MSc Project - and beyond

A matter of style

2008-09-11T20:21:25+02:00

When people hear about stylesheets, they usually think of Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) used to style HTML Web pages. There are some other kinds, though, and one of them XSL (the eXtensible Stylesheet Language) - and particularly XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Transformations) - has been giving me grief this week. Well, that's not altogether true. It's really something else that's causing the trouble.

Bosses always like to think that complicated things can be made easy, don't they? I well recall how the decision to use a particular development system, called Uniface, years ago, was taken on the grounds that programmers wouldn't have to write any program code. It could all be done by painting "Entities" onto a canvas. It didn't take us long to learn - those of us at the code face - that we were spending more time coding around the system's default behaviour than we were spending actually writing productive programming code.

When we started doing Web development, the powers that be went for a Microsoft system (ASP.NET): and I have to say that it's not half bad. I owe it some thanks for providing me with the means to get an MSc, anyway. But it does not fulfill the promise (swallowed whole by our bosses) that Web development would just become a matter of dragging and dropping Web page elements onto a canvas. We soon found out that the only reliable way to produce HTML of a professional standard was to hand code the HTML ourselves.

The latest addition to the gallery of, "You only have to drag-and-drop" tools is BizTalk, Microsoft's message broker software. I think I've mentioned it before. It sits between two disparate systems co-ordinating their behaviours by passing XML messages (almost exclusively) between them. Part of BizTalk's armoury is the BizTalk Mapper. With this tool, it is claimed, programmers can convert an XML message in one format to another XML message in another format. The first message is appropriate for the sender: the second is appropriate for the receiver.

I've spent all this week trying to get the BizTalk Mapper to convert a document obtained from our student database, in the format suitable for data retrieved from a relational database, to another document, in the format required by the recipient (the Higher Education Statistical Agency - HESA). This is for the annual HESA return, which is in XML format for the first time this year. It's pretty much late already and HE insitutions can be fined for late submission of the data. So no pressure there, then.

Well, it turns out that the BizTalk Mapper simply cannot, in practical terms, do the conversion that I want it to do. I've finished up writing custom XSLT to do the transformation. Now, if Microsoft had not written a mapper, and if they'd said up-front that conversion would have to be done via XSLT, they could have saved me several days of frustration. In the end the XSLT was not that hard to write. So all this draggy/droppy stuff has actually cost us time - when we really can't afford it.

But supposing Microsoft had said that. Supposing they'd said, "OK. Mapping is complicated. It needs a human being to sort it out", would our bosses still have bought the tool?

We've reached the silly situation where companies have to claim more automation than can actually be delivered in their products in order to sell them to people whose expectations of technology are way too high.

I read an article several years ago whose main thesis was that managers needed to accept that creating complex systems was and is a complex, difficult process. They should not expect to find magic wand solutions.

But they do ...

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The late Helen Mary Bradley

2008-08-10T22:08:27+02:00

I realise with a shock that I have not noted here my mother's passing, on the 4th May this year - the same day on which my father died fourteen years ago. She had been admitted to hospital with back pains, but her condition was not considered to be serious and she was looking forward to coming home.

On the 3rd I asked my sister if I should go up to Sheffied to help, but Jane thought everything would be fine and we all relaxed. Jane said she'd visited mum in hospital that evening and left when she went to sleep. The following morning she rang to say that mum never woke up. As ways to go, it probably tops the list.

Perhaps later I'll have more to say.

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Install issues - harder than you think

2008-08-10T21:39:24+02:00

Some recent email correspondence has set me thinking about different software installation policies: in particular the differences between Windows and Linux.

All software platforms face a problem when it comes to installing new software. How do you ensure that each program that you install has all the resources that it will require? For example, if you install a Java application it will need a Java virtual machine to run on. At a somewhat deeper level, applications will need particular code libraries that provide functions that the application needs. Jargon? OK, so let's try and make the problem a bit more concrete.

The problem is that all programs have some dependencies - some external bits of code that they depend upon in order to run. "No code is an island complete unto itself", you might say (if you were an Elizabethan metaphysical poet). So how do Windows and Linux try to solve the problem of dependencies.

If I write a Windows program, I will make calls to code stored in Windows code libraries. These are the things that will, for example, paint the visual elements like buttons and list boxes in my application. Because it's a Windows program, I can be pretty sure that those libraries will be present (and in the standard locations) so I probably won't have a problem; although I might have to produce different executables for different versions of Windows.

But supposing I want something a bit more esoteric, like XML support. I can't guarantee that the necessary XML support is going to be present on all the machines onto which my application might be installed. So what do I do? In the Windows world, the answer seems to be that I package up everything I need (Java VM, XML support etc etc) and install it all, whether it's needed or not. The alternative is to search for the required libraries and only install the ones not present. However, if I do that, what happens if the user updates the library? The updated version may not be compatible with my application and so my application will break. What happens if the user uninstalls the program that installed the library? Will the library be deleted too?

In the Windows world, the only safe way of doing things seems to be to supply everything your program needs with the program, regardless of whether this means that the user finishes up with umpteen Java VMs and umpteen identical XML libraries or not.

I should add that .NET is making this less critical, because it allows what they call side-by-side installation, but it is still pretty inefficient in my view in terms of ensuring that the minimum amount of software necessary for the proper functioning of all installed software is present.

Linux installations take a completely different approach. Most Linux distributions install software via some sort of package management system. What this means is that you ask the package manager to download and install the software from a repository.

The package manager maintains a database of all installed software and their dependencies. When you try to install something from a repository, the package manager will check the database to see if you have all the necessary external libraries etc, if not, it will try to find the necessary components in the repositories to which you subscribe and will check that it won't break anything else by installing them. If it can satisfy all the dependencies without breaking anything, it will ask for your permission to install the extra libraries and, once it has permission, will do the installation for you.

If the package manager can't resolve the necessary dependencies it will tell you what the problems are and present you with some choices of strategy for solving the problems: which may mean uninstalling some incompatible software that you already have on your system. But the choice is yours and you are in control.

Of course you can, if you must, install stuff directly on a Linux box, but then you become responsible for maintaining the dependencies. Generally speaking this is not a good idea. It is something you will do only if no package exists for the software you want to install: an increasingly rare eventuality.

I've heard Windows-oriented people remark that the Linux installation system is more complex than the Windows system. This is true: but to my mind there is a perfectly good reason for this complexity. It is to prevent the kinds of problems that can occur on Windows boxes - either of bloat, or of incompatibilities. And it is also true that almost all Linux installations can be carried out without the slightest problem - so the amount of extra complexity is minimal. Things only get complex when dependency problems arise. Something I for one am glad to be told about, since it puts me in charge of what goes on my machine and how any resulting problems are resolved.

But then, I'm biased ...

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At your service

2008-07-16T21:00:37+02:00

Right. Let's talk about SOA and WSS.

OK. OK. Let's talk about Service Oriented Architecture and Web Service Security.

The term, "Web Services" has, by now, got past the stage of being every boss's favourite buzz word, erm, phrase. They are, instead, rapidly becoming a familiar part of the IT landscape, and have become a favoured way of implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). So what's that? Well, it's a way of building powerful applications made up in whole or in part of services provided by remote computers, possibly belonging to organisations other than your own. Google, for example, provides a Web Service-based application programming interface (API). You can use this to do keyword searches in your own application without having to worry about how a keyword search is actually done. In other words what we are doing in a Web Service is to arrange for a client machine to ask a server machine to perform some service for it - i.e. to run some procedure or other and to return (send back) the result of executing the procedure. In the case of the Google API, we ask one of Google's servers to run a search for us and to send back the search results.

In order for this to work, all the participants in the game have to agree on what the rules are. Yes, we're back to standards again. There are quite a few different standards in this field, probably reflecting its comparative youth. No doubt a single standard will emerge over time. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to assume that we're talking about the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) - so you should too, if there's to be any communication between us.

Now, the whole point of these standards is that it should not matter what kind of program is running at either end of the communication. So long as they both stick to the protocol, everything should be fine. A C# program using the .NET Framework, running on a Windows machine should be able to exchange messages with a Java program running on a Linux machine and using the Apache Axis framework absolutely seamlessly. And that's pretty much what happens, but, as usual, there are exceptions.

In the early days of Web Services, nobody gave too much - some would say that no-one gave enough - thought to security. As Web Services have become more popular and organisations have started using them to pass confidential information about the place, security has become a much more pressing issue. As a result there are a number of standards dealing with Web Sevice security. If you're really having difficulty sleeping you can read about them on the OASIS site. They are extremely complex and, of course, add a layer of complexity to any programs that use them. They also increase the chances that the parties at both ends of the Web Service communication might misunderstand each other - either because there are bugs in the implementation at one end or the other, or because the implementations have interpreted the standard differrently.

So why am I telling you this? Well, it's been my misfortune over the past few weeks to try to use a Web Service exposed by one of our partners (the UK Student Loan Company). My program, like all those I write at work, is written in C#, a .NET language. The Web Service I've been trying to communicate with uses the Java Apache Axis Framework.

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but this service demands a certain amount of security because of the nature of the information being passed. It's not terribly confidential. We're not talking about student loan details, for instance; but it's a private conversation nevertheless. The Web Service therefore has the following characteristics:

Communication is over an encrypted connection (SSL)
The SOAP header (the first part of a Web Service message) must contain the client's user name and password in clear text
The server authenticates to the client using an X509 Certificate
The client does not authenticate to the server
No encryption over and above the transport layer (SSL) encryption is to be carried out.

Wouldn't you know it? This is not one of the standard configurations that can easily be configured using the .NET Framework (and the Visual Studio integrated development environment). There also seem to be some strange features in the Apache Axis Framework implementation, which mean that:

Sending a message under these particular circumstances with a element in the SOAP header - supposedly a mandatory field - will generate an error from the server
The response to at least one message results in an XML document that does not conform to the schema set out in the WSDL file. Our partners believe this to be a bug, but whatever it is, it has to be dealt with.

