Cloud pool

There was a beautiful sunset tonight after a torrential shower.

Anatomy of a software bug

Anyone who doubts that modern software is unsustainably complex should have a look at this detailed account by Microsoft developer Rick Schaut about how he tracked down a well-known bug in Word. He’s also good on the notion of complexity:

“In this context, ‘complexity’ doesn’t refer to the code itself. Rather, we’re talking about the shear [sic] volume of things the user can do. In Word, for example, we have:

* More than 850 command functions (e.g. Bold and Italic are the same command function)

* More than 1600 distinct commands (e.g. Bold and Italic are distinct commands)

* At any given time roughly 50% of these commands are enabled (conservative estimate)

With just 3 steps, the possible combinations of code execution paths exceeds 500 million.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Leica site has a Book of Condolence for HC-B, who probably did more than anyone else to make the Leica synonomous with high-quality photo-reportage. It’s accompanied by this picture. Note the way he cradles the camera to make it unobtrusive to others. He looks as though he’s dressed for a funeral. Wonder when this was taken.

The Great Leap Sideways

Here’s an interesting fact. Of the three great mass-murdering tyrants of the 20th century, two — Hitler and Stalin — are comprehensively excoriated. Nobody in Germany outside of neo-Nazi crazies publicly admires Hitler (though there is an interesting film coming about the last days in the Bunker which attempts to portray him as a human being). Ditto with Stalin in the former Soviet Union. But Mao Zedong is still a fixture in Chinese state iconography.

There are still pictures of the old brute everywhere, and the ruling Communist Party has come up with an interesting mathematical formula which takes care of the fact that he was responsible for the murder of tens of millions of his fellow countrymen: Mao, says the current regime, was “70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad”.

Which brings us neatly to the question of Tony Blair. The difficulty UK voters will have in next year’s General Election is that, with the exception of Iraq and a small number of other indefensible policies or decisions, New Labour is still the best government likely to be available. The Tories are in chaos and possibly in terminal decline. The Liberal Democrats are, well, the Liberal Democrats. So in the end voters will be faced with the conundrum: is Tony Blair 80 per cent good and 20 per cent bad? Or should the ratio be 30/70?

High-tech masks

The kids have been playing with K’Nex (“the world’s most creative toy”). Interestingly, they don’t always use it to make ‘machines’. Instead they do things like this.

What’s interesting about K’Nex is that it escapes from the ‘mechanical’ rigidity of products like Lego (and ye olde Meccano) and introduces flexibility and connectivity more like what one finds in nature. Clever stuff.

Longhorn now to be Shorthorn

Microsoft announced yesterday that Longhorn, the next release of Windows, will still ship in 2006, but only in a stripped down form. It will still have Indigo though, which is the bit that could have the biggest impact.

Coup de Jour

Apparently ‘Sir’ Mark Thatcher, the dimwitted son of baroness Thatcher (aka Mrs Hacksaw) has been arrested in South Africa on suspicion of financing an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea, wherever that is. Much though I would like to believe that the old sleazeball is guilty of this batty crime, somehow it seems implausible. But the reverberations of his arrest have reached the ancient university city of Cambridge. I’m told that in the lovely-but-tiny Indigo cafe in St Edward’s Passage yesterday, the tin for staff gratuities was labelled “All tips go to fund coup in Equatorial Guinea”.

Two years on

It’s two years today since my beloved Sue died.

I was going to add “– and my life changed forever”, but in fact my life changed the moment I finally conceded that I would lose her. That moment came on August 22nd, when her consultant said to me “It’s time to prepare for the end”. Until that moment, although I had read the literature and knew the odds, I never really gave up. But then I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach, and found myself unable to speak.

Sue was a great planner, and she and I had discussed what she wanted at the end. She had said she wanted to die in a hospice. I was unhappy with that, but one doesn’t argue with somone who is dying and I made the necessary arrangements. She was due to go into the hospice on the morning of the 25th. It was clear that we would need to take her in an ambulance, so before calling one I asked her at 6am if she really wanted to go. She indicated that she didn’t, so we cancelled everything and looked after her at home, which was what I had wanted all along. And it was a wonderful thing to be able to do. But it wouldn’t have been possible if my lovely sister Steph — who’s a nurse — hadn’t dropped her job and flown over to be with us. It was the kind of generosity one never forgets, and cannot ever repay.

So how are we now, two years on? The children seem to be fine — happy and getting on with their lives. They have good friends, use IM and iTunes a lot, play games, are good at school, love their lives. They talk about their Mum a lot, but their memories never seem to choke them the way mine choke me. I’ve begun to understand why children are so resilient — they live in the present and future, and dwell only intermittently in the past; whereas we adults spend a lot of time there.

And me? I’m struck by two things C.S. Lewis said in his lovely book on bereavement. The first is that you never stop being married to a spouse who has died. The second is that one ‘gets over’ a loss like this the way an amputee ‘gets over’ the loss of a leg. But, as Lewis observed, “he will never be a biped again”.

I’m also overwhelmed sometimes by small kindnesses: my older son deciding to come home last night to be with me; an email this morning from someone I know only through email saying that she was thinking of us today; and a friend who currently has an unbearable burden of her own turning up at Sue’s grave this morning to leave a small bunch of Fuschia — Sue’s favourite flowers.

In the end, only three things matter in life — love, children and friendship. I often think of EM Forster’s lovely observation that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the courage to choose the former. Me too.

The NotsoBig Mac

See below for the story behind this picture.

Five years ago, the Churchill, a pub on the Madingley Road favoured by the Naughtons — not to mention graduate students from the Institute of Astronomy across the road — suddenly metamorphosed into a Mcdonalds. For the first couple of years, it did a roaring trade — often causing traffic jams as people queued to get into the car park. But in the last 18 months or so, the joint’s trade died away — to the point where one would often see only one or two cars parked outside it in the evening. It’s not clear why this happened. Was it a response to 9/11 (unlikely, given the clientele)? Were people reading Fast Food Nation and deciding to eat more healthily (equally unlikely)? Whatever the explanation, in the end capitalist logic took over and the site was sold for housing development. Will its new inhabitants be more or less obnoxious? We shall see.

Cloud nine

We’ve been having crazy weather — torrential showers followed by patches of sunshine. And amazing cloudscapes.