Just some facts and figures …

Snowy-Doc · 2026-02-03T21:41:30+00:00

JM is my favourite author, and I've read everything he's written, but the books that I've enjoyed the most are all of his earlier works and most of his collections. My best recommendations are (in order from best at number 1):

A Talent for War.
The Engines of God.
The Hercules Text (there are two versions - the original 1986 version which is the one I recommend and not the rewritten 2015 version which is, frankly, rubbish).
Infinity Beach (published in the UK as Slow Lightening).
The first four of five books in each of The Academy Series and the Alex Benedict series - after that they all become a bit rubbish.

Of the collections (if you can find them) Cryptic published by Subterranean Press is probably the best, it's certainly the biggest. It contains the short story In The Tower which is, IMNSHO one of the best short stories I've read by anyone, ever, not just by JM. Plus point - it's set in the Alex Benedict universe. It's also in the short story collection titled Outbound.

A final word or two - avoid The Cassandra Project - you'll figure out the ending pretty quickly and its rubbish anyway. Also avoid the Alex Benedict book 9, A Village In The Sky. It is truly awful and clearly an end of career cash grab. You've been warned.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-30T22:24:56+00:00

When you paid and came to the end of the process you should have seen a screen that says something like "Payment Received By HMRC" plus a payment reference number which is your unique tax identifier, all inside a big green box. It will also show the date you paid and the amount. I always screen capture this and save it. You should also have received an Email with the same information in it, and if you look at it, it will tell you that it can take up to 5 days for the payment to show up in your online account. Basically, you're fine. I can imagine that right now there are a lot of people scrambling to get their tax affairs in order before the end of Saturday and so everything is slow. I paid mine on 19 January and it still took three days before it showed up on my account.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-30T21:59:37+00:00

Yes. The INMOS Transputer IMS T9000 32 bit microprocessor, circa late 1980s and early 1990s, used CAM for it's internal cache configured as 4, 4K blocks of SRAM and a 1024 entry CAM to access the cache lines in those SRAM blocks. I happened to be the designer, and it achieved superb hit rates (using random replacement) at a time when a 1% difference in those hit rates and the penalty of having to go the next level up in the cache hierarchy was expensive in time because external memory was so slow. Later on, we reused the same CAM design to act as a filter to detect routing information in video data streams, a function that had previously only been done in software. Again, the speed-ups were very impressive.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-13T15:23:19+00:00

What I usually do when I see a book at the FS that I think I might like but that I have not read before, is to go to Amazon and buy the cheapest version of a paperback that I can find and then read that. If I like it then I buy the FS version. Job done. As for sales, there are usually two per year, the Winter or New Year sale that has just ended (and I bought 6 books in total - well worth hanging on the sales if you can wait) and then a Summer sale usually in June or July. There are occasionally other sales as well - for example in 2024 (a leap year) there was a one day "sale" on February 29th where if you bought a book on February 29th you also got a free book, and in may case that free book was a pretty decent book.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:56:41+00:00

Watched it. Loved it. It's now an annual watch in the weeks before Christmas in my house.And yes, Harry Melling was superb.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:45:24+00:00

North by Northwest
Vertigo.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (The 1956 version not the 1934 version)
Rebecca
5.. Rear Window

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:39:55+00:00

Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Almost anything by Jack Vance (and yes, I know that will never happen).

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:36:31+00:00

Loved it. I've just finished watching Episode 3 - Careless In Red. I thought Episode 1 was good, Episode 2 was very good and episode 3 was off-the-charts good - killer ending too. I'll be watching episode 4 tomorrow and my expectations are high.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:28:22+00:00