It turns out that on the client side, the solution is:

To create a custom policy assertion class that filters both output from and input to the Web Service. This is done by creating two custom SoapFilter classes that are called to filter (alter) the input to and output from the Web Service client.
The filter for outgoing messages looks for the element and deletes it before the message is sent up the wire.
The filter for incoming messages looks for the malformed XML (which is on the elements) and corrects them by adding a namespace definition. As it happens the attribute that the namespace is defined for is entirely redundant, but it turned out to be easier to add the namespace definition than delete all the unnecessary attributes. The corrected XML is then fed to the .NET Framework Web Service client handling plumbing.


They don't tell you this sort of thing in any of the standard texts or on any of the standard courses and, for the first time in my experience, all my newsgroup and mailing list postings went unanswered (with one exception - and my grateful thanks to Evan Freeman of the microsoft.public.dotnet.framewok.aspnet.webservices newsgroup for his moral and practical support).
	In the hope, therefore of preventing frustration-driven rapid hair loss syndrome amongst .NET programmers, I have published a document on my personal Website that goes into all the gory details of what was done and why:
	Microsoft dotNet WSE 3 Web Services.pdf
	I hope it helps someone.  And if anyone has any suggestions as to how the document could be improved, or corrections or other improvements, then I'll be only too happy to act on them if I agree they'll help.

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The standard way of working
2008-06-27T13:35:23+02:00
I've been taken to task, in absolutely the nicest way possible, for introducing into this corner of the blogosphere a whole lorry-load of acronyms and abbreviations without taking the time properly to explain them.  Hopefully this article will explain some of them and introduce some other matters that many think are important.
	You'll no doubt agree with me that the world has been changed radically by the recent advances in the communications industry.  This applies across the board: from iPods to iPhones and from email to the World Wide Web.  Given that we agree, I'd like you to consider for a moment whether or not you think that this could have happened had there not been large numbers of open standards for implementors to follow in producing their wares.  Without standards, would an Orange phone be able to talk to its Virgin peer; would you be able to download your music from your iPod to your computer;  would you be able to send an email from Thunderbird to have it read in MS Outlook?
	When you think about it, you soon see that all these things can happen because sets of standards exist that allow products from different manufacturers to interact.  Your email, for instance, is sent using SMTP (the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and received using, probably, POP - the Post Office Protocol.
	Where do these standards come from?
	For the wider internet, the body that oversees the standards process is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  These are the people that brought you SMTP and POP(see above).  They also brought you the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) - the protocol behind the World Wide Web - and some of the worst formatted Web pages you are ever likely to see.
	The standards produced by the IETF are enshrined in Requests For Comments (RFCs) - a rather quaint nomenclature that I'll leave you to research on your own.
	You will have noticed that the word Protocol crops up a lot.  It's the final P in SMTP, POP, HTTP, FTP, EPP and so on.  A protocol is a standard way of behaving.  If a program adheres to a protocol, we can predict how it will behave.  If we can predict how it will behave, we can interact with it.
	The World Wide Web has its own set of standards that are overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  They are responsible for the likes of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  These two standards define how content is to be presented in Web browsers.  If you write standard HTML and CSS, you should be able to guarantee how your page will look in any browser - as long, of course, that the browser implements the standards.  And thereby hangs a tale.
	This is the moral of today's story.  When standards are undermined, we all suffer.
	In the 1990s, Microsoft and Netscape went head-to-head in what became known as the Browser wars.  Both companies added their own proprietary Extensions to HTML, meaning that you had to have their browser in order to Take advantage of the extra functionality.  Of course, there was no advantage, and the HTML standard became thoroughly subverted to the extent that it became referred to in this context as Tag soup.
	Worse was to come, however.  Microsoft, through the use of illegal tactics for which it has since been punished (if not punished enough) in US courts, won the browser wars hands down.  Having done so, the only way to view the Web sensibly was in their browser (IE5 and later IE6), which they hooked into their operating system so effectively that this meant, in effect, you had to run a Windows computer to view the most important new communication medium since Gutenberg.  Microsoft owned the Web.
	Or nearly ...
	By the skin of our teeth we have been spared the nightmarish conclusion to the history above.  Due to a combination of factors - Microsoft's increasing unpopularity, anti-trust findings against Microsoft in the USA and Europe, the professionalism of some Web developers, the growth of the Open Source movement, the resurgence of Apple and the popularity of Firefox - Microsoft's position gradually became untenable.  Forced by the courts to Unbundle Internet Explorer from the Windows operating system, and harried by Web developers for whom IE6 was a totally unnecessary evil that just made their jobs harder, they eventually had to capitulate and cover over most of the worst of the IE6 bugs in Internet Explorer 7.  Internet Explorer 8 promises to be standards-compliant Out-of-the-box.
	This means that fairly shortly, you will be able to view Web pages in any browser, confident in the knowledge that you will be seeing exactly what everyone else is seeing.  You win, because you can choose the browser you like, not just the one that the Operating System manufacturer wants you to have; developers win because they can guarantee how their pages are going to look, and browser makers win because they can be guaranteed a level playing field.  The only losers are those who do not want to play fair and who want to own what is, in effect, a public resource: the World Wide Web.
	So that says it for the Web, but I'd like you also to think a bit wider.  What about your word processing documents and spreadsheets?  What about your slide presentations?  Is it right that the format of these files should be in the hands of a single vendor, kept secret to make sure that others can't compete?
	Isn't the logical outcome of this that your Office Suite vendor actually owns your data?  If they won't supply you with their program (because they think you're a Pirate or because you're simply too poor to afford to buy it, or because they can't because they've gone bankrupt), doesn't this mean that you only have access to your data if they let you?  What does this say about your privacy?  If you can't see their code, how do you know that they aren't reading your documents and sending copies back to S.M.E.R.S.H. headquarters in - erm - Washington?
	It follows, for me at least, that proprietary Office Suite formats suppress competition, make innovation outside of the inner circle impossible and make it possible for office suite makers to supply buggy, intrusive and possibly dangerous code without anyone being any the wiser.  I'm not saying that this happens, but it could.  I would say, though, that innovation has been stifled and that the quality of code in proprietary products is sometimes horrific.
	It is for this reason that the Open Document Format (ODF) has been developed and adopted as an international standard by the International Standard Organisation (ISO)
	Microsoft, unsurprisingly, have been fighting the adoption of ODF tooth and nail.  They have tried to push through their own, competing standard (OOXML), despite there being an existing standard (ODF) and despite the fact that OOXML is not a complete standard (language warning).  There have also been allegations of committees being stuffed with Microsoft representatives, of coercion if not bribery and of a lack of diligence in following voting procedures.
	Be that as it may, Microsoft do seem to be on the point of capitulating on this one.  There is an ODF converter for Microsoft Office (produced by Sun Microsystems) and Microsoft have promised full ODF support in the next version of Office.
	I haven't often used this blog for propoganda, but I would urge you to get the ODF converter for Microsoft Office and to use it when exchanging documents.  When native support for ODF arrives you can use it with even less hassle.  Alternatively, you could use openOffice.org, which already contains full native support for ISO ODF.  You can download and install it for free.  It's free and open source.
	It is, after all, your data.  The best way you can protect it is to support the standard.
	Declare your independence!
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Beyond lies the Web
2008-06-25T09:20:28+02:00
It's about time I explained my absence from the blogosphere.
	As retirement approaches, I find myself increasingly engaged in private projects, in the hope - I suppose - that something will turn up that will keep me busy when I don't have to get out of bed to go to work.  So when my niece asked me to look at her Web site, I was only too pleased ...
	She's a writer, and it turns out that she has two sites.  Her personal site relates to her writing activities: but she also runs a consultancy business, called UrbanWords, that has its own Web site.  The former was already up and running, whilst the second was mainly at a planning stage.
	When I first looked at it, Sarah's personal site was a complete mess.  It had been produced using some Microsoft tools, failed every validity test in the book and simply didn't work in any other browser apart from Internet Explorer.  So I agreed to correct it and to develop the consultancy site, using the same look and feel.
	This in itself would not explain my prolonged absence.  Neither site is particularly big or particularly complex.  In fact, they were up and running within a couple of weeks - with every page passing the W3C validator tests at the XHTML 1.0 strict level.  The real work arrived afterwards.
	During the time the Sarah Butler and the UrbanWords sites were being implemented, Sarah won an Arts Council grant, partly financed with lottery money, to undertake a project that had as one of its deliverables a Web site.  So I agreed to do that one as well.
	The result is the A Place For Words site.
	As you will see if you follow the link, this was a much bigger project and involved working with a graphics designer.  The intention is to get this site into a Content Management System as soon as we can, so that Sarah can update the content of the site as time goes by.  For this purpose, we chose the open source Joomla! application.  So I've now acquired a small library of books about Joomla! and will be trying to move the site over the next few months.
	All this has been quite a lot of work.  I have had a very nice box of chocolates from Sarah out of it, though.  It arrived totally out of the blue just before Sarah left on holiday recently: a hat-box shaped container with some of the most luxurious chocolates I've ever tasted.  John Lewis partnership, it says on the label.  Highly recommended.
	So, what with three Web sites and the EPP module I blogged about yesterday, time has been a little short.
	Oh! and I'm still learning French.  Next month I go to Caen in Normandy for a one-week residential course.  Carole and I will then meet up in Paris and have a few days there before returning to Cardiff in time for the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol (National Eisteddfod), that is taking place in the fields just across the road from where I work, this year.
	The plan is to return to France this autumn, perhaps going to the south - Montpelier appeals.  But we've no definite plans yet, so who knows.  I guess it partly depends on how many Web sites I find myself developing ...
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EPP
2008-06-24T22:32:37+02:00
The 'Extensible Provisioning Protocol'.  No, I'd never heard of it either, but it's the subject of the IETF RFC 4930 and a few others as well.  Basically it's a protocol used by internet domain registries to receive commands from and send replies to their registrars concerning the domains under their control.
	Say I was interested in buying one or more domains that began with 'peredur'.  I could express this interest to a domain name registrar who would, on my behalf send a 'check' command to one or more registries to see what domains beginning with 'peredur' were available.  To do that, they would send a  query to various registries and come back with a list of what was available, if anything.  Let's say that peredur.com and peredur.org.eu were available and that I wanted to buy them.
	The next step would be for me to enter into an agreement with the registrar to buy those domains and then the registrar would send the appropriate EPP  commands to the appropriate registries.
	Now, my son happens to be a domain name registrar, amongst his other talents, and he wanted to make an EPP client (the bit that talks to the registry, by issuing the commands) available to potential domain holders, and since his site is powered by the DotNetNuke content management system, he hunted around to see what was available in C# to do this job.  It turns out that there's very little, if anything, available; so he employed an outside developer to produce something for him.
	Unfortunately, they soon hit problems, so he turned to me to see what I could do.
	I haven't programmed at this low level for years, and never in C#; but as a matter of fact it turns out not to be all that hard, once you've got your mind around the RFC.  So we currently have a class library and a console-based user interface that can connect to an EPP server, parse the returned  message, login, send a  command and receive the response from the server and, ultimately, log out.  It's not very pretty as yet, but it does work.
	The next step is to pretty it up a bit and use it as a demonstration prototype to see if anyone else is interested in it - and to use it for Matthew's purposes as well, wrapped up in a DotNetNuke module.
	Looking around the Web, we see lots of interest in a piece of software like this, and we're surprised how little there is available.  Maybe we'll have something sellable here.  Who knows?
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Who dares, wins
2008-01-28T23:15:05+01:00
A streaming video follow-up
	Well, I'd written to the Welsh TV channel (S4C) and told them that I didn't think that they could justify telling their viewers that they needed Windows media player when I'd just proved that you could use at least three others on Windows and four others on Linux, and fair play they had altered their wording a bit.  They changed it to say that other players were available for non-Windows platforms, but that there was no guarantee that they'd work, or that they would support sub-titles.
	I confess that this annoyed me a bit.  Firstly, I thought that they were deliberately avoiding saying that there were other players available for Windows, and secondly I thought that it was a bit rich to suggest that these other pieces of software somehow might not work.  So I wrote again and also translated my feelings to English for the benefit of the developers of Microsoft's rivals, to whom I sent the following:
	
