When I'm wrong, I'm very wrong.

Only a few weeks after I say that there will be no major new plane designs from Boeing or Airbus in the foreseeable future, Boeing announces one.

I think my crystal ball needs a wipe.

Ships

Nearly twenty years ago I did some freelance work for a company that involved manipulating shipping data. Much of my time was spent dealing with vast amounts of information about individual ships held on the Lloyds Register.

As I was clearing out the garage ready for our move, I came across a photocopied sheet out of a Lloyds publication. For some reason I have never thrown it out, and it has survived all of my occasional clear-outs.

The sheet details some of the ship types that Lloyds Register recognise; I had photocopied it as an aide memoire so that I did not need big books open on the desk in front of me.

How many types of ships can you think of? Trawler, oil tanker, tug, ferry, container ship, icebreaker... soon you start to run out of options.

Which is why the list fascinates me: with all of these obvious ship types are many that you would never guess. Things like 'wood chip carrier', 'mining ship', 'seismographic research vessel' and even 'semi-submersible heavy lift tank'. It is a glimpse into another world.

I must admit that the idea of a ship type called 'wine tank' might make me want to become a pirate. You could have one heck of a party with a shipload of Sauvignon Blanc...

What would I do?

The crisis in Egypt has led me to ask what I would be doing if I was Egyptian.

Firstly, I am no fan of Mubarak. His regime has - by the standards of the region - not been bad, but by our standards has been very poor. Corruption - both political and institutional - is rife. It is not a functioning democracy. If I was Egyptian I would want him to go.

However, I am also a conservative with a small 'c'. Change is necessary, but should only be undertaken if we can be fairly sure that the change is for the best (*). I abhor change for change's sake; it is nothing more than a gamble.

It is hard to know how you would behave in such a different political climate. I would like to think that I would have been on the streets (were I brave enough) for the first set of protests. However, when Mubarak agreed not to stand in the September elections I would have been happy, as long as those months were spent working out exactly *what* sort of democracy would emerge. A period of cool deliberation is vital, especially when they have such a poor starting position.

That is why today's news about the formation of a committee to study constitutional reform is to be welcomed. Let Mubarak stay in his job as a weakened figurehead whilst the future shape of the country is decided. And yes, that should include the Muslim Brotherhood, however distasteful I find some of their rhetoric. They have 20% of the seats in parliament despite the hurdles placed in their way; it is only right for them to have a say.

Of course, as a secularist I believe a secular, democratic Egypt - with Islamist leanings (in the same way the UK's laws and traditions have a Christian base) - is for the best.

At times democracy may be weak, ineffectual, annoying and even downright perverse, but it is undoubtedly the key to a just society. And Egyptian men and women deserve a just society.

(*) A classic example being Labour's alterations to the House of Lords, something I have a bee in my bonnet about. An argument could be made for getting rid of the majority of the hereditary peers, but only if the replacement system were better. However they removed the hereditary peers and did not specify a replacement, allowing all the parties to stuff the Lords with cronies. This has directly led to the recent debacles and, perversely, less democracy than there was with hereditary peers.

A diesel-steam locomotive

I once had a fondness for railways. It was not so much the trains but the actual engineering; the bridges, tracks, and tunnels etc. However, osmosis did mean that I picked up some basic knowledge about the locomotives.

Over the years the various railway companies tried various experimental schemes for locomotives. Some of these are famous, such as Bullied's Leader class. However, there are undoubtedly many weird and wonderful experiments that I have never come across.

Whilst browsing the web somnolently, I came across a webpage on the LNER Encyclopedia. The page details the Kitson-Still locomotive built in the 1930s. It fascinates me as it shows the tentative way that many established organisations approach new technology.

At the time diesel engines and transmissions were relatively new and unreliable, especially in the sizes needed by a steam locomotive. The technology was a step too far for our mostly conservative railway companies. The Kitson-Still was designed to overcome some of these problems.

Diesel engines work by compressing diesel until it spontaneously ignites. Instead of having a seperate diesel engine, the Kitson-Still injected diesel into the opposite side of the cylinders from the steam, allowing the pressure of the steam to compress it to ignition. Hence this literal form of diesel injection would give the steam engine more power.

It was also more efficient - exhaust gasses from the diesel were taken through the boiler, preheating the water. In this manner, the locomotive got up to 40% efficiency - unheralded at the time.

Of course it was a technological dead-end. Diesel technology improved rapidly over the years, and the idea never got around many of the disadvantages of steam - whilst diesel and electric locomotives can be started at the flock of a switch, it takes many hours for a steam locomotive to get to working temperatures. But I must admit to a certain fondness towards this idea.

News

I have moved house six times in the last eleven years:

• Waterbeach
• Fen Ditton
• The walk
• Great Shelford
• Romsey
• North Baddesley

Sencan has made a similar number of moves. I have counted the walk as just one move, as we slept in different places most nights. If they were counted separately then it would easily add 250 to 300 onto the total ;-)

Now for the news: as you may have guessed, we are moving once more. Sencan has a new job, so we will be upping sticks in the next few weeks and moving everything back up to Cambridgeshire. Fortunately we have not unpacked many of our boxes from the last move.

It would be nice to have a little stability...

