Freesteel

“This is the boss’s son; he’ll be working his way up from the bottom over the next two weeks.”

I’ve always wanted to use that sentence. Fortunately, neither my employment with NC Graphics, nor NC Graphics itself lasted long enough for this morale-obliterating situation to come to pass.

However, announced at Surfware on 1 July 2008:

Stephen A. Diehl has been named President and CEO of Surfware, Inc., developer of SURFCAM® CAD/CAM systems.

“I am proud and happy to announce that my eldest son Stephen will take over as Surfware President and CEO of Surfware, “says Alan Diehl, founder and former CEO of Surfware, Inc. “Stephen has been working with me behind the scenes for several years and more recently, full time at Surfware.”

But I’m not here to pick on the elements of shouldn’t-be-admired experience gained working in the vast global swindle and misallocation of capital of which the real-time trading of stocks, bonds and swaps for Fortune 500 companies is but part.

My attention was actually grabbed by a 19th of August announcement of a Notice of Allowance signifying that their patent application has been examined and is allowed for issuance as a [software] patent.

I blogged about this back in November 2005. The links to the patent pending pages on the US Patent Office webpage seem to pull out random patents now (for a Jet nozzle mixer and a Classification-expanded indexing and retrieval of classified documents thingie) because the Office’s website is absolutely shite and inexplicably avoids the use of the handy centuries-old unique-id system provided for these documents by the patent number. On the other hand, my European Patent Office link from three years ago does still work, because it does.

You can read the entire 38 pages of gory details on-line there. The provisional applications were filed in April 2004. Think: if all the work and expense that went into writing this patent and applying for it had instead been applied to working on the code itself, maybe they wouldn’t have had to spend the last four years “taking it to new levels of excellence”.

The announcement explains:

The origin of the patent application goes back to early 2002 — Surfware’s R&D Department. Robert (Pat) Patterson came up with the core idea for engagement milling, and he and Surfware co-founder Alan Diehl, set out to develop it into a workable product. Within one year they had developed two different versions of TrueMill, both covered in patent applications.

Over the next several years, the pair went on to supervise the project based on their core ideas, with some assistance from the SURFCAM product manager. In 2005, the initial patent application for engagement milling was filed with the co-inventors listed in alphabetical order, without regard to their actual contribution.

So that’s why when you search for “surfware” on the USPTO website (I’m not wasting time with their deeplinks) you get:

• Application: 20050246052, Filed March 2, 2005: Coleman, Glenn; (Cave Creek, AZ) ; Diehl, Alan; (Westlake Village, CA) ; Patterson, Robert B.; (Bellevue, WA)
• Application: 20050256604, Filed April 22, 2005: Diehi, Alan; (Westlake Village, CA) ; Patterson, Robert B.; (Bellevue, WA)

Back in 2005, Glenn Coleman was touting the benefits of Truemill in his capacity as Surfware’s Vice President of Product Design.

Also around at the time doing the same thing in his capacity as Vice President of Worldwide Sales, was Domenic Lanzillotta.

And then there was Dr Evan Sherbrooke who was Systems Architect. And there was Terry J. Sorensen who joined in May 2006 and became CEO of Surfware in December 2006, even though he was not Alan Diehl’s son.

Meanwhile, in Scottsdale (Phoenix) Arizona, in October 2006 Mike Coleman (probably no relation) announced the appointment of Domenic Lanzillotta as Vice President of Worldwide sales, and Greg Dare as Director of Marketing at TekSoft. Lanzillotta was formerly Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Surfware, and Dare was formerly Director of Marketing for Surfware.

In September 2007 TekSoft announced a new toolpath strategy, called the Adaptive roughing strategy providing the ability to cut using the full depth of the tool and safely running machines at optimum speed to reduce machining time up to 40% over conventional roughing with less wear.

A friend who went to the EMO 2007 trade show at the time saw it in action. In an interview in the same month, Mike Coleman said:

“Rather than pretending that a couple of guys in the back room can come up with everything that we need, we buy our HSM algorithms from a third party that devotes 10–15 programmers to developing just the HSM modules,” he says. This third party can afford to invest more in the module than most other developers because selling it to companies allows it to amortize the cost over a larger user base.

The two of them, Dare and Lanzillotta seemed happily installed at the TekSoft trade show booths in February 2007 at SolidWorks World (in same room as HSMWorks) and March 2007 at Westec.

In early 2008 Lanzillotta moves to Planit to sell Edgecam software from Thousand Oaks California.

