Software Problems, Grape Varieties And Weather

The Paris-Moscow Express

When I first saw in the news that this was coming I immediately thought of a new fast rail link between the two cities. No so; rather it was Arctic conditions arriving with a strong wind, just when I was beginning to think that winter was over. If the weather forecast is correct we'll miss the worst of it here and it shouldn't have too much effect on what I have been planning to do except that a final clear-up in the garden at the back will have to wait and I doubt I'll be playing boules for the next few days. I went into Buis today but played only one match before deciding with several others that it was too cold to continue. Maybe I'll do some more ambitious cooking, although I've just made myself a number of Cornish pasties to consume during the week and probably pass out to some friends. English cooking is still regarded among my French friends with a degree of suspicion despite the efforts of friend Jo and I to inculcate trust.

Anyway, the first asparagus and strawberries are in the shops.  The asparagus is from Spain and the strawberries from Morocco but local asparagus will be around in the next 3-4 weeks and local strawberries a couple of weeks after.  Signs of spring and the good local produce to come so to hell with the Paris-Moscow express.

Grape Varieties

At lunch on Sunday friend Steve produced a couple of bottles of wine to replace our usual favoured local red. One was a Côtes du Rhône but with just a blend of Grenache and Carignan, without the usual supporting Syrah or Mourvèdre. On tasting it I was instantly reminded of the dessert grapes I used to buy in the winter in England, which were always called Red Flame grapes (from south America). I think those grapes must have been either Grenache or Carignan, so why weren't they labelled as such?

It seems strange to me but dessert grapes seem never to be labelled, either here or in England, by their variety, with the notable exception of Muscat. In the autumn here red Muscat grapes are in all the shops, labelled as such. Both here and in England there are also grapes labelled Italia, which are most probably Muscat but could just be Ugni. Apart from that all the labelling I have found says just red or white, which is really redundant, pretty obvious when you look at the grapes. It occurred to me to wonder why this is, particularly in France where people are much more conscious of grape varieties than we Brits are. I wonder whether the same applies across Europe.

Resolving Software Problems

I had been using Skype to see and chat with my daughter and her family until a couple of week ago when Skype failed on me; when I tried to make a call it went immediately to “call terminated”. So I installed Messenger and used that instead. Then Messenger failed on me, refusing to initiate a call and insisting I review parameters which were all as they should be. Scratching my head about what was going wrong I decided the best solution was probably to uninstall both and then install them again. That seems to have solved the problem but.……………...what a crazy way to have to proceed.

I remember at the 1968 NATO conference on software engineering a guy from Bell Laboratories commenting on a problem they had had with one of the earliest telephone switching systems. He, responsible for keeping the system up and running, had had to resolve an intractable problem the essentially the same way, by rebooting. Called before the Board to explain why a large part of the Bell telephone network had gone down for some time; he explained that he had done it deliberately (to resolve a problem). He said the Board totally failed to understand why someone employed to keep the system up and running would deliberately tear it down (and he ondered about his career progression).

Two things occur to me. One is former friend Edsger Dijkstra's stricture that when we create systems we don't adequately understand we are on dangerous ground. The other is how the hell a desperate measure conceived half a century ago still manages to be a common answer to software problems today.

But the culture shock produced by computers at the time was very considerable; people struggled to understand.  In the same period the UK Customs and Excise totally misunderstood the import/export of programs. Programs punched on cards passed duty-free because the cards were used whereas boxes of unused cards attracted duty.  And magnetic tapes had to have an extra long leader attached to them because Customs was entitled to sample goods passing through and sometimes did.  I often wondered what they did with the bits of magnetic tape; try to get a tune out of them or find some pictures?