Gravitational waves observed!

So gravitational waves have been detected at last! The waves were observed from coalescing black holes 1.3 billion light years away. Rating the quotes from the linked Article's taken back to the more recent, though personally distant past, as an undergraduate at the Australian National University about 20 years ago.

Professor Dave McClelland was my optics lecturer. He and his team were heavily involved with designing a Laser Interferometry Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) in outback Australia away from human induced vibrations. Unfortunately the Australian observatory was never built, otherwise it would probably have participated in this observation and enabled observers to triangulate the source.

Despite the lack of an Australian observatory, the ANU team, and CSIRO, have contributed to the design and manufacture of the technology used in the gravity wave detection.

It just goes to show the kind of lead times involved with groundbreaking scientific research, something that certain science administrators would be wise to remember.

Welcome to 2016!

Happy New Year! May 2016 be a good one for you.

One hour until Christmas

Better go to bed, don't want Santa to skip our house.

Going to bed before midnight would be nice. So would waking up to a quiet Christmas day spent with just the three of us (and dog). Sadly not. Instead it's a drive up to the Insular Peninsula for a party with one side and back south by the evening for a dinner with the other.

I'm exhausted. I've been pushing to get this super awesome WordPress theme ready for testing before my co-developer, the designer goes on holiday. Finally set up the test sites last night and then wrote up the authoring and admin instructions from about 7 am and sent them out an hour before work closes for the Christmas break.

Then there were all the other support requests.

Alex has been on holiday for a week now so I had to look after him at the same time, meaning a lot of the recent work was done late at night after he slept. Then there was Christmas shopping and preparing dishes for tomorrow.

I'm knackered!

Oh darn, I just remember I have to make another layer of jelly and let it cool before pouring.

Merry Christmas.

Why you think I hate Microsoft

Every popular, or once popular, operating system has its fans. Who doesn't know an Apple fanboy (or fangirl), with their fervent agreement with every utterance from Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook? Or the Linux freedom fighter, for whom a command line equals "desktop ready"? There are even those that can't let go of their Amiga.

But there is another group who are surprisingly not as well recognised. Surprising, because theirs is the most popular opeating system of all, at least as far as personal computers are concerned.

I'm talking about Microsoft.

Let’s be clear about something. I use Microsoft products and have done so for decades. My desktop computers all run Windows, including my work laptop. I used to program in Microsoft BASIC and more recently (though somewhat reluctantly) in C# and .Net. I've maintained Web servers running IIS and even used FrontPage. At work we use Outlook.

Microsoft do make some good and useful products. But in geekdom Microsoft has traditionally been seen as the Evil Empire, to be distrusted and opposed at every opportunity.

So it has come as a shock to find people jumping out of the woodwork to vigorously and publicly defend Microsoft products from criticism.

Fair enough, you say. If they make good products then they should be supported. However, a closer analysis of the defenders' arguments actually illustrates the flaws in Microsoft's traditional strategy and why it has been losing market share.

Yes it is cloud-based allrite, but the fact that you can use it simultaneously across multiple devices with proper version control, op-locking, etc. puts it miles ahead of iOS. Google's services are okay, but as 90+% of the corporate desktop uses Microsoft Office I don't bother with it.

And yes, SharePoint is an incredibly helpful suite if used appropriately. Poor user practices and system implementation does not make it an inferior product. But hey, you could always use TRIM or some other form of EDMS if you're prepared to put up with the pain and lack of mobile support.
SKay, December 11, 2015 
Microsoft Lumia 950 XL phone review: different, but not in a good way

The above comment illustrates very well the issues.

1. The comment author assumes that the only corporate environments matter and that only Microsoft is suitable for enterprise environments.
2. They blame the user for not using the product properly rather than the usability of the product.

SharePoint is my tool of choice for revealing the true corporate Microsoft fan. We once did a competitive evaluation between intranet content management systems and invited representatives from Microsoft to pitch SharePoint. They arrived terribly cocky, assuming their product was the best and couldn't be bothered to answer the questions we'd sent them, dismissing them away as "You would need to program it"rather than providing them out of the box like the eventual winner did.

I've used SharePoint at work. It's had gaping usability, standards compliance and systems maintenance issues, yet the Microsoft fans insist that it's suitable for something other than a document sharing platform. Even then it's a version dependent pain compared with, say, Google Docs. Even Microsoft themselves don't seem to love it so much any more.

Now that Internet Explorer has won the browser wars.

That was a quote from a course I attended around three years ago about building websites using .Net. It wasn't true then and it certainly isn't true today (even Microsoft are dumping IE for Edge), especially with so much browsing done on non-Microsoft phones.

But the true Microsoft fan can't see that anyone would seriously use a non-Microsoft product. Their world is the corporate world of centrally managed systems where everything is Microsoft. They seem to struggle to acknowledge that there other enterprise players. After all, in their minds, who would use an Oracle database when SQLServer exists? There is a blindness to alternatives.

This course was funny in that it taught web application development from the perspective of a desktop application developer. They thought web pages should look like and act like Windows desktop applications.

Ha ha. Why would you make something that ugly?

Microsoft has a long history of making stuff ups with regards to the Internet and the Web. Rather than stick to agreed third party standards they subverted them with products that produced ugly and bloated code that only worked properly in Microsoft products. I have had enough of trying to fix Microsoft Office and FrontPage generated HTML to last me a lifetime.

