Will Some Word Processing Software Object To Someone Typing Battersea Power Station Station?
It is quite likely, that someone will need to type “Battersea Power Station Station” into a document.
I’ve just tried to type it into Word and it objects!
Twenty Years On!
On the eleventh of September in 2001, I had three jobs to do in London.
- I had to visit my press cuttings client near Borough tube station to talk about something, which I have long forgotten.
- I had to deliver a thousand Al Stewart CDs to his manager, as the singer was going on tour. The handover was to be performed in Waterloo station.
- I was then going on to Soho to see a Chinese bookmaker, for whom I offered computer advice.
I parked my car on a meter and went to visit the first client at about two.
When I returned to the car, I needed to phone my wife; C about something. My phone was installed in my Discovery and it didn’t have any calling list, as I remembered numbers and just typed them in.
But for some reason I couldn’t remember her mobile phone number or the Office number at home, so I didn’t make the call.
This was very unlike me, as I’ve always had an excellent memory. Especially for numbers.
I did remember to deliver the parcel to Al Stewart’s manager and made my way to Soho, where I parked in an underground car park.
It was only when I got to the bookmakers did I realise what was going on in New York, as they had the televisions on and were watching the drama continuously.
I have a feeling, that I made my excuses and returned quickly to Suffolk.
By this time, my memory had returned and I was able to phone C.
But the worst terrorist attacks of recent memory were probably over.
Did my brain pick up the bad news or was it due to being close to the City of London, where there would have been a large amount of electronic communication to New York?
I have no idea.
But there is another incident, where I may have picked up tragic news through the ether.
On Sunday, the 31st August 1997, I woke up about five as I generally do and remarkably said to C. “Something tragic has happend! I think Tony Blair has been assassinated!”
She told me to stop being silly and I went downstairs to make a cup of tea and do some programming. It was then that I turned on the radio and heard that Princess Diana had died in the traffic accident in Paris.
Building Council Flats In London
I was told this tale by the Head of the Construction Branch of the Greater London Council, who was a big user of the first Project Management System;PERT7, that I wrote in the 1970s.
The GLC were building some council flats alongside the railway.
There were four parallel blocks with five floors and I’ll number them 1 to 4, with 4 alongside the railway and 1 furthest away.
The plan to build them involved the following.
- Deliveries were planned, so that the many residents around the site and British Rail were not inconvenienced.
- Site access was arranged with British Rail along the railway on a track to and from a major road a few hundred yards away.
- The site would be cleared with all the rubble going out in the reverse direction.
- The plan then was to build the blocks 1, 2, 3 and 4 towards the railway.
- This was logical, as when each block was completed it could be occupied and the new tenants wouldn’t be living in a building site, as what needed to be done was towards the railway.
But he was overruled by a vociferous local lobby and some local politicians, who had convinced themselves that building away from the railway in a 4, 3, 2, 1 order would be better.
In the end they were built in the 4, 3, 2, 1 order with budget and time overruns and endless complaints from residents.
If there is a lesson from this fairly insignificant project, it is that in a construction project, there is often one way to build it, that minimises construction time and disturbance to neighbours and maximises the cash flow from the development.
Metier’s First And Second Ipswich Office
My Scottish Borders correspondent has asked me about the first office Metier had in Ipswich.
Courtesy of Google Streetview, I was able to capture this image.
Note.
- They were in the four story building with the yellow cladding.
- I see it’s still called Pearl Assurance House.
- Shadu Hair and Beauty used to be a rather good camera shop.
For those of you, who don’t know Ipswich, if you walk straight ahead and keep right, you end up in the centre of Ipswich.
It wasn’t very large, but it was certainly in better condition, than some of the offices we had in London.
This is the second office in Fore Street.
If I remember correctly, the office was found by Wendy, who responded to my advert in the East Anglian Daily Times, saying, that we were looking for an Office Dogsbody.
Mott’s £6m Plan Approved For Hammersmith Bridge
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Construction Index.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Hammersmith & Fulham Council has approved a new plan to stabilise Hammersmith Bridge at significantly below the original expected cost, with works completing in less than a year.
Consulting engineer, Mott MacDonald have developed a solution to the bridge that is simple in the extreme.
This sentence describes the principle at the heart of the solution.
The Mott MacDonald solution involves the use of elastomeric bearings, which allow any pressure to be applied equally to all four corners while protecting the vulnerable 134-year-old cast iron structure.
There would also appear, that some very serious computing has been applied to allow the new bearings to be inserted, by just jacking up the bridge.
In addition to the cost and the speed of installation, the Mott MacDonald plan has been welcomed by Heritage England, will require less closures and doesn’t involve diversion of the gas main.
Conclusion
This intervention will stabilise the bridge and give time for a long-term solution to be developed, that will allow the bridge to be opened to vehicles.
Piney Point: Emergency Crews Try To Plug Florida Toxic Wastewater Leak
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Emergency crews in Florida have been working to prevent a “catastrophic” flood after a leak was found in a large reservoir of toxic wastewater.
This Google Map shows the location.
Note.
- At the top of the map is an area called Tampa Bay Estuarine Ecosystem Rock Ponds.
- The reservoir appears to be in the South East corner of the map.
- There appear to be several chemical works to the West of the highway.
This second Google Map shows the reservoir at a larger scale.
Note.
- The picture in the BBC article was taken from the North West.
- The problem reservoir is right and above of centre.
- To its right is Lake Price, which appears to be the sort of lake to sail a boat and perhaps do a bit of fishing and swimming.