At some point around then, Sorensen introduced his new marketing department with Steve Crane as the Director of Marketing [I have his business card - he told me I was crazy], Steve Myers, Sales Engineer, and Bryan Sullivan, Media Relations Manager.

Then in April 2007, Sorenson, Sherbrooke and Glenn Coleman show up with their new business model attempting to market a new algorithm called VoluMill, which goes on-line in October 2007 from Cave Creek (Phoenix) Arizona.

That gives them about 6 months to write their new algorithm and release it. I observed it in December 2007 while at the Euromold trade show. It uses the neat but flawed idea of hosting the algorithm on their servers and arranging for your CAM system to transfer the model to them, generate the toolpaths, and transfer the results back. It’s a nice idea. The payment is by a monthly service plan rather than, say, per metre of toolpath calculated. We’ve made a much more sophisticated implementation of this, and could have given them the code if they’d asked. It seems that users are not quite as excited by it all as we are, so the innovators all need to work together to create the interest.

Not that any of this happens, mind you. Now I’d thought that VoluMill had basically died as so many on-line things do, but there’s a non-spam message from June 2008 on the forum:

Question: I am a hobbyist user. and although the up-front cost is zero, have you considered a plan which limits the number of tool-paths that can be generated in a month, or maybe a per usage charge?

As a hobbyist I am not so much interested in the aspects of saving time as I am in a good quality tool path. It appears that your paths work well on machines that can not accelerate quickly since they try to maintain a constant velocity.

Answer: At this time we have not received a level of interest that would make it a high priority. However, if the level of interest in such an option increases we will address it accordingly.

That answer is from Joe McChesney, Product Manager. It’s a closed user forum, so I can’t post a message telling the questioner that we’d happily give him a free copy of the Adaptive Clearing algorithm in return for some user feedback and movies.

Given what they achieved in terms of development in their first six months, what have they been doing over the past year? Also, I’ll eat my hat if they have any customers using their service at all. You can see the client source code activity here.

Back to the evil software patents — the filing of which is as much of a waste of programmer time as technical blogging like this — I asked someone about it at Euromold 2005 and took action. I received effective confirmation about it from their General Counsel of Surfware Inc in February 2006. According to the Patent Office rules:

Each individual associated with the patent owner in a reexamination proceeding has a duty of candor and good faith in dealing with the Office, which includes a duty to disclose to the Office all information known to that individual to be material to patentability in a reexamination proceeding.

So that’s all right then.

Not that the Adaptive Clearing algorithm has anything but superficial similarity in intent with TrueMill or VoluMill. But when has that ever been an excuse to avoid grief? The real defence is that the world at large hasn’t found it particularly interesting, so there’s no money worth arguing about.

The fact is, we should all be talking and working together on this. The market does not seem to have taken to new technologies, such as constant engagement milling, as it ought to have been. There are significant savings to be made in production machining by applying something like this, even if it was a very temperamental and unstable release. However, I don’t see evidence at the trade shows of it ever being used by the machine tool vendors, say. The only place it gets exhibited is on the stands of the CAM companies that sell these algorithms, and nowhere else. This is an issue.

With a market that is as conservative as it is, it makes it very difficult to get anywhere, because the dominant CAM companies can keep flogging their ten year old systems at the same high prices, invest nothing into development, and pocketing all the profits for as long as it takes users never to notice.

Ultimately the problem is with the users and their level of interest. They’ve got lots of better things they need to do than care about the software, and none of them seem to show any curiosity whatsoever as to what goes into it. The vendors spin this line about how there’s all these programmers at work in a back room you can’t talk to, and the company has all its secret special valuable algorithms that are extra good works of genius better than the science behind General Relativity, and I don’t think they actually need to bother with these fairy-tales. So few people question it. All the company needs to say is:

“Yes, we sacked all the programmers last year, and we’re down to our last guy who knows how to compile the system for new versions of the operating system. We pay him well to stay. No you won’t get your bugs fixed, because at this stage of development everyone seems able to work around the issues that remain without too much hassle. We’re certain that no one is going to come along with anything new and better because they won’t be able to afford the years of development that it took to get ours up to this stage. Back when our product was being developed in the 1990s it was possible to make money with fewer features and with something that ran slower on the machine, and at that time we were still re-investing the money and keeping lots of well-motivated programmers working on it to get it ahead. Now we don’t need to do this, because we believe that the development gap is too wide for any new start-ups to be able to bridge it with us competing against them while they are still in their early days. We know you, the customer, will not give them a second thought until they have everything we do and twice as good, and they’ll always go out of business before that happens. Today and tomorrow, we own this software. It is indeed stagnant. And if you want it, you can take it at the price we like, and I’ll be able to afford a nice car and continue filling it with gas to drive back and forth across Arizona until this economy goes completely into the ground because we’re not able to tell the difference between producing stuff and making money. Thank you very much.”