You see, Microsoft has traditionally been the enemy of interoperability. You want to use something outside of their environment? You always run into some barrier they've erected, some proprietary extension that is required to do what other products can handle almost seamlessly.

To be fair I think Microsoft has been changing under Satya Nadella and embracing a lot more openness and standards, but many of their supporters still seem to be stuck in the old ways. To a Microsoft fan it's your fault if you want something different. It's the Microsoft Way or the Highway.

Me, I like the highway. It's more scenic, usually cheaper and full of interesting things to explore and learn from. And if the diehard Microsoft fan gets in the way? There's always an alternative route, they just can't see it for themselves.

Doughman and the karate tournament

I had a very strange dream this morning. I was in a Will Ferrell movie. He was a villain called Doughman and I was fighting him. At one I almost defeated him but a small nodule of dough remained and began expanding into two plates of flat dough. I kept pounding them but Ferrell's face would appear in the dough to taunt me. So I turned them into two plates of pasta with a tomato sauce. The solution was to eat the pasta in the hope that the stomach acid would kill him.

I woke up then, but you know exactly what would have happened. Yes, Doughman would have become Spewman.

You should note that this dream occurred prior to me taking a big strike to the head at the karate tournament.

I was definitely the Doughman there. Somehow I summoned up the courage to join Alex in competing in our dojo's annual tournament. He's been doing it for almost a year now and has a red belt but I had to give it away for six months due to a foot injury and haven't even graded yet. No other senior white belts were in attendance today. Senior, that makes me feel really old now, especially when Alex is still a Pee Wee!

Me on the left getting belted

Alex in gladiator

Alex did well, adding another silver in kumite to the one he won at the warm up tournament last term. And he won both his matches in the gladiator, though his team did not progress.

Me, I got a bronze in the kata, but that's because there were only three of us competing. And a bumped head in kumite where there were four. But I did score a couple of points and I'm satisfied with that.

The things we do to set a good example for our kids...

So I may not be great at karate, but I reckon I could write a pretty decent movie script. In my sleep.

Leigh Creek

This month sees the closure of South Australia's last coal fired powerstation and the subsequant cessation of mining at Leigh Creek. Whilst it gladdens me to see another step towards cleaner energy the Leigh Creek operation does hold some special memories for me.

I was nine years old when my family began their big move away from Melbourne on a trip that was supposed to take us all around Australia. By Easter of 1984 we had got as far as the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

We drove across from Rawnsley Bluff outside of Hawker to the town of Leigh Creek on the other side of the ranges. At that time the town was brand new, the population shifted from old Leigh Creek, now a giant hole in the ground, dug up for coal.

The town was sterile, souless from all appearances, many of the buildings prefabricated. But interestingly different from the bluestone and sandstone historic towns that we had been passing through on the trip.

We went on a guided tour of the mine and were overwhelmed by the size of the machinery in use. Dump trucks with tyres taller than the height of a person.

As we walked along we were allowed to pick up some pieces of coal. I cracked them open to see the imprint of ancient leaves. It truly brought home to me that this was fossil fuel, made from the stuff of life that had died hundreds of millions of years ago.

What a contrast between the town and the reason for its existence!

Stardust and satay

We are all star dust, the stuff of exploding stars. But this post has nothing to do with astronomy. On Saturday we took Alex to Stardust Circus, his first such event under a tent.

I think I was about Alex's age when I first attended a circus, as part of a school outing. It may have been Stardust or, more likely I think, Silver's Circus.

I don't know if circuses have shrunk or perhaps we have just got bigger, but the Big Top didn't seem so big now.

Along the roadside there were animal rights protestors waving placards against the treatment of circus animals. Outside I overhead circus staff claiming it gave them free publicity, but inside the ringmaster was careful to explain that the animals were kept well.

I will not delve into the ethics of showing the lions, including a 8 month old cub, rhesus monkeys, ponies, pigs and other beast, but I found myself liking those components least of all anyway. Except for the dogs. But then I know how much dogs love the interactions and challenges, assuming that they were treated well.

Animal feats seem so unnecessary when compared with the displays of human acrobatics and the clown humour, both of which Alex loved best as well.

The performances seemed less spectacular and less polished than I recall, but perhaps again that is through the eyes of an adult.

I had to laugh at the music in the introduction to the trapeze act. Back at my first circus they played the disco version of Star Wars before the trapeze. A decade or so later, at a Silver's Circus performance in Queensland it was the same.

This time they played the full orchestral main title to Star Wars. It's good that somethings don't really change.

There was a gorgeous rainbow on our way home.

Sunday saw us at the Malaysian Festival at Pyrmont Bay Park. We had a pleasant, though packed, tram ride down there and enjoyed some Malaysian snacks. The satay from Loong Fong was really good and I love the Seremban siu pau from Sweet Rita's Nyonya Treats. Pity I can't find a restaurant for them both, Loong Fong only serves bak kwa at their Chatswoord outlet. Bak kwa is a form of sweet and spicy pork jerky that I have utterly gone off after being force fed it for our daily breakfast (along with almond jelly) by one of B's Aunts during my first trip to Singapore.

The construction work around Darling Harbour is very impressive, but I hope they return the family atmosphere once they are done. We had to purchase a Chinese costume for Alex's Mandarin class presentation. Fortunately, there is a small stall at Paddy's Markets that sells such things.

And so ended the first week of school holidays.