For my PhD, I’ve been collecting videos of software developers explaining their code. I’m delighted that, after many months of networking and hassling people and leaving the country at very short notice, I’ve collected a decent set of videos, screencaptures, interviews and questionnaires (if you were involved in this in any way, you have my eternal gratitude ). Now the running-around-hassling-people is on the back burner** while I catch up on the transcription and analysis.

Onboarding (artist's impression)

Transcribing these materials is very, very slow, but also pretty interesting if you want to know what developers actually do. I also have a collection of wonderful quotes that made me laugh, none of which I am permitted to share with you.

Participant confidentiality.

* I discovered recently that if I’m not online very much, my parents will start to worry that I’ve been evicted from my house.

** That’s not to say I wouldn’t like more data if it happened to come my way…

Six months of use and it's holding up.

I was slightly concerned that this might add some extra lines of dialogue to the airport security theatre, but so far it has passed without comment.

Now that I have this wallet, I’d better learn to live up to it. Off to play with some transistors…

* There’s a difference between ‘finished’ and ‘completed’. Ask a gamer.

Really ties the room together.

It’s made of 100 triangles of white cotton, each with magnets sewn into each corner, so that you can just stick it in place ting-ting-ting to the bolts.

Satisfying to install.

Of course, sewing next to a magnet is physically impossible, because it magnetises the business parts of the sewing machine and causes it to jam. So instead, each corner is sewn without a magnet in it, and the magnet is pushed in before the threads are tied together. Doing this 300 times is incredibly boring (hence the ten-month project duration). If we ever need another dome cover, I’m outsourcing it to China.

Buddabag, nerdy cushions, and a swing.

Our house gets really cold over the winter, so I am seriously considering moving my office into the dome (adding some throws over the top for more insulation, and borrowing the bitcoin mine for warmth*). I should probably make a door first, though.

* Bitcoins are not going to make Charlie rich after all, but a bitcoin mine can be thought of as “Internet-subsidised heating”.

PPoA #11: County Cork

The town of Kinsale has art galleries and narrow streets and so on, and I’m sure it’s an excellent example of Quaint And Picturesque if it is not a windy and rainy afternoon in November. It is, of course, an eternal beautiful sunny day on the postcard.

What's with all the red objects?

I didn’t realise it at the time, but Kinsale is also the first Transition Town. I only learned about this a few days ago from Charlie’s friend Alec. The idea is to transform the town into one that can thrive without cheap oil and endless economic growth.

As well as the postcard, I also collected* another Irish idiom. The hotel receptionist, on forgetting what day it was:

“Now, what day have we here?”

Is this Irish grammar cropping up again, or old English?

* Ok, technically this happened in Cork City. But Cork City is represented by a giraffe, so clearly the whole project is something of a shambles.

My flying experience to date consisted of playing flight sims on the Amiga and complaining about Ryanair. No problem: the instructor and I clambered into a cute little yellow Grob, and after a long and involved safety dance (lyrics sheet supplied) he took off:

Then up at about a thousand feet he handed over the controls for half-an-hour’s instruction in climbing, descending, two different ways to turn, and getting the plane to stay level when you let go (that is to say, pitching, rolling, yawing and trimming). That flight sim experience actually came in quite handy for this. (The flight sim also taught me that it is a bad idea to land on the sea because, although your aeroplane will float nicely, you will be unable to take off again without resetting your Amiga. However, I did not put this to the test.)

Lesson 1 is all about “the picture”, or the view out of the windscreen and the position of the aircraft’s nose in relation to the horizon. This is not straightforward in Ireland, where the horizon will generally be covered by a bank of cloud, but not to worry, you just use the clouds instead.

"Ok, you need to be at thirty degrees to that line of cloud."

The German-built Grob is reassuringly responsive. I particularly liked the way it wanted to go up when you increased the throttle; heavier-than-air flight doesn’t actually feel heavy at all. Aerofoils are awesome.

I also learned the correct pronunciation of “altimeter”. It is not what I thought it was.

Pretending to fly a plane.

My other plane is an SR-71 Blackbird.

We got the tickets through LivingSocial. I feel a bit bad about this, having subsequently discovered that these daily deals companies are often bad news for the businesses they lure in. So, since I am but a poor grad student and not remotely likely to be going back for a PPL any time soon, I guess all I can do is say: go to Flightwise and have a go at flying, it’s lots of fun

Looks like a perfectly normal beach, I don't un...

IT'S ALL MADE OF SEAGLASS!

White, green, brown, blue, amber, occasional bits of china.

Can't... stop... collecting...

This magical place even has squirrels.

"What?"

So what’s going on here? A look at the next cove provides some answers.

This beach is very different.

On closer inspection, the rocks here are not rock. They’re lumps of densely compacted, rust-coloured waste material shot through with shards of glass.

Glass shards embedded in... what, exactly?

Many years ago, the beach was used as a dumping ground by local residents. The waves have turned most of the glass to seaglass, but the sea hasn’t reached this cove. There are old tyres here, and abandoned concrete, and a huge pipe gushing water over the rubble.

Pretty and vaguely toxic at the same time.

The whole area has a strange atmosphere. Populations come and go, and their best intentions and worst mistakes are all subject to the forces of nature. Sometimes we like the results, sometimes we don’t, but it has nothing to do with us.

Feels like something happened here, too.

How far out does the seaglass go?

This is a sad tomato.