I've just got annoyed with my favourite TV channel because of their treatment of non-WMP video players.  I thought you might at least like to know what's being said, even though I doubt very much that there's anything anyone can do about it.
	The story's a long one, so I'll cut it short.
	I'm referring to the Welsh TV channel, S4C.  Until recently they said on their website, "You will need Windows Media Player" in order to watch their programmes.  I pointed out to them that in my experience at least the following worked on Windows:
	*  xine

*  MPlayer

*  vlc
	... and that those all worked on Linux too, along with Kaffeine, of course.
	They have now changed their wording to the following:
	"You will require a media player capable of playing windows media 9 files, such as Windows Media Player. Other players are available for non-windows platforms, but these aren't guaranteed to work, nor support subtitles (sami) files."
	There are two things wrong with this in my view:
	*  The alternatives are not just for non-Windows platforms

*  There is no reason to suppose that the alternatives are any less likely to work than WMP (except for the sub-titles, where they may be correct.  I wouldn't know.  I don't need them).
	I've told them what I think, but I doubt if it will make a difference.

	Guenter Bartsch, the main xine developer, wrote back and said that he understood that I was annoyed, but that perhaps we should accept that they were just trying to avoid having to support anything but the Microsoft software, and should just be happy that they'd altered their wording at all.  He also pointed out, as I had when talking to S4C, that the main problem was in the use of proprietary codecs instead of public ones like Ogg.
	And I thought that would be the end of it.
	This evening, just out of a vain hope, I again accessed the S4C site: and guess what.  Yep, they've altered their wording again.  Here's how I announced the change to the South Wales Linux User Group:
	
S4C have now changed their site to read:
	"Byddwch angen chwaraewr cyfryngau sydd yn gallu chwarae ffeiliau

Windows Media 9, er engraifft Windows Media Player. Mae chwaraewyr

eraill ar gael ond nid oes sicrwydd y bydd rhain yn cefnogi ffeiliau

isdeitlau (sami)."
	That is ...

"You will need a media player that can play Windows Media 9 files, for

example Windows Media Player.  Other players are available but there is

no certainty that these will support subititle files (sami)"
	Fantastic.

	No sooner had I sent this off, than an email dropped into my mailbox from S4C confirming that they'd changed their wording.
	I have written back thanking them for their patience and saying that I could not have written it better myself.
	Well done S4C.  My faith is restored.
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Streaming video in Linux
2008-01-05T20:25:07+01:00
Or how to watch telly on Linux when the channel thinks everyone uses Windows ...
	Up until yesterday, you could have written on the back of a postage stamp everything I knew about streaming video.  You might need, perhaps, half a sheet of A4 now: so I still don't know a lot, but I know more than I did.  Here's why.
	On a visit to the S4C Web site recently, I noticed that they were offering the facility to view some of their programmes on a computer.  These were either programmes that had already been broadcast and had been saved to a file, or programmes currently being televised.  "Ooh!  There's lovely" I thought, as you do if you live in this part of the world, and clicked on a link to a programme shown earlier of a concert by the harpist Catrin Finch.  I have this Catrin Finch problem: but let's not go into that.
	The only response I got to clicking on the link was an error message saying that, "mms is not a registered protocol".  The protocol MMS, it appears is a Microsoft proprietory video streaming format, and so not a lot of help to those of us who do not run Windows computers.  Now, I've lived for nearly sixty-one years without needing mms so I'm pretty certain I could carry on without it, but it did appear to me that it was a bit unfair of S4C to provide content for Windows users only.  So I wrote to S4C to see what they had to say.
	I had an email back from them explaining that they felt that they had to use the most popular video streaming format, and referring me to some Web sites that turned out not to be of much use.  It was pretty obvious from the reply that they weren't going to change their policies just for me, although I did point out that Linux users, minority or not, paid just as much for S4C as anyone else and ought therefore to get the same service as everyone else.  It also occurred to me that if they applied their argument to language usage, S4C would not exist.  It is the highest cost per capita television channel in the UK and serves 1% of the UK population.  I didn't say that, though.  Instead I just wrote that we'd have to agree to differ.
	All this did start me thinking though, which is usually a dangerous thing, but in this case turned out fairly well.
	I'm on the mailing list of the South Wales Linux User Group, so I posted there asking if anyone could suggest a way of getting the S4C programmes on Linux.  Their combined help was truly amazing.
	The first thing that I learnt was that you could obtain MPlayer for Linux.  MPlayer is free, and supports the mms format.  So I downloaded it and installed it.  The result was that I could do this from a command line to watch Catrin Finch:
	mplayer "mms://s4c.unique-media.tv/s4c_uk/bsm/hsbc_jazz_

aberhonddu___catrin_finch_ai0000803d21b8.wmv?sami=http:

//www.s4c.co.uk/sami/A290559874.smi"
	The bit in quotes is the URI, and I got it by right-clicking on the link on the S4C Web page and selecting "Copy Link Location" from the context menu in Firefox.  I then pasted the link text onto the command line I was using.
	The results were not impressive, though.  In fact the results were unwatchable with the picture stopping and starting all the time and the sound totally out of sync with the video.  However, not to be deterred, I learnt next from the SWLUG faithful that you could do this:
	mplayer -dumpstream "mms://s4c.unique-media.tv/s4c_uk/

bsm/hsbc_jazz_aberhonddu___catrin_finch_ai0000803d21b8.wmv

?sami=http://www.s4c.co.uk/sami/A290559874.smi"
	This downloaded the stream to a file called stream.dump in the same folder as the folder from which the mplayer command was issued.  Once the file had been downloaded, you could do this:
	mplayer stream.dump
	The results of this were better, because the stream was no longer downloading in real time: however the picture quality was still disappointing.  By the way, I'm not sure how happy S4C would be to know that you could download the stream to a file like that.  Does it make me a pirate?
	Once again, the group had a suggestion.  Had I tried xine?  Well, no, I hadn't.  In fact even though it came with my SUSE Linux distribution, I'd never installed it.  Ten minutes later I had xine installed and tried:
	xine stream.dump
	The results were perfect.  So I thought I'd try real time:
	xine "mms://s4c.unique-media.tv/s4c_uk/bsm/hsbc_jazz_

aberhonddu___catrin_finch_ai0000803d21b8.wmv?sami=http:

//www.s4c.co.uk/sami/A290559874.smi"
	No luck.  Nothing.
	Another post to the group and I discovered that xine didn't want to know about the final bit of the URL above: the bit starting with the question mark and ending ".smi".  So I tried with this:
	xine "mms://s4c.unique-media.tv/s4c_uk/bsm/hsbc_jazz_

aberhonddu___catrin_finch_ai0000803d21b8.wmv"
	Absolutely perfect.  Streaming video in real time.
	And that would be it, really, you would think.  I certainly did.  I wrote back to S4C explaining to them how it was done and settled back to do some serious Catrin Finch watching.  Just then another email from the SWLUG dropped into my mail box. It said:
	
While I was playing around with this I found this link, now I can click

on an mms link in firefox and it opens xine.
	http://www.cinlug.org/node/316

	Here is all you have to do (quoted from the site):
	
	
	Open Firefox, type "about:config" (no quotes) in the address window, and click enter.
	Right click on the window and choose , then  from the pop-up menu that appears.
	In the first pop-up box, enter: "network.protocol-handler.app.mms" (no quotes, and it might just be easier to cut 'n paste this into the box).
	In the next pop-up box enter the path to Kaffeine (e.g. "/usr/bin/kaffeine").
	Now, click in the main window again but choose  
	 In the first pop-up box, enter: "network.protocol-handler.external.mms"
	In the second pop-up select .
	