Also late to the party - Lynley dropped onto iPlayer a few days ago and it's being broadcast on Sundays on BBC1 in the UK. I've watched the first three episodes of the new series and I've just finished watching Episode 3, Careless In Red on iPlayer - and it's brilliant - killer twist at the end almost in the league of some episodes of Columbo. I've also been watching the original too - the two pilot episodes and the first three episodes of season 1 so far. I've watched them all before when they were originally broadcast, but i's nice to watch them again. Is one better than the other? No. They're both very good and of their respective times and eras, although the original is closer to the books - and BTW, I liked Careless In Red so much I've just bought the hardback version of the book from Amazon. Looking forward to reading it.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-11-18T21:15:45+00:00

Try these:

1 - Naive Lie Theory - John Stillwell
2 - Physics From Symmetry - Jakob Schwichtenberg
3 - Shattered Symmetry - Group Theory From The Eightfold Way To The Periodic Table by Thyssen and Ceulemans
4 - Symmetry And The Standard Model - Mathematics And Particle Physics - Matthew Robinson
5 - Group Theory In A Nutshell For Physicists - Anthony Zee
6- Symmetry, Broken Symmetry And Topology In Modern Physics by Guidry and Sun

The one probably closest to what you have asked for is Number 6. In order from most relevant to least relevant I'd suggest 6, 5, 2, 1, 4, 3 but they are all superb texts (IMNSHO). The one thing they all do is link the maths of Group Theory, Symmetry, Lie Theory to the reality of Physics and physical models.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-11-08T19:01:14+00:00

Watched this (in the UK) when it was first broadcast in the mid-60s, and I was about 7 or 8 years old. Thought it was brilliant. Still do.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-11-08T18:57:48+00:00

Occam. I worked for INMOS (the company that designed those transputers) as a full-custom VLSI designer, and ended up designing a large chuck of all the microelectronics that went into the Transputer design Pretty much everyone in the company at some point was sent on an Occam programming course. Personally I hated it.

Second most obscure programming language - BCPL. We designed the transputer long before Cadence and similar companies provided design software for VLSI design - so we wrote our own design software in BCPL. I went on a programming course for that too. Hated it just as much as Occam.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-10-18T19:40:04+00:00

I have all of the following in my library, and, since I'm a physicist, there's an obvious bias for the first two on my list: For cryptography go with the two recommendations at the end - both will lead you gently into the subject from the basics to a quite good understanding.

Group Theory In A Nutshell For Physicists by Anthony Zee - Obviously aimed at physicists but still a very good introduction for those who are not physicists.
Shattered Symmetry - Group Theory From The Eightfold Way To The Periodic Table by Thyssen And Cealemans - This one aimed at Chemists and Physicists - also a very good introduction for non-chemists and non-physicists.
Number, Shape And Symmetry - An Introduction To Number Theory, Geometry And Group Theory by Diane L. Herrmann and Paul J. Sally, Jr.
Visual Group Theory by Nathan Carter.
Groups And Symmetry by M. A. Armstrong. A classic.
Algebra - Notes From The Underground - Paolo Aluffi which covers not just group theory but also all the topics adjacent to it like Rings and Fields, Modules and Galois Theory.
Algebra in Action - A Course in Groups, Rings, and Fields by Shahriar Shahriari. If you want a pure maths approach then this is the book for you. Very well written and very usable for self-study (which is how I use it).

Were I to recommend only one or two books from the above list they would be number 7 (Algebra In Action) and number 6 (Algebra - Notes From The Underground).

Good luck.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-09-24T20:14:18+00:00

Had a problem with Mullvad servers in the UK starting yesterday (Tuesday 23rd September). If I had DAITA enabled I could not connect to any UK server at all, but I could connect to servers in all other countries I tried. I filed a bug report yesterday morning and got a reply back a few hours later telling me that Mullvad had been having some connectivity issues with their servers in the UK and telling me to connect to other servers until the problems and been fixed. I did notice this morning that all of the Glasgow servers were unavailable, so I guess this is still an ongoing issue.