Like I said, it would be nice to come clean in the CAM software industry as to which system uses what kernel and whose algorithm. I don’t think the users actually give a toss enough to make a difference to sales. Some transparency would be really helpful for people like me to find out who in the world is actually still programming these specialized algorithms in order to share tips and find out where the jobs are.

In the absence of this, all I’ve got is this blog-ranting about manager-level machinations within the industry that have nothing to do with actually getting any programming work done. Even communication that’s one-way can be useful.

For reasons known to myself, I have decided that it would be convenient to be able to get a quick result for the distance of closest approach from a given point to a model…

I was going to outline how I have begun work on a giant 3D array of cells which each know the minimum answer for all the points in the cube, but have just thought of something better in the process of writing after I spent the last two days on the project.

I was going to cache all the results in an array: vector< vector< vector< double > > > subdividing the region in space and compute the closest difference between cubes and triangles, and began writing the code. Here’s the annoying code for doing it to a point:


void BoxClosest::MergeClosPoint(const P3& p)
{
double pdsq = Square(xrg.Distance(p.x));
if (pdsq > clossq) return;
pdsq += Square(yrg.Distance(p.y));
if (pdsq > clossq) return;
pdsq += Square(zrg.Distance(p.z));
if (pdsq > clossq) return;
clossq = pdsq;
}


where

struct P3 { double x, y, z }
struct I1 { double lo, hi }
struct BoxClosest { I1 xrg, yrg, zrg; double clossq }


The code for edges and triangles is very horrible. There should be some fancy algorithm to fill it in across the entire space, but I don’t know if it one exists. It’s an interesting puzzle.

Anyways, I’m hoping I can throw all that code out shortly if I proceed with something a bit more interesting that is able to cache the results and do it by points instead of cubes.

Ultimately I want a function that gives me the following:


bool IsDistanceGreater(const P3& p, double r, triangulated_model)
{
if (distance(p, triangulated_model) > r) return true;
// false negatives are acceptable as long as it's fast
return false;
}


Now, if we know (have earlier calculated) that s = distance(q, triangulated_model), and it happens to be that s - distance(p, q) > r then we can get the answer quickly, using power of metric spaces.

We have ultimate case of lazy calculations here. The function remains valid for the same set of triangles, so it can be shared among several algorithms and they will constantly get faster as the computer runs on them for longer. It could be a strange situation. The first 5-axis pass will be slow. The second will be faster, as long as it doesn’t go too far away from the first. How this optimizes for multi-core coding is another problem.

Several of my FOI requests have matured while I was away, following my adventures with the Audit Commission Act.

Vellum

A slightly annoyed response from the House of Lords put me right about my stupid belief that there was a set of printing presses running on cowhide on the premises of Westminster. I have now requested details in the TSO contract stipulating that vellum must be used, and preventing them from producing it in a 0.0001pt typeface so as not to create waste. I ranted about this topic in June following my discovery of a stupid vote in Parliament in 1999 over the issue.

Now if we could have a debate about publishing Acts and Bills in XML and funding it with the cost savings of not doing it on cow-hide, then we could move forward.

BBC secrecy

As I observed to them, the BBC operates a very detailed database of whole website commissions, creative inputs, content ingest costs, application technologies, content rights, customised software licences and contractors/freelancer/sole traders engaged on a “deliverables” basis — in order to verify its Quota Requirement of External Spend on Future Media & Technology, which was reported as being 31%.

However, following “considerable consultation” with the new media industry, it was agreed that a set of virtually useless performance metrics could be provided which would “be helpful” to the industry whilst not compromising commercial confidentiality — which they then didn’t publish.

They gave out the three page document of what they could publish (which I didn’t find very helpful), but couldn’t be bothered to gather any details about said “considerable consultation” which resulted in this surprising level of non-disclosure. So it’s remains a secret as to which companies told them that their business had to be secret.

Rother District Council

The floodgates of information were finally opened by the Interim Solicitor when he got a letter from the ICO telling him to behave. This letter, and many others, was disclosed under a request for all communications about the whatdotheyknow website.