	This only works, obviously, if you have Kaffeine - which most Linux distributions do.  It would probably also work with any player that accepted the entire link location (i.e. including the bit from the question mark until the ".smi").  You would just have to change the "path to Kaffeine" bit, to "path to MPlayer", or whatever.
	Now all I have to do is to click on the link in Firefox and the video opens in Kaffeine.  Just, wouldn't you agree, as nature intended.
	This prompted another email to S4C and the suggestion that they publish an article on their Web site explaining how to do it.  Alternatively, I suggested - rather generously, I thought - that they might want to ask me to write an article that they could link to from their Web site.  That way they don't have to accept any responsibility for its content.
	So what do we learn from all this?  A few things, I reckon.
	Firstly, I learnt a fair bit about streaming video, and that can't be a bad thing.
	Secondly, I learnt that the Linux community have the most incredible knack of working together to pool knowledge and to solve each other's problems.  They've never failed me yet.
	Lastly, I learnt that whatever it is, in the Open Source world someone will have had a crack at it and will have produced a solution.  Not one of the applications that I have mentioned in this article is owned by a private company or individual.  They are all the fruit of co-operative code hacking by a community of programmers interested in solving a problem.  This is what programming should be like.  It is more akin to a research activity than to product development: and it is done best when done openly and in a spirit of co-operation.  It's why open source software works and closed source software often doesn't.
	Vista, anyone?  No?  Didn't think so.
	Happy new year to one and all - or "Blwyddyn Newydd Dda" as they say on S4C.
	
  Comments  


A cat's tale
2007-12-17T21:27:05+01:00
Saturday was the day the cat had her annual check up.  No problems.  The vet said she’d gained a bit of weight, which she needed to do, and that her heart was strong.  Apart from a hole in one of her teeth that needed sorting out, she was in fine shape.  So she had her injections and came home. 
	By lunch time, we’d started to notice that the cat was behaving a bit out of character.  She’s an old lady, so she doesn’t move about a lot at the best of times, but she does go outside occasionally and she does walk around pointing out the deficiencies in cat care of which we are guilty.  “Why hasn’t the litter tray been cleaned?”  “Surely you don’t expect me to eat cat food, again, do you?”  The usual stuff: but Saturday afternoon and evening she was completely immobile in front of the living room radiator and nothing could stir her.
	Both Carole and I had a lot of work to do this weekend.  Carole’s working on a publication and I had some work to do on a couple of Web sites.  So we made sure the cat had food and water, and basically got on with our lives.  By 7:00 p.m., though, the cat had gone missing.  She must just have gone for a prowl around, we thought; but it was very cold and when she hadn’t returned after an hour we started to worry.  Neither of us had seen her go out, so we hunted around the house, in all the places she would normally go (under the sofa, on top of the wardrobes …).  The cat was not to be found. 
	By 8:00 p.m. we were really worried that she’d done a Capt. Oates on us.  We hunted around the garden.  We knocked on the neighbours’ doors and hunted around their gardens.  Nothing.  We went around the block and found a number of other cats all of whom expressed a willingness to accompany us back into the warm, but Bitzi was not to be seen and we began to accept that the worst had happened.
	So we sat a bit on the sofa feeling miserable and telling ourselves that this was the sort of thing that cats did when they heard the call of the great litter tray in the sky.  She was an old cat after all and it was bound to happen sooner or later.  It would have been better if we could have let her die peacefully in the warm, but with cats, well, they do what cats do. 
	By 10:00 p.m. Carole had roused herself a bit and decided that, despite everything, she just had to get some work done.  So with a heavy heart she went upstairs to pull out some paper she had “filed” under the bed.
	As she peered into the sub-duvetic gloom, she fancied that she saw a cat shape at the furthest corner of the bed.  “No,” she told herself, “It’s just that I want to see a cat shape.  My mind is playing tricks.”  She did look again, though, and there did seem to be something vaguely cat-like, barely perceptible through the darkness.  When the bed was moved, guess who was sitting there, sulking.  You guessed it. 
	She was definitely not a happy cat, but we googled for feline reactions to vaccination and found that they could lead to up to 24 hours of lethargy and depression.
	Yesterday morning after a night in which the cat moved just once from her nest (to go downstairs and use the litter tray) I was sent to Sainsbury’s for cat supplies.  One tin of salmon and half a dozen Whiskas cat sweets later, the cat was back to normal.  
	Capt. Oates, indeed!
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A grandad.  Again.
2007-04-19T22:01:54+02:00
Your grandchildren are, without doubt, the best thing about getting old.  Now we have three.  At half past midnight last Tuesday, our youngest daughter, Clare, gave birth to Katy Elizabeth; 7lbs, a sister to the twins Matthew and Owen, and pretty as a picture.
	It was a hard pregnancy for Clare.  Early on she caught an infection that the doctors thought might be dangerous to the foetus.  Then she had a bad reaction to the antibiotics prescribed for it.  She had various problems throughout her term and, indeed, finished the last two months walking on crutches.
	But Katy Elizabeth seems fine.  The hospital are still doing tests to cover the worry about the infection early on: and she didn't pass her hearing test.  However, the doctors think that might be mucus.  Certainly she has a good pair of lungs; and babies who have serious hearing problems don't generally cry in the way a hearing child does.  So we're not too worried.  It wouldn't do to worry, either.  You get what you're given, and need to be grateful for that, don't you.
	So.  Not my most coherent blog entry ever.  Must be something to do with being, "Tired and emotional."
	Here's to grandfatherhood!

