Apr 30 2017

A real opposition

Labour no longer form an effective opposition. On the main issue of the day, Brexit, their leader was insipid in the referendum campaign, and the Remain campaign was hamstring because of this. And now the vote has passed their policy seems to be a vague “we’ll do Brexit but not as Brexity as the Tories”. They voted to trigger Article 50 in the absence of any practical acquiesce to their demands on Brexit.

Theresa May led a slim majority in parliament with no personal mandate, and a prime directive: Brexit that a very narrow majority of voters actually voted for and if they did vote for it then it was a glorious unicorn which frankly is not on the table (or in the stable, if you wish to avoid a mixed metaphor). Any reasonable opposition should be well ahead in the opinion polls, not 20 points behind as Labour is now.

The opinion polls as they now stand are not “will they / won’t they form a government”, more “what size rump of the Labour party will be left”.

Their main problem is leadership. Fundamentally a man who rebelled so often against the party in the past is incapable of leading it. The parliamentary Labour Party agrees, 80% of them voted against Jeremy Corbyn in a no confidence vote. Labour MPs don’t want Corbyn as their leader, why on earth should we want him to lead the country?

The problem with leadership has meant that the Opposition has scarcely had a function front bench since the 2015 election, and re-electing Corbyn as a leader as not helped in any way.

Labour as an opposition with a minority of less than 20 seats have been ineffective. Just think what it would be like with a minority in of more than 100.

Labour as a party is dead. It’s dead but it doesn’t yet know it. You can vote for it to make the corpse wiggle for a little longer or you can do something different.

Across the country Labour are saying “Don’t vote for them, they’ll let the Tories in”. The blunt truth is, they will let the Tories in with their utter incompetence and they’ll give them a free hand to do what they want once they are in. They rely on their “hereditary” vote and a presumption that they have the right to any vote that is not a vote for the Tories.

On the 8th June, vote for a real opposition, vote for the Liberal Democrats.

Apr 24 2017

And they’re off!

How did we get here, facing a second general election only two years after the last one?

Theresa May called the election, possibly because she saw that Labour was historically weak – the Tories currently have something like a 20 point lead over Labour in the opinion polls. That’s much larger than any sort of margin of error, and if maintained until the election will give the Tories an overall majority in excess of 100 seats – see the Electoral Calculus website for a more detailed prediction.

Or it might have been because she was going to lose her majority of 17 through resignations of Tory MPs over election expenses. Channel 4 has done some great work researching this story: Channel 4 Election Expenses Investigation. As it stands Tory MPs and their agents could have charges brought against them during the election campaign.

MPs voted by more than a two thirds majority to allow the election, as required by the Fixed Term Parliament Act. In retrospect this is a bit surprising, clearly the Liberal Democrats have an interest in this General Election – things can’t be worse for them than the 2015 election. But why have Labour made this so easy? They could have forced a vote of no confidence instead of voting with the government which would have made little practical difference but would have not looked good for the government.

Of course the original cause for the General Election is David Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU to pacify the europhobic wing of the Tory party. He clearly expected to win the Remain vote in the referendum, and his failure led to the most spectacular act of political self-decapitation that I can recall.

This general election appears to have taken Labour and even Tory parties by surprise, but not the Liberal Democrats – as local parties we were asked by our HQ to select candidates last summer, after the EU referendum.

Regular readers of my blog will be aware that I’m somewhat political. I can’t maintain a mysterious and thoughtful mien in the forthcoming campaign before finally, publically revealing my voting intentions. I am the treasurer of City of Chester Liberal Democrats, so:

Vote Liberal Democrat on 8th June, wherever you are!

Apr 23 2017

Book review: Man of Iron by Julian Glover

This review is on man-of-ironMan of Iron: Thomas Telford and the Building of Britain by Julian Glover. Telford fits in with my interest in the Industrial Revolution, which are longstanding – in my very early teens my first stay at a hotel was in Ironbridge for a weekend of visiting the museums in that area. More recently I moved to Chester which is not that far from the famous Pontscysyllte Aqueduct and the Menai bridge and London to Holyhead roads, all works Telford was involved in.

Telford was born in Eskdale in the Scottish Borders in 1757, a tightknit rural community from which a number of great names have emerged  – William Pulteney (formerly William Johnstone) key amongst them, as an early patron of Telford. His father, a shepherd, died shortly after he was born.

He originally apprenticed as a stonemason in Eskdale before travelling to Edinburgh and London, where he worked on the refurbishment of Somerset House. He next worked in Portsmouth where he started to be involved in architectural design. He moved to Shropshire to become (eventually) county surveyor in 1786, where he was engaged in a wide range of projects.

As we head into the 1790’s the projects he is involved in expand enormously. Starting with the Ellesmere Canal, which includes the Pontscysyllte Aqueduct. Originally it was intended as a lower level, stone structure with locks taking the canal into the valley, at one point it was proposed that it should carry a rail-way. However, when the moment came the economy and lightness of iron led to the high level structure we see today.

