubricated. And it ran and ran and ran. Until last year.

I had it serviced regularly, but not annually. Last year it was due, and I loaded it in the back of the car and took it to Sharnford Horticultural. They had a look at what needed doing: the cutting barrel had been reground enough times that its diameter was too small to be reground again. A new barrel was needed. To be fair, the grass hadn't been flying to the collecting box properly for some years. And a few days later they advised me that they couldn't source the part: it had mown its last.

While mowers haven't improved much in the last 20 years, they have since the 1970s. A bit of eBaying found me a 2008 17” Atco for just over £400 – you could get a new rotary mower for less money, but the precious disposition precludes that. This has an industry standard Kawasaki petrol engine and, as the model is in production now, there should be spares available until I'm 6' under (or 2m or 2000mm). Continuing the precious theme, I run it on Aspen 4 – it costs more than unleaded out of the pump, but repays this premium by running sweetly even after winter storage.

And every time I mow with it, I look at the finished work an think to myself “Damn, that looks good”.

#100DaysToOffload

Day 4: “I cannae change the laws of physics”

We've all been there. You're asked how long something will take. So you take the nearest equivalent to what you're being asked and calibrate it to the situation.

Quite often this first estimate meets with disapprobation. At which point you decompose the stages needed and consider the range of duration for each stage. Don't do this! – someone will come along and take the shortest range for each element and add them together to come up with an “optimistic” overall estimate. This isn't “optimistic”, each of the ranges has been treated optimistically, so if there are 10 components then this is optimistic to the power of ten. You may then be asked to shorten this duration still further: “If we start this before its pre-requisites are ready and slot them in...”

In my career I have never known a project estimated in this way to arrive on time.

So the first estimate for “How long will it take to provide a vaccine for a new virus” would be “Between ten and fifteen years, maybe longer”.

Which brings me to this piece. The opening paragraph contains the simple sentence “We've never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before.” And then we look at all the short cuts that must be made, the “assume the best case” that must work at each stage ... to get to a vaccine within a decade.

Whenever you hear the words ”...until we have a vaccine” think of a project where you were bamboozled into saying it could be done in a compressed timescale, and then remember what the outcome was.

#100DaysToOffload