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Bonjour tout le monde
2007-04-14T22:31:02+02:00
Yup.  Definitely into this French stuff.  And getting back into Open University speak, as well.
	It's many years since I last did an OU course.  About eight in fact.  At that time I had this stupid idea that I might get an MSc in Computing.  I saw the light, of course, and gave up after the taught modules, earning myself a Post Graduate Diploma in Computing for Commerce and Industry.  Doing the dissertation for the MSc would have been far too hard.
	The OU, though, like blogging is catching: and it comes with its own terminology.  People say things like, "Oh, I'm in TMA avoidance mode", meaning that they are finding excuses for not doing their Tutor Marked Assignment.  And then there are SMAs and CMAs, Lyceum sessions and OUSBA accounts.
	From my point of view, Lyceum is one of the most interesting things.  It's a Java program that sets up a virtual classroom where learners and teachers can interact in multiple ways - via documents, charts and, interestingly, speech.  Unfortunately, Lyceum, which is written by the OU itself will only work on Windows boxes, and isn't even very reliable on those.  The technology is interesting, though, and I'm sure it will become more sophisticated and reliable as time goes by.
	The OU are currently considering teaching Welsh in addition to their current language offerings.  I'll be very interested to see how that goes.
	As for the French, I've currently earned 24.45% out of the 40% of the total number of marks for the course that are needed for a pass.  So things are going quite well.
	******
	Now I have to include a paragraph for my eldest daughter...
	She phoned the other day to tell me that she'd found my blog.  "Do you like it?" I asked.
	"Well," she said,"It does sound as though I only meet you to get a meal out of you!"
	So this is for Maxine...
	I, Peter Bradley, do solemnly swear and declare that I do not believe I have to buy a meal for her in order to enjoy my eldest daughter's company.
	OK, Max?
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The rise of the phoenix
2007-02-05T21:55:37+01:00
Blogging, it turns out, is addictive.
	I have tried to stay away.  How I have tried!  To no avail.
	What is more, it also turns out that learning is addictive, too.  No sooner have I returned my borrowed cap and gown, than I find myself enrolling with the OU for yet more study...
	Carole and I holidayed this year in Avignon, as I may have mentioned.  If I haven't, then let me say now that Avignon is genuinely awesome.  Even better, it can be reached in one hop by Eurostar; or two hops by Eurostar and TGV.  Either way, there is no better way to travel, and fewer equal destinations.
	We are quite attached to France, Carole and I.  We honeymooned, all those years ago, in Paris.  Can I tell you the story?
	We were not well off when we married.  Until my father fell ill with throat cancer, we didn't have, and couldn't afford to have, a car.  We took my father's car once he became incapable of driving, and used it to visit as often as we could.
	Our marriage was in the high summer following my father's death in May.  As was our custom, we spent the first week of August at the National Eisteddfod, returning on the 6th for our civil ceremony, and then departing on the 7th for Paris - 4 nights by coach, on a bargain basement trip organised by the Western Mail.
	Everything about that holiday is memorable - standing by the now demolished Empire Pool, waiting for the coach; discovering that the coach was circa 1980 and that the driver did not even know the way to Newport (the next stop), never mind the way to Paris; the relief of finding that we were to transfer to another, more modern, coach at one of the services on the M4.  Most memorable perhaps was arriving at the hotel in a modern development on the outskirts of Paris.
	Now, Paris is deserted - except for tourists and those who serve them - in August.  All the Parisians have gone to the Cote d'Amour or some other favourite resort location.  So there is no work for business hotels.  Our coach therefore arrived at a massive, glass-fronted, brand new hotel and disgorged fifty or so cheapskate tourists who had paid next to nothing for their holiday.
	"This can't be right", I said to Carole, "They must have made a mistake.  This place is too grand for us.  Maybe our hotel is the next stop, or something".  But no, this was our hotel.  A little far out from the centre of Paris, but close to an RER station that put the Place de la concorde within easy enough reach.
	So every day, to save money, we walked to the town centre near our hotel and bought bread and cheese, perhaps a salad too, to have for dinner, and caught the train into Paris.  We bought a Carte Musee that gave us entry to many of Paris' museums including the Louvre - a major coup since, apart from the financial benefits of the 'carte', we also avoided the queues for the Louvre and were saluted into a side door by a smiling gendarme.
	Carole is somewhat more sensible than I am, so she had worked out a budget - what we could afford to spend from day to day.  As it turned out, we spent quite a bit less than our budget and reached our final day with a good sum in hand.
	On that final day, at about 7:30 p.m., our coach was going into Paris, for anyone who wanted a lift in, and was stopping at Etoile Charles de Gaulle, where it would wait, to take us back in the late evening.
	We descended from the coach and walked down the Champs Elysees until we found a restaurant that offered a decent menu for vegetarians; then we took our table on the street outside, ate well, drank a bottle of wine, and watched the sun descend over the Paris rooftops.  We didn't say a lot, but we felt - both of us did - how lucky we were to have found this beautiful place, and to have found each other to enjoy it together.
	So we've been back to France a number of times since then.  Not always to Paris, but also to Brittany and the Midi.
	Each time we go, by the end of the first week there, we can feel our French becoming more natural: and every year, after a week back home, we can feel it slipping away.  So we've signed up on French courses with the Open University, and will also be going on an OU summer school to Caen in Normandy at the end of July - and then maybe on somewhere else for a second week of French immersion.
	Shall I keep you informed as to how we get on?  It looks like it, doesn't it?
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Swansong
2006-12-21T21:24:55+01:00
So called because mute swans are said to utter a cry, the only time that they do so, when they are on the point of death.  And this is, I suppose, a valediction.  The MSc certificate is in the envelope with the piano and flute certificates, the post graduate diplomas and the hundred yards breast stroke.
	This blog has served its purpose.
	And yet.
	Although it started as just a way to maintain motivation at a time when I was finding that hard, it has turned out to be more than just a plain relating of passing academic milestones.  It has fulfilled its original intent.  No denying that.  Yet it grew, I think, along the way, and now there are some of you out there who know a little bit about me and my family, and some of the things that put me on the way to achieving something I never thought myself capable of.  There is a little corner of cyberspace that is forever...  Well.  You know what I mean.
	And some of you are now my friends.
	Maybe the world shall hear from me again.  In any event, a very happy 2007 to you all, and my grateful thanks to each one of you for all your kind words and encouragement during 2006.
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More graduations
2006-11-19T15:44:14+01:00
Graduations are coming thick and fast in our family.  Last (calendar) year, we had Carole's MA graduation ceremony.  This year my eldest daughter, Maxine, has got her PGCE, and I'll get my MSc.  Next year my "eldest middle" daughter, Pippa, will get her degree in Criminal Psychology.
	Maxine's graduation ceremony was in Sheffield at 18:30 last Thursday night, so I left Cardiff at 09:30, thinking that I'd be there in plenty in time to meet up with Maxine on the Sheffield City Hall steps at 17:15, as we'd arranged.  As it turned out, part of the M5 was closed and so I saw a lot more of Droitwich and Bromsgrove than I ever wanted to, and finally made it to my hotel at 16:30 having not eaten or stopped at all on the way up.  There was just time to throw on some smart rags and dash down to the rendezvous.  It's lucky I booked a hotel within a 20 minutes walk of the City Hall.
	We had a good meal afterwards.  I've seldom eaten better.  So that's two meals in the space of two weeks that Maxine's had off me.  I was in London last week on a course and met up with her, since she teaches in Hackney, to let her spend some of her father's money.
	Whilst I was up in Sheffield, I took the opportunity to visit my mother, who is still in intermediate care in a Rotherham Nursing Home.  She's still in quite a lot of pain, and can only walk with the aid of a Zimmer frame; but at least she is up and about.  The home, which is very good, is currently assessing the extent to which she can look after herself.  My guess is that she will be home in a week or two.  Certainly she was talking about going home, which can only be a good thing.
	She is still quite forgetful, but I imaging that, at eighty-six, this is to be expected: but beyond that, she seems to have most of her marbles at least.  I was quite pleased to see the improvement in her, and I guess if she can get back home, in the company of her friends, she will improve some more.
	Pippa's graduation won't be until next summer.  So I've a chance to save up!  She's thirty-two now, and has always been a very bright girl.  She lost her way a bit after GCSEs and didn't really achieve as much as I think she could have.  I think she knew that as well.  So she never went to college at eighteen.  Instead she attended the University of Life, living for some time in Peru (and picking up Peruvian street Spanish at the same time), and then having a series of jobs in which she did very well, but which never quite suited her.
	Two years ago she got taken on as a trainee in the Probation Service.  Part of her training has been to complete a Criminal Psychology degree in two years.  That's why the graduation isn't until next summer - when all her classmates who took three years will graduate.  She's a fully qualified Probation Officer now, with a full case load.  It's a very difficult job, with considerable pressures; but I think she's found what she wants to do.
	And she got a first.  So she can always go and do research if the job gets too frustrating.
	
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The choc box has landed
2006-10-31T19:57:55+01:00
Yes, chocwatch control - my sister Jane - informs me that the chocolates have arrived.  She adds, "And very nice they are too".
	I've just rung Thorntons to thank them for the trouble they took.  It seemed to be the least I could do.
	Jane says that my mother has now been discharged from the hospital.  The injury will just take its course now.  The expectation is that it will be six to eight weeks before she is fully recovered.  She's a bit confused, apparently, but talking positively about going back home, which is a good sign.
	The social work team will be meeting next week to discuss her case and Jane will attend on behalf of the family.  I wonder if she's told them she's a County Councillor yet.

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Of chocolates and mortar boards
2006-10-29T22:54:45+01:00
You'd think, wouldn't you, that getting a box of chocolates delivered would be a fairly trouble-free process?  Well, that's not always the case.
	My mother was eighty-six last week, and since she's in a nursing home at the moment recovering from her fall, there didn't seem to be any point in getting all that creative about birthday presents.  So I decided to get some chocolates delivered.
	The nursing home where my mother is currently resident is on a leafy suburban road that was farmland within living memory.  And that's where the problem lies.
	On the Thorntons Web site, on the page where they ask you for the delivery address for the chocolates, they use a program called Quick Address.  I know a bit about this, because it's a program I support at work.  All the Web site user has to do is to enter the postcode of the property to which the chocolates should be delivered, pick from a list of choices - if the postcode refers to more than one property - and the program fills in the correct address on the Web page.  What can go wrong?
	Well, let's suppose that a farmer builds a property on the field adjacent to his farmhouse.  He sells it and it becomes a separate property: but if no-one thinks to communicate this fact to the Post Office, they continue to consider the two properties to be one - like a farmhouse and an out-building for example.  Over time, the farmer sells all his fields and you finish up with two houses on a leafy suburban street that share the same number and postcode.
	Worse, when the chocolate delivery pantechnicon driver knocks at the door of the (wrong) house, he finds that the resident is not in.  In fact, she's on holiday.  The next door neighbours are also not in, so the driver leaves the box of chocolates with a neighbour far enough down the road not to realise that the name on the box is not the name of the resident of the (wrong) house; and the chocolates are well and truly lost.
	Fair play to Thorntons: they are doing their best to sort things out.  And I'm taking it in good heart.  There are more important problems than chocolate deliveries to worry about in the world.  But why did this one land in my lap?
	Anyway, hopefully, my mother should get her chocolates any day soon.  Before she leaves the nursing home, with any luck.
	And talking of my mother, given that she's pretty well immobile at the moment as well as being somewhat confused at times, I've decided that it would not be kind to trouble her with trying to get to my graduation.  My sisters and I have talked about it and decided to drop the subject, quietly, from conversation.  Even if she could attend, I doubt that she would really understand what was going on.
	But things move on.  The Liverpool University Registry have contacted me with more details about the ceremony and pointed me to a Web site where I can hire the cap and gown and arrange for photographs.  The struggling puritan within is shocked to find that hiring a cap and gown and having your picture taken will set you back £90.00, at least, and protests that it is little more than frivolity and vanity anyway.  But my more selfish soul protests equally loudly that I've worked for three years for this and that I deserve my few seconds in the spotlight.  A compromise has therefore been worked out.  I will not be buying the DVD.
	Oh!  Did I tell you I'd passed?  Well I have: with distinction.
  Comments  