The problem, as is so often the case, lay with starting. If I started a 25-minute tomato, I’d work reasonably hard on it and get things done. But then I wouldn’t want to start the next one at the end of the break, and I definitely didn’t want to start a block of four tomatoes at the end of a long break, because work is hard. I’d end up in tomato limbo, checking email, checking Twitter**, always on the verge of starting, but not doing any work and not even having any fun either (because, after all, I was supposed to be working).

Last week I was browsing my new favourite website, Less Wrong, and met an intriguing idea: instead of punishing people when they’re caught driving too fast through speed cameras, how about rewarding drivers who were under the limit by entering them into a prize draw?

And that set some neurons firing: our brains respond really well to regular but unpredictable rewards, as exploited by many a videogame (and that explains that email-Twitter cycle too).

Ok, I can use that. Behold my latest strategy: the Tomatoes of Destiny!

Pebbles stolen from a boardgame.

It works like this: there’s a bag on my desk that contains some glass pebbles, a few clear and the rest brown. I start a tomato timer and then draw a pebble. If it’s brown, I have to work. If it’s clear, I get the whole tomato to do whatever I want.

Thus, starting work is transformed into a game, with the tantalising possibility of a free tomato. That’s twenty five completely free minutes: no guilt, no looking busy***, just long enough to work on something interesting.

And if I draw a work pebble; meh, the timer’s already running, it’s only 25 minutes, and maybe the next one will be free, right?

I am my own lab rat.

* Though it did result in a lot of blog hits from people searching for ‘angry tomato’. What do you want, you people??

** Could be worse, I could still be on Facebook :S

*** This is clearly ridiculous. I work from home, who am I trying to fool?

**** This blog post exists as a result of drawing three clear pebbles in a row. Hmm, maybe the pebble ratio needs some tuning.

Gotta love the eyebrows.

That’s about the best street art in the area, but it doesn’t help at all with decoding the noise. Oh, hold on:

That looks more like it.

With the stickers collected up, and armed with this new information, I attacked the sound file again:

• 33.3 and 45 are vinyl speeds. I sped the sound up accordingly.
• The product of the squares of the first four primes? That’s 44100, a common sample speed for audio recordings.
• Next is a mono audio jack. Ok, the sound was mono.
• Next are a 386 processor and Queen Elizabeth I’s signature. I had no idea what these were about*.
• Finally, an XOR gate and the number 29 in binary. I wrote a few lines of Python to XOR every byte in the file.

and decoded a picture of my friend’s house.

Unfortunately my friend is in San Francisco**. I asked him about it and he suggested I look in the workshop instead. And in the workshop, ten days and just a few metres from where I started the treasure hunt, I finally found my birthday presents:

Presents!

• A binary blanket!
• Sky lanterns!
• (And the keys to the padlock on the second box. I did wonder…)

* “So what was that about?”
“32 bit signed!”

** I was supposed to solve the puzzle before he left. In the interests of him not getting burgled, you don’t get the picture

Charlie tells me that the information I need is right on the screen in front of me. Sure enough, Google tells me that 00013.76490 is a computer system from the Deux Ex game.

I try a few logins and find this:

That was *data*??

More sound, eh? I’d assumed partition 3 was unformatted garbage, but throwing all the data into Audacity nets another sound-that-sounds-like-a-picture. But this one is neither SSTV nor fax.

I puzzle over this for a while. It’s some other format, but what? Charlie finds me watching YouTube videos of weatherfaxes* and urges me to consider the psychedelic flowchart instead.

Dungeon map!

Some hinting later: it’s a map of the whole puzzle. Filling it in (starting on the left with the locked box) tells me that the letter, the map and the message about street art must be used together, and that I don’t yet have enough information to decipher the noise.

Not a website after all?

Back to the letter then. It has two sets of numbers: “6 15 39″ and “#351514″. Most geocaches in Dublin have an east/west coordinate of 6°15.XXXX, so that’s promising. Converting the second number in three chunks from hex to decimal gives 53°21.20. And that is here, near a crossroads…

So I’ll go there tomorrow and look for street art, I guess…

* Everybody hits RECORD halfway through the transmission. There is no example of a weatherfax header noise on the whole of YouTube. Sort it out, weatherfax nerds.

Awwww.

The pursing monsters are creepers from the game Minecraft. Charlie used to play a lot of Minecraft. We even made a set of wooden boxes in the style of Minecraft blocks…

… wait a minute, why is that box now full of shredded paper?

Sure enough, there's something inside.

Oh no, another lock...

Not only is this box chained and padlocked, the screws have been drilled out so I can’t unscrew them. Off to the workshop:

Sawing at 1am again. Oops.

The contents are wrapped in paper...

Inside is a remarkably pleasing solar powered circuit encased in resin:

Well, I wasn't expecting that.

Inside there's a PIC and a bit of bamboo.

At first I thought this was another radio transmitter, but when placed under a bright lamp, it emitted red light from an LED inside the bamboo shielding. Pulses of light… it’s Morse code again*.

It says “Have you seen any good street art recently?”

It is presently very late on a Saturday night, there are distant explosions, and I don’t want to go looking for street art right now. I return to a still-unsolved puzzle: the apparently empty partition on the USB drive.

It’s an NTFS drive and there’s definitely something on it. Running ntfsundelete nets me an executable called ‘unknown’, and running that gives me this login:

The tyranny of the waiting prompt.

What is my username here? What am I even logging into? No idea. I’m stuck again.

* Maybe I should just learn Morse code since I need it so often.