- Moore Lake to the South appears similar to Lake Price.
It looks to me that it is not the place to have an environmental incident.
This article in The Times says this.
Engineers are furiously pumping the phosphate-rich water into the sea to avoid an uncontrolled spill at Piney Point, whose failure could unleash a 20ft-high wall of toxic effluent.
Pumping it into the sea? Surely not?
I suspect there could have been a mixture of sloppy management and loose regulation, with minimal enforcement and I’ll be interested to see what recommendations are put forward by the inevitable investigation.
In my varied past, I was once indirectly involved, in the toxic waste that comes out of chemical plants. At the time, I was working for ICI in Runcorn and my main job was building designing and building instruments for the various chemical plants in and around Runcorn.
As they had hired me because of my programming skills, they asked me if I could do a few small jobs on their Ferranti Argus 500, which could be plugged in to both their Varian NMR machine and their AEI mass spectrometer.
With the former, to get better accuracy in analysis of chemicals, I would take successive scans of a sample and aggregate them together. The accuracy of the results would be proportion to the square root of the number of scans.
The second to my mind was more difficult and much more interesting.
This explanation of mass spectroscopy is from Wikipedia.
Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technique that is used to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions. The results are typically presented as a mass spectrum, a plot of intensity as a function of the mass-to-charge ratio. Mass spectrometry is used in many different fields and is applied to pure samples as well as complex mixtures.
ICI at Runcorn had a lot of complex mixtures and the aim of my project, was to take a mass spectrum and automatically decide what chemicals were present in the mixture.
The mass spectra were presented as a long graph on a roll of thermal paper. I noticed that operators would pick out distinctive patterns on the graph, which they told me were distinctive patterns of chlorine ions.
Chlorine has an unusual atomic weight of 35.5 because it is a mixture of two stable isotypes Chlorine-35 and Chlorine-37, which produced these distinctive patterns on the spectra.
I was able to identify these patterns to determine the number of chlorine atoms in a compound. By giving the algorithm a clue in stating how many carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms could be involved, it was able to successfully identify what was in a complex mixture.
All this was programmed on computer with just 64K words of memory and a half-megabyte hard disc.
ICI must have been pleased, as I got a bonus.
One of the jobs the software was used for was to identify what chemicals were present in the lagoons alongside the River Weaver, which are shown today in this Google Map.
Note.
- The chemical works, which were part of ICI in the 1960s, to the North of the Weaver Navigation Canal.
- The two former lagoons between the canal and the River Weaver, which seem to have been cleaned out and partially restored.
- Was that a third large lagoon to the South of the River Weaver?
- There also appears to be a fourth smaller triangular lagoon between the canal and the river.
There certainly seems to have been a better clear-up in Runcorn, than in Florida.
I moved on from Runcorn soon after, I’d finished that software and have no idea how or if it developed and was used.
But the techniques I used stayed in my brain and were used at least four times in the future.
- In the design of a Space Allocation Program for ICI Plastics Division.
- In the design of two Project Management systems for Time Sharing Ltd.
And of course, they were also used in designing the scheduler in Artemis for Metier.
I
Why I Will Never Use DPD
I keep getting messages from DPD say they have missed me. I’ve had about six.
I know they are scams as the sending e-mail is xxxx.xxxx@hotmail.it. I have the real address.
So I thought I should report this idiot, to DPD, as perhaps it might help find the scammer, so he can be arrested.
But there is no information on their web site, let alone a place to report them.
I don’t deal with companies who don’t look after their customers.
I reported the message to report@phishing.gov.uk.
Never Remove A Feature In A Computer Program
One of my golden rules in updating computing programs, is never to remove a feature however obscure it is. The reason is obvious, in that if the feature exists someone will find an extremely useful way to use it.
Here are two changes in other software systems that are annoying me at present.
The Windows 10 Photo Viewer
I use an SD card to capture images in my camera..
On my old laptop with Windows 7, if I was looking at a folder of images, I could scroll past the last image to the first and vice-versa, which was a very useful feature, when looking for an obscure image.
Windows 10 doesn’t have this feature and it is very annoying.
Zopa’s New System
I invest some of my savings in Zopa and use it as a high-interest one month-access deposit account in a concept that I call hybrid banking, which I wrote about in The Concept Of Hybrid Banking.
The old system used to give two figures about your money, that was yet to be invested.
- The money sitting there waiting in the queue for new borrowers.
- The allocated money waiting for the borrower to be checked and sign up.
The first figure was invaluable, as by watching it, it enabled me to see how constipated the system was. There’s not much point, of putting more money in Zopa, if it will just sit there. It could be more productive in crowdfunding an outstanding idea.
But in the new system, they have added these two figures together.
It’s not catastrophic, but it’s a nuisance.
Conclusion
Never disobey, the title of this post!
Inappropriate Language
My bank sends a six character code of three letters and three numbers to my phone, so that I can login.
Today, the three letters were KKK.
How inappropriate is that?
I have complained!
Oxford Vaccine Could Substantially Cut Spread
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the first two paragraphs.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could lead to a “substantial” fall in the spread of the virus, say scientists.
The impact of Covid vaccines on transmission has been a crucial unknown that will dramatically shape the future of the pandemic.
The article also says you get this after one dose.
This study – on 17,000 people in the UK, South Africa and Brazil – showed protection remained at 76% during the three months after the first dose.
This rose to 82% after people were given the second dose.
It will be interesting to see, what figures drop out of the data, when millions have been vaccinated twice in the UK.
Conclusion
It looks like very good news to me!
The Anonymous Widower 