I will leave Southampton with more than a little regret. It is a wonderful area for walking, with the New Forest, South Downs, Salisbury Plain, the Dorset Coast and the Isle of Wight all within an easy drive. I love Cambridge, but the area around it is rather devoid of interesting walks (or at least I have done most of them already).

We went up to Cambridge a couple of weeks ago, and whilst Sencan was at her interview I went for a short walk in the rain from Bottisham Lock. It was muddy, wet and miserable, but I realised how much I miss the Cam. On many a sunny Sunday afternoon my then-girlfriend and I would lay a picnic basket on a blanket by the lock. We would scoff our food as we watched all the inexperienced boaters trying to use the lock. Halcyon days.

The training walks after my last operation were along the Cam between Waterbeach and Ely, an easy walk that I could do on a Sunday morning in time to catch the train back to watch a Grand Prix. Those solitary walks gave me a love for the black horizons of the Fens.

So what are the advantages of Cambridge? Well, we will be able to resume our love of Sunday breakfast scones at the Orchard, an enjoyable experience that adds inches onto our waistlines. I will enjoy the bookshops, although I noticed with shock on my last visit that Galloway and Porter has closed - a sad loss. It will be good to be near the theatres of Cambridge (the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton only ever does musicals). I will also be an hour nearer my parents, and within a reasonable drive of the Peak District. Proximity will allow me to increase my ire about the farce of the guided bus. I will be able to go for a sloppy burger in Gardenias. I will be nearer the Viking chip shop on Milton Road, whose workers I had chatted up so they would give me extra-large portions.

What are the disadvantages? Well, the walking is far less varied than in the Romsey area, and I have to travel a long way to get any hills. I have previously lived in Cambridge for over ten years on and off, and the area offers little new to me. I will miss being within a ten-minute drive of the sea (well, Southampton Water at least). I will miss Romsey, a quintessential English market town. I will miss the people and the vibrancy of the local life. I will miss the ease of driving and parking in Southampton, which makes Cambridge feel oppressive in comparison. I will miss the local chippie, whose workers I had chatted up so they would give me extra-large portions...

As life changes, some things remain constant. My quest for the perfect fish and chips is one such thing.

Some navel gazing

Well, the experiment is over. A few months ago I wondered if I could get a blog post out every day. I thought I would try it for a week, but since then I have written over a hundred posts, missing only one day.

So the question is whether this verbal diarrhoea has been at the cost of quality. Looking back, there are some posts that I am proud of, and others that are frankly rather ill-thought out.

Almost every post has forced me to do some basic research, even if it is just checking my facts on Wikipedia or in books. This is something I love, and I have probably sent more time with my nose in books than I have writing.

Unfortunately the daily churn has meant that the quality has not been as good as it could have been. The posts have frequently been hurried, and in many the point I was trying to make has been unclear or obscured by layers of hyperbole.

One of the biggest problems with this blog is its lack of focus. The best blogs tend to be about one topic only, written by experts in that area. My blog covers anything that I find to be of interest, and this leads to a scattergun of topics: from writing and book reviews, through walking and computing to politics. This means that it is unlikely to be of interest to anyone who wants in-depth knowledge of any particular topic. Basically, the ideal reader of the blog would be someone with the same interest as myself; and that would probably just be me.

This was put succinctly elsewhere: "If your blog does not have a niche, then it will become niche itself."

One thing has surprised me: I have plenty to say. The problem has not been finding things to write about; rather it has been finding the time to write.

Yet all of this will now come to an end. I will soon be able to spend less time at my PC, especially if my previous joyful experiences with TalkTalk, Virgin and BT are anything to go by. My life is heading off in another direction. I will still post, but they will not be daily.

I hope you have enjoyed reading these daily posts. I have certainly enjoyed writing them!

Watch this space...

Unforeseen consequences

Designing electronics is very difficult. So difficult, in fact, that I am very glad that I chose to become a programmer rather than an electronics engineer.

The problem is always in the polishing. There is an old adage that completing the first 90% of a program takes 10% of the time, whilst completing the last 10% takes the remaining 90% of the time. To put it another way, it is far easier to get something basically working than it is to ensure that it always works well under all necessary conditions.

This is one of the reasons why there are so many buggy programs - the programmer write some code that appears to work and passes basic tests. He knows that there are some areas that may need work, but the management thinks it is good enough and wants him to work on the next task. That last 10% of the job, the polishing, often never occurs.

And it is far worse in electronics, and especially consumer electronics. And sometimes the truly weird and unexpected can come and bite you on the bottom. Take this story on the Connectify blog. Basically, some people with the new Kindle 3 E-Book readers noticed their units were rebooting at random intervals. The Kindle's come with a choice of leather covers, one of which has a light, and the other which is unlit.

Strangely, the failures were only occurring in the Kindles with unlit covers. Connectify did some research, and it turns out that on the powered cover, two gold-plated contacts touch the Kindle to power the light. In the unpowered version, these contacts are metal painted with a non-conductive paint. This paint was wearing off with repeated opening and closing of the cover, allowing a connection to be made. This was drawing power from the Kindle and causing various pseudo-random problems, including crashes and reboots.

Thus the design of a cover for a device has led to a problem with the device itself; circumstances which would have been difficult to foresee. This is one reason why automotive and military electronics are always more expensive: they go to much more bother about the construction and testing of their devices than consumer electronics companies.