Love's Young Dream

The two of them are starting to irk now.

Young Keith and Charlii, that is.

I got fed up of them sitting there holding hands and whispering through all the Occasions. So I've separated them. Young Keith is now officially i/c Audio Visuals, and therefore has to sit at the back in the half-light, looking moody. The Leadership Team have been told to abandon all pretence at being on the same level as the punters, and have to sit up the front on their demi-druidical bean bags at all times.

Of course, that didn't initially stop them texting, did it. All the way through the singing, the liturgy, solemn lighting of tea lights, pouring out and filling up of beakers. No matter what we were doing, the lovey-doveyness never stopped.

So Hnaef's done a bit of techie magic for me and now we're broadcasting a scrambling signal on all frequencies. The Powerpoint's a lot sharper on its cues now. And all the Beaker People who had been claiming to "take notes" on their Smartphones during sermons have mysteriously discovered that their memories have improved. Amazing what a bit of electronic white noise can do to improve the worshipful atmosphere.

Rest for the Wiki

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They came to call 18 Jan 2012 the "Great Darkness". The day that some Wikipedia software engineers, concerned that the US government was going to make them use SOAP, pulled the great online encyclopedia offline. And while the engineers wondered how, without Wikipedia, they were going to be able to find the instructions on how to turn it back on again, the world fell into darkness.

It's terrible news for me, I can tell you. Whenever I inform the Beaker people that we're celebrating a new form of Inca liturgy (not the one with the still-beating heart - that's gross and must sting a bit) it's to Wikipedia I turn for the salient points. It also conveniently has lists of births, deaths and notable events for each day. Now we might have to use real saints, if Hnaef can find his old Book of Common Prayer - that must surely give all the saints for any day?

And pity the poor student, having to write a scientific or historical essay today. Though if essays are submitted explaining that Karl Marx left Harpo, Chico and co after "Duck Soup", because he didn't think it covered the area of class struggle with sufficient seriousness - how will the teachers be able to check?

Down at the tabloid newspapers, there must be utter panic.  How are they going to write their "20 things you never knew about Peter Sarstedt" articles now? There could be pages of blank newsheet coming off the presses as I write. And the QI Elves have been given a day's unpaid leave as well.  Stephen Fry has been reduced to the status of mere mortal.

So we are celebrating the Lament of Knowlessness today. It's basically a straight moan that, although we thought we were so much cleverer than our ancestors - thinking we knew all about Bob Holness playing the sax on Baker Street, the Hundred Years War and the chemical structure of amides - in fact we know little. A small amount of contextless data rattles around our empty brains but, without Wiki, we don't know how to give it a Sitz in Leben. Like frogs in a pond in March, there's no logic to how the ends join up. Did Lord Nelson kiss the author Thomas Hardy? Did the composer Engelbert Humperdinck have a second career as a pop singer? Did. Freddie Mercury prophecy the day when Lady Gaga would take over the world and pump her music into our radios like a latter-day Big Brother? Is Endemol a kind of sleeping tablet? Did St Helen come from St Helens or Saint Helena? I realise that, as it says in the Book of Samuel, everything is vanity - all human knowledge is but polarised dust on an unused disk array - and I repent in that dust and weep.

On a brighter note, we're going to be painting the Moot House door blue today. If we can find out how paint works.

Time for an Upgrade?

Maybe Young Keith is right and it's time to upgrade the computer.

But then, maybe it just sums up my life.

Chrome all the Way Down

Hearing heart-rending sobs from Burton Dasset just now, I found him reading a blog post about comparative browser usage. It would seem that Chrome has overtaken the Firefox so belonged of geeks, programmers and other assorted people with no social skills.

This sort of thing sent me rushing to Google Analytics of course. Or, in fact, it sent me rushing to Young Keith who looked the stats up for me. Turns out that Chrome is the browser of choice for visitors to the Beaker Folk, weighing in at 25% of all visits. Firefox is just behind with 23%.

Interestingly, Internet Explorer barely clings onto third place - 20% compared to Safari's 19%. I can confidently say that the Beaker Folk is one of the least beholden blogs around, either to Microsoft or the hippies of Apple. Although given our use of Google Anaytics, the Chrome Browser and my new-found love of an Android device - I'm starting to think a new Microsoft is looming in our midst. Tell you what, to be on the safe side I'm going to boycott Google+.

By the way, I note that in the last month I had 7 visitors using Blackberry. You've got to admire their guts.

Dennis Richie - RIP

I am happy to refer you to a fine tribute to Dennis Richie from Steve Borthwick. And I would like to pay a tribute also to the man who created C and helped Unix.

I remember when I went on my Data Processing Conversion Course after my first few years as an accountant. And I like to think that those two skills, Finance and IT, forged from the need to develop a new Invoice Passing system, are what have made me the well-rounded individual I am today. And in those days, Dear Readers, there was a myth. And that myth was that programming was easy enough even for Systems Analysts. The COBOL language was sold on the belief that it could be written to look like English - instructions such as "GO TO PUB DEPENDING ON YOUR-STATE-OF-MIND". Databases such as DataEase  and later Access encouraged even end-users and Marketing people to believe that they could write computer applications.

But time of course has shown that if you allow someone in Supply Chain to write an Access database - for load planning, or perhaps for order forecasting - then that simple, easy-to-understand table rapidly becomes a mess of badly-normalised tables, views upon views and inadequately optimized SQL queries. Eventually, the Access guru will go down under the strain of all those sub-optimal joins and unwise Excel hooks, and set off for a new career as a baker or a Feng Shui surfing instructor. At which point his formerly grateful colleagues will discover the amount of manual effort with which he kept his edifice going. They will then pay a consultant a grand or so a day to recover the database and try to restore it to something approaching maintainability.

No, Dear Readers, it is clear. End users lack the discipline and logical reasoning ability to construct proper computer systems. Which is why the inventions of C, Java and Unix were so important. They make the point quite clearly that normal people can't be trusted with these things. Computers, even today, are hard and to be respected - to be programmed in hushed tones by experts with white coats. Let the world play with its Tweetdeck and Word for Windows and think it is computer-literate. That is like driving a car and thinking you are a Ferrari motor mechanic. We know that, underneath, it is all very hard and very confusing. And we like it that way.

Big Brot^H^H^H^H Archdruid

It appears that we are being watched. Last night, in a spontaneous move that required only 8 hours of planning, I replaced the Pouring Out of Beakers ceremony with a lovely Church of England Evening Prayer (or, more accurately in this case, good old Evensong). I'd even arranged to have the Preces and Responses (Byrd), Mag & Nunc. (Tallis) and a lovely Anthem (Gibbons), so we were all very up-to-date. Things started off well, and then Enya came on the speakers in the Moot House.

I was having a few pints with Young Keith down at the White Horse after the debacle, and he was explaining to me about web-cams. It appears that the Archdruid is able to monitor our activities remotely, at any time she wishes, and then to take control over the sound system. And lights. And possibly window openings.

Well, he also told me that, for a small fee (several pints), he's willing to use a "staple trick of the spy film genre", and to "play a loop" of a previous service over the "web-cam feed". This should allow us to enjoy the Methodist service I have planned for this evening (ecumenism is always nice, as long as it's with people we generally agree with most of the time), and to avoid interference - or interventions - by person or persons remote.

I will prevail!