I’d been concerned by the threat in all the correspondence that “any application for consent to re-use information will be considered under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005, but if consent is given a charge may be made to you” and made a request following a close reading of the Regulations.

The reply was finally satisfactory and pointed to this page detailing their Re-use of Public Sector Information policy. As I suspected, there has so far been no re-use of Rother District public sector information, and no plans for any in the future. I think it’s a fresh document, and shares some words (also with the Regulation) with this statement on the Audit Commission website.

You’d think there would by now be a central service where all these legal and policy issues could be shared between the local authorities.

Mouchel Parkman

I’m digging into partnership contracts with this company and local authorities. Rochdale and Knowsly have asked for extentions to their 20 statutory days to cleanse them of “commercially confidential” data.

I really need to send in my complaint to the ICO about Liverpool’s exemptions on same contract. The delay is because I have to fill in a crappy Word Document complaints form which doesn’t render properly in Open Office. I hate these filling in of word processed forms. Must get on the case soon.

Liverpool continues to flatly disregard FOI requests for Liverpool Direct contracts, IPS Services contracts, and a really old one from early in the development of the webpage, Veolia contract.

And finally

Cambridgeshire council has a contract document that’s too big to email. Interesting puzzle. This request came about from an investigation the way PFI is imposed onto Local Councils who would otherwise have the common sense not to have anything to do with this expensive exercise in corporate welfare.

My related request for all the PFI credits given out by central government in order to subsidize the scam (and it’s probably subsidy in the form of withdrawing central government grants and then giving them back with the stipulation that it must only be squandered on a PFI project) got granted.

Rather handily, the FOI officer writes:

“In the past individual sponsoring departments have often produced news releases when new allocations were made and, as you say, individual local authorities have also frequently publicised the figures. There is therefore no reason not to bring this information together in a collated form.

I have therefore arranged for the list of PFI contracts on this department’s website (at www.local.communities.gov.uk/pfi/index.htm) to be revised so that in future it includes PFI credit amounts.”

Well, that’s progress. Some day we’ll be able to turn it out on a map.

And I ran out of easy places to contribute to on Wikipedia, such as United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur, United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia, United Nations Integrated Office in Sierra Leone, United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone, and Timeline of the 2008 South Ossetia war; and so surfed around on the UN News Centre.

Naturally, there wasn’t anything about all the pro bono work I have so far done accessibilizing the official documents in a cumulatively constructive way that makes it possible to find out what the processes are, who’s operating them, and discover what’s been going on over the past decade to get us to the way things are now. After all, I am merely a programmer.

What I did find was a press release about how an… Innovative UN awareness-raising campaign earns prestigious Cannes award:

15 July 2008 – A groundbreaking United Nations campaign that uses the latest technology to give a voice to those who normally go unheard has been recognized by one of the world’s leading international advertising festivals.

“United Nations Voices,” (Internet Explorer only) which was designed pro bono for the UN Information Centre in Canberra by Saatchi & Saatchi, Australia, was awarded a Bronze Lion in the 2008 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, held in France last month.

I’ve added those links myself to improve connectivity.

Although bronze is not as prestigious as gold or silver, if you’re an ad company you know how to place your free advertising into the UN news feed in the hope that people will forgive you for delivering us Margaret Thatcher in 1979, as well as tonnes of other evil.

The material is a large colour poster of a face which you photograph with your mobile phone, email the picture to a particular phone number, and then you get phoned back with a recorded message from the featured “voiceless” person. The functionality could have been implemented by texting a key-word to the particular phone number instead of the digital photograph, or frigging it by using different phone numbers on each poster and ignoring the image (they didn’t do this).
Meanwhile, their March press release when they ran the ad campaign in Sydney, Australia is here, a blog about the campaign with lots of comments is here, and according to this posting the vital stats are:

Brief:
The United Nations wanted to find an engaging way of talking to modern day Australians, particularly the youth, and making them aware of the many and varied issues in today’s multi-cultural society.

Solution:
The problem is the people who really need to be heard are the ones who don’t normally have a voice. So by using revolutionary digital image recognition technology we could make a poster and press ad talk for the very first time and actually give everyone a voice.

Results:
In a small market like Australia, over a 2 week period, more than 35,000 people “listened” - making this the country’s most successful UN brand campaign to date. Due to its overwhelming success next year the UN is going to roll it out globally in all major cities.