Filial duties
2006-10-20T20:00:10+02:00
I've always told my children that they must attend their degree ceremonies to receive their degrees: not because it will do them any good, though.  Degree ceremonies, I tell them, are not for the graduands.  They are for the parents of the graduands.  So I was rather hoping that my mother would be able to make it to my degree ceremony in Liverpool in December.  It's looking increasingly unlikely, though.  I think I mentioned that she had had a fall, and that it was taking some time to get better - or at least less painful.  Since my sisters would be away on holiday, I voluteered to hold the fort whilst they were away.
	So I arrived in Rotherham last Friday and rang the Abbeys Nursing Home where she was supposed to be, who told me that she had been moved to another Nursing Home.  I rang them and confirmed she was there and arranged to visit the following afternoon.  When I got there, they told me that she had had another fall and had been taken off to A & E at Rotherham General Hospital.  Fair play to them, they contacted the hospital and confirmed that my mother would be taken to ward B3, "Within 20 minutes".  So we packed a bag for her and off I went to Rotherham General.  From what the nursing home said, mum had tried to get out of bed for some reason, and had fallen in the attempt.  They found her on the floor, apparently.
	Anyway, I arrived at Ward B3, Rotherham General, at the same time as mum - which was convenient.  The doctor came to see her whilst I was there, and the story from A & E was that she had broken her hip and would have to have an operation either to put screws in or perhaps a plate, depending on what they found when they operated.  The doctor assured me that this was a completely different injury to the one sustained previously.  As I left, the nurse told me they would have a case conference in the morning (Sunday) and if they decided it was an emergency, they might operate straightaway - otherwise, it would be a day or two.  So I agreed to phone at midday Sunday to find out the score.
	Midday Sunday, the hospital told me that the surgeon had studied the X-Rays and decided that it wasn't a break.  They therefore thought that she would be well enough to go back to Broom Lane Nursing Home the following day (Monday) if transport was available.  Mum was a bit confused when I saw her (she thought she'd, "Had the operation"), but then again, so was I by this time; but she was otherwise well when I left her on Sunday afternoon.
	When I arrived home late on Sunday, the phone rang: Rotherham Hospital phoning to say that mum had had another fall.  She had apparently tried to get out of bed and had slipped on the polished floor.  How she could manage to get out of a high hospital bed with the sides up when she's supposed to be so immobile and in such pain, I don't know.  According to an eye witness (the lady in the next bed who was just returning from the toilet as mum fell), she slipped, but caught hold of the side of the bed and so simply slid more or less gracefully to the floor.  So calling it a fall might be overstating things a bit.  Anyway, the hospital said they wanted to keep her in for at least another day just to ensure no damage had been done.
	I rang the hospital again on Monday (she'd been moved to ward B2 by then, apparently).  They said that she was fine in herself and that she would be returning to Broom Lane on Tuesday.  "The ambulance is booked".  And, in fact that's what happened.
	The rest of the day was spent phoning the Nursing Home and the Social Services to make sure everyone knew what hospital out-patients appointments had been booked and generally trying to get things tidy for when my sister returned.
	My sister got back on Tuesday night, and I spoke to her briefy then, and then again today.  Physically, my mother is slowly on the mend, but mentally probably not.  That decision I spoke of before is getting closer and we know it.
	So I think my mother will miss my graduation.
	Pity.
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The distaff side
2006-10-02T20:29:54+02:00
It's been a while.
	Two things have happened to cause me to write a new entry.  Firstly, the University of Liverpool has decided when and where the graduation ceremony will be.  Tuesday 12th December, 2006, in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall is the big day, and I've been asked to check that all my personal details are correct and up-to-date on their records: which they are.  I still don't know whether or not I've passed, though.  The Exam Board sits towards the end of this month, so there's not that long to wait.
	The other event has to do with my mother.  I'm conscious that I haven't written at all about my mother's side of the family.  Perhaps it's because my mother's still alive.  I don't know: but recently we've had to face up to the fact that she is getting more forgetful and is finding it increasingly difficult to look after herself.  Then last week she had a fall and chipped a bone in her hip.
	An injury like that is unpleasant for anyone, but at eighty-six years of age it's quite frightening.  Despite the best efforts of my sister, Jane, who lives nearby, my mother has been so frightened by the pain when she tries to move that she ended up back in hospital and then in a nursing home where she remains at present.  The therapists are going to make an assessment by Wednesday as to whether or not she is fit enough to return to her flat.  As far as I can tell, this means judging whether or not she can get herself up in a morning.
	I may have mentioned that I used to work with, mainly, old people.  I found that there were two types of widow and widower: those who succeeded in getting on with their lives after bereavement, and those who were too deeply scarred by it ever to recover fully.  I remember visiting one elderly lady in Bridgend who had lost her husband fifteen years previously.  He had gone down the garden to fetch something from the shed and never returned.  He just collapsed and died in the garden shed.  I recall how this lady talked about him, and how she said as I left after one visit, "I still miss him, Mr Bradley".
	My mother is in this category.  Although it is twelve years now since my father died, my mother is still quite deeply traumatised.  As time goes on, she is becoming more and more dependent on Jane, who lives close by, which is not fair on Jane.  She lost her own husband, Oz, some five years ago, to a brain tumour at the age of fifty-two, and is trying hard to re-build her life: and with some success.  I feel quite strongly that Jane must be allowed that.
	My other sister, Anne, lives in Stockport with her husband, Dave.  She does what she can, but she works for a living and she is thirty or forty miles away so she can't be visiting my mother every day.  I, of course, am two hundred and ten miles away.  They say that a daughter's a daughter all of your life, but a son's a son till he marries a wife.  I'm determined that should not be the case.
	So the time is quickly approaching when we, the family, will have to make decisions as to the level of care my mother really needs, and how to provide it.  There's no shortage of money or anything like that, so we are fortunate enough to be able to pick and choose: and of course it is my mother who gets the final say.  It is her life after all.  Being fair to everyone is not easy, though.  And being fair to the elderly person is often the hardest thing of all.
	As we grow older we stop being what we were - not out of choice, but because we can no longer choose.  The mother I remember making clothes for my sisters out of remnants of cloth, the person who unpicked worn out jumpers and re-knitted them into other items, the energetic secretary of the amateur dramatic society is gone.
	I remember another of my customers; another lady in Bridgend.  Her body so warped with rheumatoid arthritis, she could no longer stand or move around.  Her fingers so bent she could barely raise a cup to her lips between the knuckles of both hands.  This woman who had been a seamstress: whose hands had been her living.  Every morning, her niece came to get her up, bath her, give her breakfast, turn on the television and prop her up in a chair, surrounded by cushions.  At lunch time the Meals on Wheels came and left her dinner and tea - on a swivel table attached to her chair.  At night, her niece came again to undress her, turn off the television and put her to bed.
	One day I arrived to find her sitting in her chair with an elastoplast across the top of her eye.  The day before, after lunch, she had begun to slide forward in her seat.  Her arthritic joints did not permit her to arrest her fall and she slipped beneath the swivel table onto the floor, banging her forehead on the way and cutting her eye.  She had been on the floor for six hours or more when her niece found her.
	But she never complained.  The last time I saw her I remarked on this, jokingly.
	"Oh! I never complain, Mr Bradley", she said, "I think I'm going to get better".
	She died the following day.
  Comments  


A bit of a marathon
2006-06-18T20:30:41+02:00
Well that's how my wife describes the process of getting a Masters degree via distance learning.  In this respect, I think she is referring to her own Masters in Applied Linguistics - obtained through the Open University - as well as my own attempt.  She said it again yesterday, and it's got me thinking: me having just read an article about disabled athletes in today's Independent on Sunday.
	Marathons are something I know a bit about, you see, having run a few in my time.  The last one I did was in Paris three or four years ago.  That was an experience!  I went on my own.  Carole was going to come with me, but was unable to at the last minute.
	After the race, I went back to the hotel and, realising I didn't have more than twelve Euros left in my pocket, decided to go out and change a cheque ... but then thought better of it.  "Heck!" I thought, "I've got my credit card.  Much better to lie down for a few minutes".
	It was eight o'clock in the evening when I awoke, and I was starving.  So off I went, resplendent in my Paris Marathon T-shirt, in search of a restaurant.  Not far from the hotel, I came across a little Bangladeshi place that looked just the thing.  I entered, and was greeted by the proprietor who waved me to a table.  When he brought the menu, I thought I'd better just check:
	"M'sieur, vous acceptez les cartes banquaires?"
	"Ah m'sieur!  Le machine ne marche pas."
	In dismay, I explained that I had only twelve Euros on me, and that I must therefore find another place to eat.  At this point the proprietor noticed my T-shirt.
	"Mais, vous avez couru le marathon?"
	"Oui, c'etait aujourd'hui."
	In a voice loud enough for all his customers to hear, he proclaimed that if a man had run a marathon and deigned to patronise his eating house, he deserved a meal for twelve Euros.  Thrusting the menu back into my startled hands he declared that I should choose what I pleased.  Everything on the menu, for me, totalled twelve Euros.
	Neither was there any avoiding a carafe of the house red.  It would have been churlish to explain that I am, more or less, teetotal.
	Yes, running a marathon is quite an achievement.  Yet I remember running the Robin Hood marathon in Nottingham in 1994 - the one I ran for my father, to raise money for a cancer charity.  
	There was a stretch of road on the course that was used for the athletes going out - on one side - and those coming in - on the other.  As we ran up the one side, having run some seven or eight miles, the wheelchair athletes - whose race had begun some time before ours - were coming down the other.  Every single able-bodied athlete on the road applauded, spontaneously, the wheelchair athletes as they passed.  We knew how much training for a marathon had cost us.  We also knew that we could not imagine, could not begin to imagine how much it had cost those who had done it without the use of their legs.