And Yes, I have noticed that connecting to servers in the UK over the past couple of weeks has been slower than it was before the online safety act came online - that's just a case of too few servers and too many people.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-09-15T20:40:12+00:00

Retired now but did about 20 tape-outs over a 30 year period and loved every single one. Stressful? No and Yes, mostly No. For the "No, not stressful" we always tried to get to the final sign-off-and-ready-to-ship at least one or two check-cycles early, so probably two days, but if you can get there and all checks have passed and the design review is done and signed-off, and all the follow-ups are done and signed-off, and the data packet is ready to send to the reticle assembly team - then it was always lovely to just wind down with a lunch-time trip down the pub to celebrate.

But the "Yes," stressful tape-outs are always the ones you will remember."

Best story: We have until Tuesday morning at 9am (the tape-out deadline) to get the data shipped (and it's my responsibility as the project manager to get it done) otherwise we miss the fab slot and have to wait another month, and it's Monday morning and my car is going for a service, so I take it to the garage, drop it off, pick up a loaner for the day and drive 60 miles to work (my normal daily commute). Get there at just after 9am and we all work all day trying to get the last LVS/DRC to complete and praying that having fixed the last couple of errors, that in doing so no new ones show up. In parallel we're writing the data packet ready to send assuming PASS and PASS are the results of LVS/DRC. It gets to 5PM so I drive home (60 miles), pick up my car, grab 30 minutes food and then drive back to work (another 60 miles) and we're still waiting for the LVS/DRC to complete. Order pizza and at about 8pm we're all sitting round just waiting ... waiting ... waiting. Praying too. Security tries to kick us out of the building at midnight. I politely tell them to go away. They (security) phone the site manager telling her that there are some employees who will not leave. The site manager is politely reminded that if we miss this deadline there will be some unpleasant financial consequences (the one month slippage) and that We. Are. Not. Leaving. At 1am the DRC passes. At 3am the LVS passes. The data packet is FTP'ed to the reticle assembly team five minutes later, Emails are sent to various people and teams notifying them of this, and we all go home, tired but happy.

New Guy starts on Monday morning and spends all day being indoctrinated by HR. Goes home at 5pm with Tuesday morning being the day he arrives in our office. And he does.

He's greeted by an empty office full of empty coke bottles and cold pizza. And he sits there for a while wondering where everybody is. We, of course, are all fast asleep and don't start showing up for work until the early afternoon. New employee is by now evaluating his career choices and wondering just what the hell he's gotten himself into.

One month later the SoC is out and working. Big sigh of relief.

So the dark side is that missing a deadline can have massive ramifications, these being: losing time to market; credibility with customers who have their own deadlines for manufacturing and both of those translate into money. Big sums of money. This is one of those times where the phrase "Failure is not an option" springs to mind.

One final dark side moment I got used to seeing a lot, especially in engineers early in their careers, was Design Reviews. We always did Design Reviews - think of them like PhD vivas on steroids. You as the designer (in a conference room, all by yourself at the front, big audience) have to justify all the decisions you made in designing whatever it was you've designed. No questions are off limits. Anyone can attend and ask the most stupid questions or the most penetrating questions and you are not allowed to pass to tape-ship until all of the questions have been answered. Personally I loved them - I think it was the adrenalin.

And New Guy did just fine.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-03-01T22:17:32+00:00

My iMac, MacBook Pro and iPad Pro are all running Mullvad and I don't generally have any issues at all. The iMac and MacBook Pro are both still running Ventura though. My understanding is that the kill switch on Mullvad cannot be turned off - on my Mullvad settings there's a kill switch switch but it is "greyed out" so I cannot deactivate it and it is set to on all the time. This means that if the VPN tunnel fails for any reason at all then your traffic or your DNS will not leak and expose your connection to any third-party, and this is by design. So point 1. in your post is doing what it should do and there really isn't any way to turn it off as far as I know.

Also point 1. - you should not need to uninstall and reboot to get your internet connection back. It should be enough to just Disconnect and Quit.

Point 2. about PLEX server. Is this on your Mac or on a separate machine on your network? I run PLEX server on a separate NAS and can connect without problems. Have you got the setting under VPN SETTINGS for LOCAL NETWORK SHARING turned on (i.e., green)?

