Alan's Ramblings

It seems that the Planet Sun blog aggregator's fame continues to grow - Richard Giles pointed out an article entitled Blogging and Sun: The RSS Tide Is Rising... over at the Java Developers Journal website. I found the following contribution (dare I say rant?) in the comments section of the article really rather amusing:

So, in the interests of reducing the usefulness of the Internet even further I offer up the details of part of my Easter weekend. I promise to include at least one reference to chocolate, plenty of information about where I was, and absolutely nothing about Java. Here we go...

On Friday afternoon I took my two kids out for a walk to try to spot some arctic hares - as anyone who has read my blog before know I have a bit of a soft spot for them. We drove up to Woodhead tunnel, parked up and set off up Far Black Clough. The weather was OK when we started, a bit overcast but dry. By the time we got up towards Featherbed Moss we'd see half a dozen hares - lots of 'Oohs' and 'Aahs' from the kids as they watched them through the binoculars. As we headed further up Far Black Clough the clag descended rapidly, and by the time we reached Bleaklow Stones visibility was down to 40-50 metres or so. The temperature had dropped and there was a brisk westerly so we didn't linger and set off towards Near Bleaklow Stones.

Once we got to Near Bleaklow Stones we hunkered down amongst the rocks to get out of the wind and broke out the bananas and chocolate bars (see, I said I'd mention chocolate).

We then wandered over to take a look a the Boulton Paul Defiant wreck a couple of hundred metres from the stones. - "It was like this when we found it Dad - honest!" After spending a few minutes at the wreck we headed west towards Far Black Clough, which was a welcome relief as once we were across it and on the path we were out of the wind.

It's been reasonably wet over the last week, and this path is a bit boggy at the best of times. The promise of the remaining chocolate bar to the first one to spot the first tree of Birchen Bank Wood was more than enough to ensure rapid progress. As we headed down the path back towards Woodhead tunnel I kept expecting the cloud to lift as we got lower, but in fact it had dropped right down to the car park, so we were nearly at the bottom before we could see the trees and finish off the chocolate ration.

I'm sure all parents know the almost magnetic attraction between small boys and dirt, it seems mine are particularly talented in this respect. The pair of peat-caked boots on the left were in fact brand new - this was their maiden voyage. "Mission accomplished Dad!".

Posted by alan at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My mum's partner Trevor has been driving for over 50 years with an unblemished record. Recently he unfortunately had to attend the funeral of an acquaintance, and was following the cortege to the cemetery. He got left behind a bit, so he sped up slightly to about 35mph to catch up - straight past a 30mph speed camera. One speeding ticket duly arrived just before Christmas. Only Trevor could have managed to get a speeding ticket as part of a funeral cortege!

Posted by alan at 11:09 AM | Permalink

I was hunting around in Borders looking for something to buy for James, my eldest, and I found a boxed beginners Go set and book. For those of you who don't know what Go is, it is a 3,000 year old game that originated in China. Go is the European name for it, derived from the Japanese name, Igo. Other names for it are Wei Ch'i in China and Baduk in Korea. The game consists of a 19 x 19 grid, with one player playing black stones, and the other playing white. Unlike other board games, the pieces are played on the intersections of the lines rather than inside the squares. The objective of the game is to surround territory with stones of your color. Pieces can take each other, but that's a secondary objective - the winner is the person who has captured the most territory.

So that I wouldn't get hammered by my 10-year old son on Xmas day, I thought I'd better get a head start and find out how to play. It turns out there is an enormous amout of information on the net - not surprising as the game is played by an estimated 50 million people in the Far East. A good introduction can be found on the British Go Association website. There are also quite a few online Go servers, that allow you to play other people online - and having played a few games, I'm hooked!