Telford then went on to an enormous construction project in Scotland including harbours, the Calendonian Canal, numerous bridges and roads which necessitated extensive biannual visits over a period of 20 years or so. This project was put in place by the government, keen to see development in the Highlands, and later in the period having more cash to fund such work having finished fighting the French.

In common with William Smith, who made the first geological map of Britain, and Erasmus Darwin he was tremendously mobile forever travelling at a time when travel was hard. (Both of these men were his contemporaries). Telford knew the Darwin family and admired Erasmus Darwin’s “The Loves of Plants”, an epic scientific poem (a genre that has long fallen into disuse). In his earlier years Telford turned his hand to (not particularly good) poetry in the manner of Robert Burns who again was also a contemporary and was born not far from Eskdale.

In addition to this he directed the construction of the London to Holyhead road including the Menai Bridge, and with spurs along the North Wales coast to Conwy. He also planned the Göta Canal which crosses Sweden from the North to the Baltic Seas. The book includes a lengthy appendix listing his works (and the resident engineers on those projects, where relevant), I did consider mapping all these works but decided the list was too long!

Much of his inner motivation we learn from his correspondence with Andrew Little, a boyhood friend which sadly ends in 1803 with the death at age 48 of Little. Telford never married and there is scarcely a hint of any relationships with any women, Glover suggests in passing that his relationship with Little may have been very deep.

In his correspondence with Little we see Telford’s voracious appetite for continuous learning, but also a degree of cunning in his ambitions. He is not just a skilled technician in his fields but also a skilled worker of contacts, and project manager. He had a keen eye for his progress.

There’s some discussion in the book as to how much we should consider the projects he was involved in as his individual successes or as part of a team. This seems to me to be something of a trap, we tend to seek out the hero, the individual in any venture rather than truly appreciate the team effort. Think for example the way in which individual footballers are adulated. This carries over into histories of science and engineering, much of popular history of science is about the “great man” rather than the broader sweep or the group effort. Telford was no doubt technically able across a wide range of topics, he knew how to work his patrons, and he seems an excellent project manager. It’s clear there were often others like William Jessop who were notionally his superior for projects such as the Ellesmere Port canal and some of the Scottish work and likewise he had strong independent subordinates, particularly in Scotland, who delivered the work. Often biographers seems to fall into the trap of considering their subject “not sufficiently recognised”.

Telford died in 1834, a somewhat diminished figure. By that time the railways were starting to spread across the country and they would soon displace the canals and roads that had been his life’s work. I can’t help thinking that the projects that he worked on such as the Menai Bridge, the London – Holyhead road and the Ellesmere Canal demonstrated that the railway lines which were to come were feasible, if not always economically viable. Many times whilst reading this book I googled for the bridges he had built and found them still standing, sometimes still in use, sometimes by-passed by newer versions built to carry traffic unimaginable 200 years ago. Nevertheless they represent an impressive legacy. 

Apr 08 2017

Book Review: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

hidden_figuresHidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly tells the story of Africa American women who worked as “computers” at NASA and its predecessor NACA during and after the Second World War.

In a first, this means I am currently reading both fiction and non-fiction by African-American women. (I’m also reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler)

The Hidden Figures worked initially in the West Area Computing Group at the NACA Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia, which did reseach on aircraft and then rocket design. The Computing groups carried out calculations at the behest of engineers from around the Centre, this was at a time when calculation was manual or semi-manual compared to today. Over time they were co-opted directly into research groups, some of them to ultimately become engineers. The West Computing group was mirrored by the East Area Computing Group – comprised of white women.

There is some history for women acting as “computers”, and the necessity of World War II led to the government taking on Africa American women for the job, in face of historic segregation. For African American women this was a rare opportunity, until then the only recourse for African American woman with advanced training in maths was teaching. For a very few the Computing group ultimately acted as a stepping stone to working as an engineer.

Shetterly sees these women as a vanguard to the African Americans in the modern US who have every opportunity open to them. This jars a little to me when I see constant news from the US of, for example black people being more likely to be killed by the police, or a senior African American being brought together by the President with the policeman that aggressively interviewed him on his doorstep because the house looked too nice to belong to a black man. Or African Americans being purposefully disenfranchised.

The shocking thing to me, as a Brit, was the degree to which US society was absolutely, formally segregated on racial grounds. In Virginia, where this story is set, segregation was preserved by the Democratic Party (perhaps some explanation as to why African Americans are not necessarily whole-heartedly Democrats). In Prince Edward County, Virginia they went as far as shutting down all the public schools for 5 years in order that black and white children would not be educated together – white children were given grants to study at private schools. Britain may have been racist in the past, it may still be racist today but it never enshrined it so deeply and widely into law.

In response to this Africa Americans ran a parallel community, segregation didn’t end because the segregation laws were repealed. It ended because African Americans saw the end of those laws as a door ajar which needed a serious push to pass through. Thus when Rosa Parks sat on the bus, Katherine Goble (from this book) went to university and Ruby Bridges went to school they didn’t do so entirely alone. They had the support of their community and the organisation of the NAACP to help them. They had to be twice as good as a white person to get the same job. At the same time they also saw themselves as representatives of their race, and examples to their children.