  Comments  


Parkhead Cricket Festival
2006-06-03T11:19:52+02:00
Given the job I'm in, as a computer programmer, it's not surprising that I spend a lot of time on the Internet: and quite a lot of that time, on the Web.  So I found myself earlier today, having just read again my last entry, idly remembering my childhood and the things we used to do.
	For the first seventeen years of my life, the most important thing in it was cricket.  All I ever wanted to do was to play for Yorkshire.  Not England.  Playing for England would have been nice: but playing for Yorkshire would have been the pinnacle.  Of course I was never good enough, but in childhood and adolescence you're allowed to dream: and dream I did.
	In my reverie I remembered an annual event that sadly is no more - and has not been for quite some time - the Parkhead Cricket Festival.  Naturally, I looked it up on the Web.  There is a site for the club:
	http://www.parkhead.cricketclub.btinternet.co.uk
	but not for the festival.  So this little article is to put that right.
	I don't remember now when or why the Parkhead Cricket Festival ceased to be.  I do remember, though, that throughout my childhood and into my teens it was one of the occasions that marked the turning of the year - along with Palm Sunday, the Whit Sing in Endcliffe Park, Works Weeks and the Sheffield Show.
	It was sandwiched in somewhere between the Scarborough Cricket Festival and the proper start of the football season and consisted of a number of day and evening games between a variety of guest teams.
	The Parkhead cricket ground is in many ways a traditional English village ground.  Bordered on the South and West by Abbey Lane and Ecclesall Road South, it has the Wheatsheaf pub and the wooden pavilion at its north end and part of Ecclesall Woods to the east.  It is small - compact I guess you'd say - with boundaries that cannot be more than 50 yards, if that.
	Every year we would catch the tram to Ecclesall terminus, or walk the couple of miles up the hill, to make the annual pilgrimage.  As a boy, of course, entry was by crawling under the canvasses erected along Ecclesall Road South to thwart unpaying eyes.  As manhood beckoned, we'd pay our way, to prove to the girls that we could.
	So what makes this undistinguished event in the southern suburbs of Sheffield so worthy of remembrance?  This.  Every year, this unnassuming little club arranged cricket matches between the two Sheffield football clubs - United and Wednesday  - and between themselves and a number of teams: but more than that, they arranged for Yorkshire to play there.  And more, even, than that, the visiting tourists would also play - against that Yorkshire team.  At Parkhead I saw Freddie Trueman bowl, and saw him bat - hitting sixes towards the inviting windows of the Wheatsheaf Tavern.  I saw Bob Appleyard before his early retirement and early death, Johnny Wardle - whose wicket I would one day take - and Jimmy Binks who would have played regularly for England but for Godfrey Evans.  I saw Doug Padgett, Roger Taylor and Brian Close - who used to get us complimentary tickets for the games at Bramall Lane.
	But there, on this tiny ground I saw the three 'W's of Worrall, Weekes and Walcott.  I saw the young Garfield Sobers and all those great West Indians.
	Sometimes I think I must have dreamt all this.  Did all these people really visit us?  Did they stay so close to my home?  Did I really sit with them on the steps of a tiny, white-painted, wooden pavilion at a club cricket ground on the edge of Sheffield?
	I think I did.  And I think it says something about the age we grew up in, that people who today would be celebrities beyond our reach were then celebrities in our midst.  I don't know what happened to extract celebrities from their society - what drove us to drive them out.  Perhaps we pursued them too closely and made them lock themselves away.  Perhaps it's simply a matter of money.  More likely it's a mixture of many things.
	I do know that it was better then, when you could touch the hem of your hero's gown - or just sit quietly at his side.  Or listen to him swearing - as was the case with Freddie Trueman.  He may be responsible for the addition of more than one word to my vocabulary.
	And it's sad that it cannot now be done.  The Parkhead Cricket Festival is no more - has not been for many a long year.  We are poorer for that whether we follow cricket or not.
	But the real value of Parkhead Cricket Festival in those days of its prime, was not to consort with heroes: at least, that was not its main importance to little boys who loved cricket.  I've mentioned that Ecclesall Woods made up one side of the pitch, and into that wood flew a great many cricket balls over the course of the week.
	Cricket balls were like gold to working class boys of Sheffield.  In the parks where we learnt our game we usually made do with cork balls bought from the local Post Office for a few coppers.  I even remember playing with a hockey ball, once.  To have a real leather ball was a dream come true.
	Parkhead Cricket Festival was a cricket ball mine.  Tens of young boys would scour those woods for lost balls.  The more financially oriented would return them to the club for the shilling reward they offered; but the true cricket lover would stuff his pockets with as many as he could find, for these were next year's kit, and priceless.

  Comments  


In memoriam - my father's last gift.
2006-06-02T20:39:03+02:00
I've spent this week up in Sheffield, visiting my mother, Jane - my sister, and my eldest daughter - Maxine.  It was a grand visit.  On Thursday night we all went out, with my sister's boyfriend - if you can have boyfriends at 55 years of age - her daughter, Liz, and Liz's partner, Adam.  That made us eight for a meal at B.B's Italian restaurant.
	My daughter has just completed her post-graduate teaching qualification and will be teaching in Hackney, London, next year.  Liz is now Dr Elizabeth Austen, having recently finished her PhD in Criminal Psychology.
	Carole and I stayed at my sister's for the time we were up there.  Jane keeps her house rather warmer than I like it during the night; and so I found myself lying awake and wondering how my father would have reacted to this plethora of post-graduate awards.  Not very visibly is my guess.  He was not one to show, or express his feelings.
	I've mentioned before that his birth, in 1919, over 10 years after the birth of his sisters, Ruby and Olive, was something of a surprise to his parents.  So he was what we call in Wales, "Y cyw melyn olaf" - the last yellow chick.
	The scholarship exam placed him, at twelve years of age, into the Sheffield Technical School, from which he matriculated, but without the kind of distinction that would have offered him a university place.  Not that his parents could have afforded for him to go into higher education anyway.  Instead, he joined the Post Office as an apprentice telephone engineer.  His closest friends were then and remained the three young men who started their apprenticeships with him - Phillip, Harry and John - until they were cruelly taken by heart attacks, one after the other, in their mid fifties.  This shocked my father so much that he arranged to have a medical check up at the Sheffield Hallamshire Hospital, where they gave him a clean bill of health, but added that that did not mean that he would not drop dead of a heart attack as he walked back down the hospital drive.
	Although his work was at the Post Office, his heart was in sport and in particular in playing football.  At sixteen years of age he tried for papers with Sheffield United, but they told him he was too short - at five foot six and a quarter inches, ever to be a professional.  Sheffield Wednesday, however, took a more encouraging line and referred him to Lopham, one of their "incubator" clubs, from where he was transferred to Norton Woodseats as they sought a replacement right half in their quest for Amateur Cup glory.
	In 1938, he had trials with West Brom and Arsenal, and was offered papers by West Brom.  Unsure of what he should do, he turned to my Uncle Colin, Olive's husband, for advice.  His advice was to stick with the Post Office: advice that may have saved his life since he would have been amongst the first called up in the war had he signed for West Brom.
	I remember Colin, sixteen years my father's senior, as a bitter, broken man; his body ravaged by emphacemia caused by his trade as a silversmith at Mappin and Webbs.  In his latter years he would walk slowly up the hill of Ecclesall Road stopping to look in all the shop windows: too proud to show he was out of breath and could walk no further.  He was called up to fight in 1940 and joined the Desert Rats.  When he came back, his son, Paul, whom he had never seen, was six years old and cried at the presence of this stranger thrust upon him.  Colin and Paul were never close, and Paul remained, in my eyes at least, something of a "Mother's boy", with no interest in sports.  Later I learnt from my mother that Colin had been a fine sportsman, maybe better than my father.  How cruel the hand Fate dealt him.
	My father was called up in 1942 and crossed into France on D-Day plus one.  Only very rarely would he mention the war, but from the occasional glimpse he gave me it seems that his job, as a member of the Royal Signals, was to set up field exchanges for the invading troops by driving in front of the front line and commandeering suitable buildings.
	I remember, when I was eighteen years old, sitting in the Prince of Wales pub with my father holding an animated conversation about the rights and wrongs of pacifism, with me arguing the pacifist cause.  At the end of the night, my father went to the toilet and whilst he was there I was approached by a man of about my father's age in regimental blazer and tie, who lambasted me verbally for my perceived pacifistm.  "If it wasn't for those of us who fought in the war, you would not be here to make these stupid arguments... " and so on.  He was still at it when my father returned.  He sat down and listened in silence until the haranguer turned to him for support:
	"You were not the only one who fought in the war," said my father, "And some of us didn't enjoy it."
	Whatever his experiences in the army, he returned to civilian life a committed Socialist.  In particular, he became an active trade unionist.  Some time in the 1960s he was elected Branch Treasurer and later became Secretary of a branch that by then numbered over two thousand members.  In effect, he became a full-time trade union official.
	My father was a negotiator, not a militant in the traditional sense despite a committment to some of the more esoteric parties of the left.  For over twenty years he served his members in this way - and a wider constituency as an active member of the Trades and Labour Council - until the advent of the black-and-white politics of the Thatcher years forced him to yield to a branch committee that he could no longer support.  The years that followed were of black depression and growing ill-health.
	With great determination he beat the depression that haunted him, although it prevented him from accepting his union's gold badge - their highest award - because he would have cried in accepting it: and he would not ever allow that.  He beat also his addiction to the tablets prescribed for the depression.  But in 1994, he succumbed to throat cancer.  In a few short months, he slipped from being an active seventy-something year old, to being a shuffling, suffering wreck.
	But he had one last gift for me.
	In April 1994, as my father lay ill, Carole and I decided to marry.  We had been partners for  over three years and it seemed right, somehow.  On our next trip up to Sheffield to visit my father in hospital, we talked and, on leaving, told him what we planned.  Carole showed him her engagement ring and they kissed.  As we turned to go, at the moment we opened the door to leave, my father coughed and raised his voice as best he could:
	"Look after him Carole," he said, "He's daft."
	We crossed the car park and got into the car - my father's old car.  "Well," I said, "If those are the last words I hear from my father, I'll settle for that."
	Three days later I was called back to Sheffield.  My father's life was draining away.  For three days we kept vigil by his bedside as he, full up with morphine, stared sightlessly at the ceiling.  I told him all the things I'd wanted him to hear, but never said.  I remember apologising for not being a better footballer.  And in my mind I heard, over and over, the words that Dylan Thomas wrote to his own father at his death:
	"Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
	But he did not.  He was never a fighter.  A negotiator second to none.  But not a fighter, and you cannot negotiate with death.
	And on the third day, he died.
	I miss him still, although this all happened twelve years ago.  What would he have thought about this MSc?  What would he have said?  Would he have been proud?
	I like to think so.  Maybe he'd allow that in this, as in my choice of second wife, I've done something not quite so daft.