At first sight the game appears to be straightforward - the rules are fairly simple, and it all seems pretty easy. However, having played a couple of games online and been soundly thrashed, it has really grabbed my interest. It's actually a far more complex game than chess - unlike chess the best Go-playing programs are of a distinctly crummy standard. The reason it is so much more difficult for computers than chess, according to this overview of computer Go is that at any given point in a Go game there are vastly more potential moves to be considered, and that in addition evaluating each potential move is far more difficult and costly, and to cap it off libraries of precomputed game openings and endings, which are used extensively in chess playing programs, really don't work very well for Go - in all it is thought that 10^27 more computer power is needed for a world-class Go program than is needed for chess. At least there is still one thing left where we are better than the goddam machines :-)

The largest online Go server is the Internet Go Server (IGS). Most of the Go servers are based on telnet, but there are a quite a few clients available that give you a graphical board to play on, and you can also watch other games that are in progress. I quite like gGo - it's written in Java so it is cross-platform. I shouldn't say this bearing in mind who I work for, but it is the first Java application I've come across that I actually consider to be worth using!

Posted by alan at 09:49 PM | Permalink

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Graham and Shirley, were up over the weekend for a pre-christmas visit and general family gossip, and yesterday we went to Castleton to go down the Blue John cavern. Blue John is a semiprecious form of fluorspar which has been mined since Roman times, and is found nowhere else other than Castleton - as far as I know the Blue John cavern is the only remaining source, all the others having being worked out years ago. We have been down several times, but Shirley and Graham hadn't been before. After that we went for a very blowy walk along the landslipped road at the foot of Mam Tor before heading off to The Lamb Inn on the A624 between Chinley and Hayfield for a most excellent meal - the banana-filled crepes with bananna ice-cream were superb. Yum-yum :-)

Posted by alan at 06:22 PM | Permalink

The car is in the garage at the moment, so this afternoon we all squeezed ourselves into the Peugot 106 courtesy car the garage had lent us and struggled our way over Holme Moss to Digley and Bilberry reservoirs for a quick walk. As we got to the bottom end of Bilberry reservoir the sun was setting over Black Hill, with the clouds giving the most glorious salmon sky which was reflected in the reservoir below. I haven't modified the photos whatsoever, the sky really was that colour!

Bilberry reservoir was the scene of a disaster on 5th of February, 1852 when the dam gave way and flooded the valley below, including the nearby town of Holmfirth. 81 people lost their lives, and there was a vast amount of damage to houses and the many mills that lined the valley. At the moment however, Digley reservoir which is the lower of the pair is very low, as are all the reservoirs in the area, due to the extremely dry autumn that we have had.

After eating we battered our way back up Holme Moss, stopping briefly at the summit to look at the "Dragon Towers", otherwise know as the TV and radio masts at Holme Moss and Emley Moor . The dragon reference is a fanciful comparison of the red anti-collision lights on both masts to the eyes of dragons - Look, I've got young kids, OK? :-)

Posted by alan at 11:04 PM | Permalink

I was up at my mum's last weekend, along with my brother, sister and their families - 8 adults and 6 kids, so it was a full (and frantic) house. Mum lives in Ambleside in the Lake District, another of the UK's National Parks, and on Sunday we all wandered up Stock Ghyll with the kids in tow to look at the waterfall above. I was Googling to make sure I'd spelled it correctly, and I found this 1910 photograph taken from almost exactly the same spot as the one above. It's amazing how little it seems to have changed in nearly 100 years.

In the afternoon we went to my hometown Barrow-in-Furness and had a guided tour of HMS Cumberland, a Batch 3 Type 22 Frigate, which was in Barrow for Remembrance Sunday - my brother-in-law Dave is the Weapons Officer on the ship. As a consequence we got to see all the things on the ship that went pop, bang or whoosh. We also tried to persuade the kids that the helicopter was for purely used for collecting takeaway food orders for the crew, but I don't think they bought it. I think I probably enjoyed the visit more than the kids!

I've always had this romantic vision (garnered mainly from old B&W war movies I suspect) of the captain steaming into battle on the bridge, clad in his dufflecoat and with his binoculars around his neck. The truth is a little more prosaic. Dave took us into the command centre, a low-ceilinged windowless room entirely filled with various radar, sonar, missile system and computer screens. The captain "fights the ship" from the command centre, and the ship's systems are all controlled from in there. The 4.5" gun on the front is aimed with a very ordinary-looking joystick, and the gun is fired with something that looks for all the world like a sewing machine pedal. Even the sighting of the gun is done with various TV and IR systems. So much for the "Romance of the High Seas", we live truly in the Nintendo Age.