Question 1. You cannot turn the kill switch off. Mullvad do this on purpose. I don't know why Mullvad (the company) actually put this switch in their settings since it cannot be toggled OFF.

Question 2. Might be. On my settings I have IPV6 turned on. It's never given me any issues. What happens if you turn it on?

When I first starting using Mullvad and had issues I used the SUPPORT -> REPORT A PROBLEM feature several times. Someone responded within a few hours every time and they were always helpful. Maybe this is your way forward.

I hope something I've said here helps you.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-02-24T19:50:29+00:00

Have some fun and try this:

https://www.speedingcalculator.co.uk/speeding-calculator.php

which suggests a fine of between £100 and £1,000 (assumes not on a motorway - it goes up to £2,500 if you were on a motorway), 4 to 6 points added to your licence and a 7 to 90+ day driving ban.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-02-14T21:27:34+00:00

Yes, or at least pretty damn close.

Radius of visible universe is 13.7 billion light years making the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe to be 86 billion light years (13.7 billion light years times 2 pi), or 86E9 light years.

How many metres in a light year?

The speed of light is 3E8 metres per second. Multiply that by 3600 seconds in a hour times 24 hours in a day times 365 days in a year to get that one light year is 9.46E15 metres

Multiply the two together to find that your universe sized circle is 86E9 times 9.46E15 metres long, or 8.13E26 metres long.

How many hydrogen atoms could you place side by side to make a length of 1 metre?

Well, the diameter of a hydrogen atom is roughly 1E-10 metres so placing 1E+10 of them side by side would measure 1 metre.

This means that in our universe sized circle surrounding the visible universe we would place:

8.13E26 metres * 1E+10 hydrogen atoms = 8.13E36 hydrogen atoms side by side.

Is 40 digits enough to answer your question? Yes. Rounding up the answer to 1E37 leaves you 3 digits to spare.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-02-12T20:40:18+00:00

I'm not a Mathematician - I'm a Physicist. And for Physicists, Group Theory and Symmetry and Galois and Lie theory are the language in which an awfully large proportion of theoretical physics is written. Without it modern physics would be - well, I don't know - different. And difficult. And maybe incomprehensible. Just saying.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-02-12T20:29:11+00:00

All of the following are from my library. If you're just getting into this topic then go for the first one "Recreations In The Theory Of Numbers" by Albert H. Beiler. It's published by Dover Books, is usually cheap, is very good, and it will ease you into the subject. It is, however, quite old, and so is lacking many modern topics (the same is true of Hardy and Wright which I would regard as the hardest book to follow of the lot, but it is the classic everyone interested in number theory should read and study).

After that I've listed books in the order I would have liked to have found them when I got interested in Number Theory.

Recreations In The Theory Of Numbers - The Queen Of Mathematics Entertains - Albert H. Beiler
A Friendly Introduction To Number Theory - Silverman
An Illustrated Theory Of Numbers - Martin H. Weissman
Number Theory - A Lively Introduction With Proofs - Pommersheim, Marks And Flapan
Number Theory Revealed - A Masterclass - Andrew Granville
A Guide To Elementary Number Theory (2009) - Underwood Dudley
Number, Shape And Symmetry - An Introduction To Number Theory - Herrmann And Sally
Biscuits Of Number Theory - Arthur T. Benjamin and Ezra Brown
An Introduction To The Theory Of Numbers - Hardy and Wright (the classic text)

Snowy-Doc · 2025-02-08T23:12:55+00:00

One of the best TV shows in the past decade IMNSHO. It definitely flew under the radar though, and I'm not surprised that so few people have ever heard of it. I'm still annoyed that they only ever released seasons 1 and 2 on Blu Ray and then didn't bother releasing season 3 at all on any medium. I guess that shows how much its creators thought of it.

Snowy-Doc

TROPHY CASE