Odd day

Odd day really. Got a new cooker installed after the other one went fuzzle fuzzle pop - was not worth replacing the element for - installers did a good job but could not get the RCD back on - not their fault as oldish - I tried and then turned another one off leaving me with no power! A few expletives went through my mind but not my mouth. Then one of the guys suggested WD40, worked a treat, both went back on easily. Had to leave the box to breath for a while as WD40 is flamable and the RCD's are rated to 32 Amps.

Then internet connection has been playing up all day with only a 160Kbps download speed on an ADSL connection, well tempremental, only waited nine hours to sort out completely - changed everything - including using the spare modem - still back to normal now.

Whilst on the Train on Sunday to meet Mum in London, I continued to read a book on Turing I have bought - well hard! Read three pages and then need a cap nap to let the brain cool down. Still it is worth while reading as you can start to understand where all of this Computing lark came from. I do realise that Alan Turing is not the only person involved, but it gives a good insight into Finite State Machines for without it TCP would not be able to implement Sliding Window and no internet, and therefore no blogging. Although reading Wikipedia's definition, perhaps Sliding Window is not state based, however the TCP Protocol must so it can function. And I think should be 'Circle Free' so that it never stops working.

On that note, Charles Petzold has written a really good book - even though I am not at the end of it yet. Turing does state that it not possible to create a decision machine that will tell you if another machine will fail - i.e. 'crash' in modern times. Now if you consider all possible decision machines, then you can consider humans as decision machines. After all, I decided that I wanted Salad for lunch. In my experience of writing software, it is possible to determine if a piece of code is going to work or not before it is actually executed - either as you are writing the code (Sofware Engineering) or as a part of some sort of testing process such as a structured walkthrough - Wikipedia describes this process as a Software Walkthrough. And yet it is stated in the book that Decision Machines that perform this function of determination cannot exist. It also states that Alan Turing has something to say on the matter - more reading to do!