Posted by alan at 05:26 PM | Permalink

At dusk we took the kids out for a short walk up Shire Hill near the house to watch the bats. We have been seeing them nearly every evening over the last few weeks from the kitchen window as they hunt for insects across the garden, but standing under the trees on the edge of Shire Hill as it went dark, watching them chase insects was quite something. The kids were captivated - it's the first time I've seen them stand stock still and silent (!) for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch.

I'm fairly sure the ones we saw are the most common of UK bats, Pipistrelles. I can think of about four places within 1km of home where you can more-or-less guarantee you will see them, so they do seem to be more common than usual around here. I guess the low-input farming typical of the area with the consequential abundance of insects means that this is a particularly good area for them. If the number of midge bites we all received is an indicator, there is certainly a good supply of food for them!

Until I'd actually seen them in the wild I'd always thought as bats as second-rate flyers, a poor imitation of birds. However, watching their incredibly fast, silent flight with frequent lightning changes in direction completely changed my misconceptions. Seemingly they can eat up to 3000 insects per night, and may live for up to 16 years. Not bad going for something the same weight as a 2p coin!

Yay for the mammals!

Posted by alan at 11:01 PM | Permalink

Having put Mark's hedgehog picture up, it only seems fair that I do the same with one of James's pictures (or so he tells me). The artist informs me that this work is entitled 'Butch has found a new juicy bone to gloat over', and the medium is felt-tip pen.

Posted by alan at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last time I was in the US, I was wandering around Frys looking for something to take home for the kids. I ended picking up a couple of packs of Whitewings paper gliders (http://www.whitewings.com) - 12 different models for about $15.00. It claimed on the box that they are the "World's Best performance Paper Gliders', and I can vouch that they are! They are a combination of a balsa body and paper wings that you glue together with PVA craft glue. I made them ages ago and never got round to flying them, so today we finally had a go, and they are excellent. You get some gauges that you use to set the dihedral and camber of the wings, and to fly them you launch then into the wind using a little rubber-band catapult. They will easily go the length of a football field, and if tuned properly will fly in a wide circle as they drift downwind. The kids loved them. I've not been able to find a stockist in the UK, but I'm sure there must be one.

Top tip: After you build them, spray them with sealer - the type artists use for protecting chalk and charcoal drawings, and they won't get soggy if they land in a puddle :-)

Posted by alan at 06:53 PM | Permalink

One of Mark's drawings - no idea where he gets his artistic bent from. I wonder if the Tate Gallery is interested?

Posted by alan at 09:55 PM | Permalink

James' class has 'mountains' as their class topic this term, so on wednesday I had the pleasure of accompanying about thirty nine and ten year olds on a mini-expedition up onto the moors surrounding Glossop.

I'm no athlete, but I was pretty shocked at how unfit some of the kids were - I doubt they ever get more excercise than the walk between the car and the classroom - or more probably McDonalds. It was also obvious that a lot of them had never been off a pavement in their lives, despite the fact we live surrounded by the UKs largest National Park. I can't blame the kids, who all thoroughly enjoyed themselves, but I do wonder what health problems we are storing up for the next generation.

During the trip us adults took great care to explain about the various landscape features and natural history, and the different ways the moors had been used and managed over the centuries to the kids. After the trip the kids were asked to write 'thank-you' letters to the adults who helped out, and today Chris came back from picking the kids up with mine - I was interested to see which aspect the kids had remembered most. Here is one of the letters:

Dear Mr. Burlison

Thank you for your time. I like you because you let us see exciting things like the dead sheep. My best bit was the dead sheep too, a lot of people liked that too. I had a good time. I hope you did.

So it seems like a trip down the local abbatoir would have been sufficient!

Posted by alan at 07:57 PM | Permalink