When you look at a man the age of Donald Trump, 70, it’s worth bearing in mind that his teenage years were spent during the end of segregation by law and his parents were the white generation which fought so hard to keep it.

The focus of the book is mainly the personal lives, and ambitions of the women. There is some description of the work they, and the Research Centre did, but not in any great depth. The book highlights again the transformative effect of, particularly, the Second World War on society in the US. The seeds of theses changes could be seen after the First World War. This mirrors similar changes in society in the UK.

Once “computing” became the realm of high capital machinery the importance of women as computers waned, high capital machinery being the preserve of men. We see the consequences of this even now.

The book finishes with the part Katherine Johnson, in particular, played in John Glenn’s first trip into orbit and her subsequent work on the Apollo moon landing and Apollo 13 recovery. Shetterly emphasises the legacy of this group of women that normalised the idea that Africa American women could ultimately become engineers, scientists or any other sort of professional.

Interestingly my wife and I disagreed on the prominence of the men on the cover of the book (see above). She thought they were central and thus important, I thought they were small and thus unimportant. In the text the men are bit-part players, they are husbands and sons, or drift in and out of the narrative having spoken their line.

Mar 26 2017

Book review: Working effectively with legacy code by Michael C. Feathers

legacy_codeWorking effectively with legacy code by Michael C. Feathers is one of the programmer’s classic texts. I’d seen it lying around the office at ScraperWiki but hadn’t picked it up since I didn’t think I was working with legacy code. I returned to read it having found it at the top of the list of recommended programming books from Stackoverflow at dev-books. Reading the description I learnt that it’s more a book about testing than about legacy code. Feathers defines legacy code simply as code without tests, he is of the Agile school of software development for whom tests are central.

With this in mind I thought it would be a useful read for me to improve my own code with the application of better tests and perhaps incidentally picking up some object-oriented style, in which I am currently lacking.

Following the theme of my previous blog post on women authors I note that there are two women authors in the 30 books on the dev-books list. It’s interesting that a number of books in the style of Working Effectively explicitly reference women as project managers, or testers in the text, i.e part of the team – I take this as a recognition that there exists a problem which needs to be addressed and this is pretty much the least you can do. However, beyond the family, friends and publishing team the acknowledgements mention one women in a lengthy list.

The book starts with a general overview of the techniques it will introduce, including the tools used to address them. These come down to testing frameworks and the refactoring tools found in many IDEs. The examples in the book are typically written in C++ or Java. I particularly liked the introduction of the ideas of the “seam”, a place where behaviour can be changed without editing the code and the “enabling point” – the place where a change can be made at that seam. A seam may be a class that can be replaced by another one, or a value altered. In desperate cases (in C) the preprocessor can be used to invoke test-time changes in the executed code.

There are then a set of chapters that answer questions that a legacy code-ridden developer might have such as:

  • I can’t get this class into a test harness
  • How do I know that I’m not breaking anything?
  • I need to make a change. What methods should I test?

This makes the book easy to navigate, if not a bit inelegant. It seems to me that the book addresses two problems in getting suitably sized pieces of code into a test harness. One of these is breaking the code into suitable sized pieces by, for example, extracting methods. The second is gaining independence of the pieces of code such that they can be tested without building a huge infrastructure up to support them.

Although I’ve not done any serious programming in Java or C++ I felt I generally understood the examples presented. My favoured language is Python, and the problems I tackle tend to be more amenable to a functional style of programming. Despite this I think many of the methods described are highly relevant – particularly those describing how to break down monster functions. The book is highly pragmatic, it accepts that the world is not full of applications in which beautiful structure diagrams are replicated by beautiful code.

There are differences between these compiled object-oriented languages and Python though. C#, Java, and C++ all have a collection of keywords (like public, private, protected, static and final) which control who can see what methods exist on a class and whether they can be over-ridden or replaced. These features present challenges for bringing legacy code under test. Python, on the other hand, has a “gentleman’s agreement” that method names starting with an underscore are private, but that’s it, and there are no mechanisms to prevent you using these “private” functions! Similarly, pretty much any method in Python can be over-ridden by monkey-patching. That’s to say if you don’t like a function in an imported library you can simply overwrite it with your own version after you’ve imported the library. This is not necessarily a good thing. A second difference is that Python comes with a unit testing framework and a mocking library rather than them being functionality which is third-party added. Although to be fair, the mocking library in Python was originally third party.

I’ve often felt I should programme in a more object-oriented style but this book has made me reconsider. It’s quite clear that spaghetti code can be written in an object oriented language as well as any other. And I suspect the data processing for which I am normally coding fits very well with a functional style of coding. The ideas of single responsibility functions, and testing still fit well with more functional programming styles.

Working effectively is readable and pragmatic. I suspect the developer’s dirty secret is that actually we wrote the legacy code that we’re now trying to fix.