  Comments  


Beth yw dyn?
2006-05-26T23:23:58+02:00
"Beth yw dyn?"  What is a man asks the poet Waldo Williams: and part of the answer is "Cadw ty mewn cwmwl tystion" - housekeeping in a cloud of witnesses.
	After my grandmother (on my father's side) died, a friend of hers asked if she could have her bowls.  She'd always admired them when they played together at the bowling club, and she'd like to have them, to remember her.  This is crown green bowling, by the way, not your cop-out southern variety.
	A couple of weeks later, this friend of my late grandmother, dropped into my Aunty Olive's shoe shop to buy some new shoes for Whit.  "Those bowls are amazing" she enthused, "When I use them, it's as though there's someone behind me, egging me on to play better."
	"Aye" replied Olive, "That'll be me mother".
	The eldest girl in sixteen children, Grandma Bradley had really been a mother all her life.  Born in Tipton in the Black Country in the 1880s, she and my Grandad Bradley moved to Sheffield at the turn of the century, where my grandfather plied his trade as a vice fitter.  I have a photograph of them in their back yard from about that time.  Two young people, my grandfather standing in his best suit with sleeves too short, and my grandmother slim and pretty, sitting with her back ramrod straight on a kitchen chair.  
	They had three children.  Olive and Ruby were born in 1905 and 1906 respectively, and my father came along as something of a suprise in 1920.
	Things went fairly well up until the depression in the 1930s when my grandfather lost his job.  He was out of work for seven years.  To pay the rent, my grandmother worked as a midwife (before there were such things as midwifery exams), took in washing, kept a lodger and ran whist drives in the evening.  My father learnt to play cards by making up a foursome if they were a player short at any table.  It must have been a hard school, judging by the player he became.  You did not want to play cards against my father.
	The lodger told my parents he'd never see them wed.  On the morning of the wedding my grandmother went up to him to say she was off to the wedding, and found him dead in his chair.  She closed the curtains, left the house, locked the door and never said a word to anyone until the wedding was over and my parents, newly wed, were gone.
	Some years ago, I found myself, with my children, on the road where my grandparents used to live.  The house is long gone of course; sacrificed on the altar of "slum clearance".
	"This is where my gran lived" I said to them, and described the house.  Two up, two down, gas lights and no electricity, no hot water, one stone sink in the kitchen and no bathroom, a Yorkshire range and a gas ring for cooking - and a toilet at the bottom of the yard.  That gas ring nearly killed me.
	We were visiting my grandma and she asked my father to do some job for her that involved him crawling under the sink.  I don't remember why.  I was only three years old.  My mother and baby sister had gone down to the corner shop and some baked beans were cooking on the gas ring next to the sink when I crawled in after my father.  I must have caught the flexible pipe to the gas ring because the next thing was that the gas ring, saucepan and baked beans were down on top of me.  My mother was walking up the passage at the time and swears to this day that she can still hear the scream.
	My Grandad Bradley died when my Grandma was seventy-six.  Within eighteen months she'd remarried - to my Grandad Ransom.  She needed someone to look after, people said. 
	They were moved, when the slums were cleared, to a ground floor maisonette on the edge of Sheffield.  I remember visiting them.  My grandma must have been in her eighties.  "Sit down, love" she said, "I'm just popping up to look after the old lady who lives upstairs."  The old woman upstairs was twenty years her junior.
	As she grew older, and as my parents got a bit better off and rich enough to own a car they decided they'd do my grandma's shopping for her once a week.  Proud as anything with his £50.00 car (1954 Morris Oxford), my father drove my mother to the shops to get my grandma's groceries.  When they arrived back, my grandma lifted each item out of the box one-by-one and asked, "How much did you pay for this?" and to each answer, she retorted, "I could have got it tuppence ha'penny cheaper at so-and-so's."  She did her own shopping after that.
	Grandma Bradley and Grandad Ransom lived together for nearly twenty years, and I really believed that they were indestructible.  But the habits of poverty claimed them in the end.
	On Sunday, my Grandma cooked the Sunday dinner - as in breakfast, dinner, tea; none of this breakfast, lunch, dinner business - and then left the bones from the joint to boil overnight to make stock.  It must have boiled over and put out the flame - more than one flame - because when the postman called in the morning he smelled gas.  Failing to get an answer when he knocked, he broke into the house.  Grandad Ransom was lying in the hall where he must have fallen trying to reach the kitchen.  My grandma was still in bed.  Asleep.  Never to wake.
  Comments  


Finale
2006-05-24T13:27:13+02:00
I had this from my supervisor:
	So, there we are!  All finished ... Except for waiting for the contact from the PM [Programme Manager] to let you know the results of the Board of Examiners meeting.
	Later in the email she adds:
	It was a very interesting project and one that I enjoyed for sure.  I hope to meet up with you for graduation.
	
	The graduation ceremony is, apparently, just before Christmas, in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.
	The last time I was in Liverpool was in 1957, when I visited an aunt of mine who was a Brigadier in the Salvation Army.  She ran the SA Women's Hostel in Birkenhead.  So the visit was punctuated with shouts offstage along the lines of, "Brigadier, Annie's set her room on fire.  Again."
	I have no religion myself, but I loved my Aunt Ruby dearly.  The world was a poorer place when she died.
	As she lay ill with cancer in hospital, the ward sister and a doctor approached us when we visited and asked us if they should tell her that she was dying and that there was no hope.  We said, "Of course."  A little while later, the nurse returned with a slightly bemused look on her face, which she explained by saying that after telling Ruby she was dying, Ruby had smiled and replied, "Thank you my dear.  That's what I wanted to hear."
	Her will contained a small legacy for me.  My first marriage had failed many years before and I had been living with Carole (then my partner, now my second wife) for at least six, maybe seven years.  In her will, Ruby left me £200.00 - to get a divorce.
  Comments  


A marked man
2006-05-18T10:39:12+02:00
The second assessor has written to me again.  She has this to say:
	
I read your DS -- you have done some good work!  I do not have any questions.  I will be submitting my assessment to UoL management later today.
	Congratulations on having completed your DS!

	So what do you think?  Does that sound like a pass?
  Comments  


New directions
2006-05-15T13:24:01+02:00
Having got this far and, hopefully, succeeded in getting an MSc, the question arises as to what to do with it.  Is it necessary to do anything with it?  Probably not; but it has left a hole that wants filling, and it would be appropriate to fill it with something that exploits the results of the last three years of struggle.
	I've always had a desire to teach computing; to try to pass on a bit of my enthusiasm for the subject.  Teaching full time is almost certainly not on, to be honest, and I'm not at all sure that I'd want to  do that anyway.  So I looked up on the Web, details of Associate Lecturer positions with the UK's Open University.  I studied computing for many years with that institution and, in fact, very nearly did an MSc with them.  In the end I settled for a post-graduate diploma.  I wasn't ready for the dissertation part of the process at that time.
	In fact, many members of our family have studied with the Open University.  My wife, Carole, has an MA in Applied Linguistics with them, and my youngest daughter studies technology (amongst other things) with them.  One of the photographs on this site is of Carole at her graduation.
	The OU are not perfect, but there is a lot to be said for them: Harold Wilson's legacy, and a fine one, too.
	It turns out that they are looking for people to teach Java and SQL, for some courses starting in February 2007.  So I've applied.  Whether they recruit or not will depend largely on the number of students they get in areas I could get to for seminars, but I guess I have as much of a chance as anyone else.  There's nothing to lose, anyway.
	Could be interesting ...
  Comments  


Seconds out!
2006-05-13T12:07:54+02:00
Well, a second assessor has been appointed to mark my work, and she has written to me to introduce herself and to say she may be asking me some questions.
	The order of events from here on is that my work will be assessed independently by the two assessors.  The first one is my Dissertation Advisor with whom I've been in contact throughout the dissertation process; and the second one is the one I refer to above.  So an assessment will be made within the next few days, probably.  I say "probably" because I won't get to know about it until October, when the Examination Board sits.
	So I shall be turning my attention to other things.  I might even write about them here.  Stay tuned 

  Comments  


Something to hold on to
2006-04-29T18:57:34+02:00
Earlier this week, I went to a local bookbinders who specialise in binding theses and dissertations, and got my magnum opus bound (one hardback and four softback copies).  I collected them on Thursday.
	Holding the results in my hands made it all seem more real, somehow.  Up until then I hadn't really been aware of what I'd done.  Not really.  But to hold this 250-odd page book in my hands was quite something, I can tell you.
	My next stop was to take some copies into work.  I've donated one copy to the library, and gave another copy to the Assistant Principal who gave me permission to use the university's facilities.  It seemed the least I could do; and he seemed touchingly pleased to have been given a copy.
	I'm very lucky in that Liverpool University are not at all concerned about copies being distributed.  Most universities claim copyright on all theses and dissertations and forbid any publication without their permission.  Liverpool, fair play, just say that as long as their name is on it, and as long as proper acknowledgements are made, then they are perfectly happy.
	This is what has allowed me to publish the final product on the Web.  I'm very glad that I've been able to do that because I've promised a lot of people along the way that I'd provide them with copies of my results.  That responsibility is now, happily, discharged.
  Comments  


Go and see for yourselves
2006-04-25T13:40:44+02:00
Here is the URL to go to if you want to see the finished product:
	http://www.peredur.uklinux.net/msc
	And may the force be with you.
  Comments  


Odds and ends
2006-04-24T22:27:56+02:00
Although my dissertation submission is done electronically, I thought I'd get some hard copy versions bound.  A number of people have given me a lot of help over the last eight months, so the least I can do is to present them with a copy of the completed magnum opus.  I thought the university might be a bit sniffy about this, but in fact they're perfectly happy for me to publish and be damned.
	I'm getting a hardback copy for myself, and then copies for people like the Assistant Principal at work who gave me permission to use the servers and put them on the LAN; and I thought I'd donate a copy to the library at the university where I work.  The other thing I'm going to do is to put the dissertation up on the Web.  I've created a little site on my local machine here at home.  All I have to do now is to find an ISP to host it - uklinux.net are favourites at the moment.
	Quite a few people on the Mono mailing list expressed an interest in seeing the results, as well as a number of people whose work I used or cited.  Providing access via the Web seems the sensible thing to do.
	Hopefully, Web access should be available within a day or two.  The hard copies will be available for collection in the late afternoon in three day's time.
	Hmmm.  Never noticed that before.  You don't have a word for the day after the day after tomorrow in English, do you?  In Welsh, we have:

echdoe = the day before yesterday
	doe = yesterday
	heddiw = today
	yfory = tomorrow
	trenydd = the day after tomorrow
	tradwy = the day after the day after tomorrow

  Funny thing, language.  But I digress.
	I'll post the URL for the Web site when I've set it up.
	The other thing I found out, is that the Academic Board does not meet again until October.  That means that no grade will be officially awarded until then.  I asked my supervisor if that meant I'd have no indication as to whether I'd passed or failed until October.  She replied by saying, "I wouldn't be concerned, Peter".  That's probably the best I can hope for 

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