A batch-processing system replies

August 31, 2012August 31, 2012 Chris Cannam

In response to “Ode to a Preemptive Multitasking Kernel“

I do things right, that’s what I say.
I take a thing: I let it run:
It finishes, then off it goes.
I take the next thing when it’s done.

My advantages are clear to see:
Clarity, sureness, crispness, ease.
I march on, forge ahead, in my
Elemental simplicity.

Oh, screw the pretence. I hate this stuff!
Your tedious jobs fill me with bile.
I want to explode when I’ve had enough —
Blast your FORTRAN into space in considerable style.

Fill your matrices with wild bobcats.
Show your simulation a thing or two!
Punch your cards, deck your stack, squash your loops flat.
“FATAL ERROR: Application eaten by a grue.”

I never will. I’ll just plod on.
My temperament is much too slow.
I only know these simple things:
Ordering, processing, FIFO.

Places

A Watery City

August 4, 2012August 4, 2012 Chris Cannam

A striking thing about the venues for the 2012 Olympics in London is that their locations make more sense when seen as connected by water rather than by road.

The Olympic Park sits on the River Lea and a couple of its former working branches, and is bounded on one side by the Lee Navigation canal.

Greenwich Park (equestrian events, modern pentathlon) overlooks the River Thames at Greenwich. You can get there on foot from the Olympic Park by taking the Lee Navigation towpath to the Limehouse Cut and traversing Docklands before cutting under the river through the Greenwich foot tunnel—see map below.

It’s a nice walk, though you can’t do it directly from the Olympic Park during the Olympics because the Lee Navigation towpath is closed for “security reasons”. I hope they remember to re-open it afterwards. In the meantime you’ll have to join the towpath at Stratford High Street.

Also on the Thames, the Royal Artillery Barracks (shooting) in Woolwich are just downstream, a bend away, on the same riverbank—roughly opposite the entrance to the Royal docks, on which the ExCeL centre (fencing, boxing, weightlifting etc) sits.

Hampton Court (cycling time trials) and Eton Dorney (rowing) are on the Thames as well, much further upstream. More centrally, you can find Horse Guard’s Parade (beach volleyball) and The Mall (marathon, cycling road race) set back only a couple of hundred metres from the river.

The Lee Valley white water centre (canoe slalom) is on the same river as the Olympic Park. Presumably you could canoe between the two of them, though it might take a while.

Lord’s (archery) is accessible from the Regent’s Canal; from there you can walk all the way to the Olympic Park along the towpath via the Hertford Union Canal—apart from that pesky tunnel at Islington, for which you’ll need a boat, or to rise to street level (see map).

Wembley Stadium (football) and arena (badminton) are on a site bounded by the River Brent. An ideal way to get there from Lord’s should be to take the Regent’s Canal down to Little Venice, the Grand Union Canal from there up to Alperton, and then follow the Brent through the Tokyngton Recreation Ground. But I’m not sure whether that last connection can easily be made on foot, and the Brent isn’t navigable. I’ll have to go and take a look.

Earl’s Court (volleyball) and Hyde Park (open-water swimming, triathlon) can’t be reached by water, but both were built on top of culverted rivers or streams—Earl’s Court on Counter’s Creek, which reaches the Thames at Chelsea harbour, and Hyde Park over the Westbourne, which formerly supplied the water for the Serpentine.

The odd one out is Wimbledon, which is nowhere near any present or former waterway as far as I can see.

Computers

iPads in schools

August 4, 2012August 4, 2012 Chris Cannam2 Comments

Fraser Spiers remarks, in a review of the Google Nexus 7 tablet:

My experience with two years of iPad in school is that the iPad can cover 99% of everything we want to do with a computer in school… the iPad can replace the computer suite

I think the radical nature of his observation has to do with the replacement of the desktop computer in dedicated labs—the iPad is already widely proposed and increasingly adopted as an assistance to learning for pupils outside the computer suite.

Viewed close-up, this seems like a good thing. iPads are generally cheaper, more reliable, and easier to get to grips with than traditional PCs, are portable enough to be used across teaching disciplines, and make a wide range of software very easily available.

But imagine that, ten years ago, someone had proposed:

that in future, schools in the UK and elsewhere would buy all of their computer hardware and most of their software from a single American company;
that software for these computers could not be used with hardware made by anyone else, never mind with other operating system platforms;
that software for these computers could only be obtained through the company that made the computers, and that installing it would require entering a contractual relationship with them;
that these computers could not be programmed natively using the computer itself: prospective application programmers would first need to buy another, more expensive computer from the same company, enter another contractual relationship with them, and in most cases also pay them;
that GNU-style Free Software would be forbidden from running on them;
that the company in question was known to have designed this environment quite deliberately and had a record of squashing attempts to work around its limitations;
and that these computers would be used as a standard teaching platform across all disciplines, and would also be the platform on which computing as a subject was taught to children.

How would that have sounded?