And now, the credits:

Advertising Agency: SAATCHI & SAATCHI, Sydney, Australia
Executive Creative Directors: Steve Back, David Nobay
Copywriters / Art Directors: Steve Jackson, Vince Lagana
Photographers: Sean Izzard, Petrina Hicks, Scott Newett
Producer: Kate Whitfield
Art Buyers: Olivia Wilson, Danni Simpson, Skye Houghton
CEO: Simone Bartley
Account Supervisors: Bree Lennon, Stephen Lacy, James Tracey-Inglis
Head Of Digital & Direct: Paul Worboys
Image Technology: Hyperfactory
Image Technology: Mobot
Creative Group Head, Digital: Brian Merrifield
Director: Ralph Van Dijk, Eardrum
Photographers: Tim Gibbs, David Knight, Daniel Smith

According to the technologist’s website:

Mobot has developed a powerful, scalable, and flexible patent-pending solution which relies on image recovery, pattern recognition, and image matching capability ‘in the cloud.’ Cognitive science research has shown that the human brain uses blobs to recognize objects, that is, your brain does not use sharp edges to determine that a table is a table or a face is face. Mobot applies algorithms patterned after these methods to solve the problem of mobile visual search. Mobot has built a best in class solution through a combination of invention, innovation, and tech licensing. Mobot has strong technology partnerships with leading edge companies. For example, Imagen’s technology and Evolution Robotics’ ViPR technology are components of Mobot’s visual search engine and help Mobot deliver state of the art pattern recognition.

Miraculously, the Google Patent search engine digs out what appears to be the correct patent application for the inventor “Zvi Haim Lev” based on the term “mobot”, although this made-up word appears nowhere in the text.

It’s all pretty standard computer vision processing, done with a lot of elbow grease and efforts to handle occlusion and gauss filtering to handle the low quality resulting from the JPEG crappiness of the camera phone images.

As it’s a case of unnecessary technology used unobtrusively, it’s doing no harm. In the future the real advertising applications will be to make the cameras point outwards from the poster at the people so it can speak to you messages depending on who you are on determining your demographic status according to the branded products you choose to clothe your body in, with the eventual result the world described in the 1954 Philip K Dick story Sales Pitch.

Meanwhile, back in the world where things need to get done, not only sold, one can wonder what this campaign was actually trying to sell. “Raising awareness” is such a vague term, if none of those people whose awareness is raised never stand a change in finding out what they can do. The point of these vast PR companies is to (a) move product (make you spend money on profitable crap), (b) get votes (sabotage the democratic process), and (c) manage concern (prevent people from taking effective action).

This particular campaign is attempting to achieve (c). Thanks for all the help and encouragement, folks. Maybe I should just go home and pick the marrows.

Have been at CUCC expo 2008 in Austria for the past three weeks. Apart from the caving, the carries up to top camp, the carries back from top camp, efforts to find an easy surface route down to 161 entrance h (failed), I did quite a bit on Tunnel as half the user-base was there.

Aside from a bunch of user interface issues, some of which got fixed, and some of which just get ignored until the user has gotten used to them and will then complain if it gets changed to something “better”, it became apparent that the cave we’re doing it on has become just too complex, (see the 2006 version here) and so I started work on an atlas feature. A rough estimate suggested that the cave needs to be covered by 140 A3 atlas tiles. This would be a so much work that I came up with a scheme to generate them automatically. Since I want some words on them, I’m extracting the explorers and dates of each section from the survey data. Also, as the survey is in colour, it might as well have a photo on each page. The automatic allocation of these will be done later.

A set of pages so far done is in 204 renderings. Browsers are very bad at showing images zoomed out, so they’ll look terrible. You have to save them to your disk individually to view them in something else, I suspect. At some point we should print a set of these tiles to start finding all the errors.

I can’t seem to upload images on this blog at the moment, so this will have to do.

Now to get back to some machining work.

Here’s a bit of easy C++ code using a template class with a template member function that compiles and executes with no problems on MS VC8:

But try this on a linux machine with gcc (I used “gcc version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)”) and you will get into compilation trouble:

So, what’s wrong?
If there’s only one candidate, why does the compiler not instatiate that one? Why is there a matching problem, and why does VC8 not spot this?

I could wait until tomorrow with telling you the solution, but I won’t let you racking your brains…

here it is:

replace the declaration of the template member in template struct A with this:

and you get a result. But why is that? You tell me!
And what do you do if you want to code a member that needs pointers, not constant references? Somebody out there who knows the answer?

A post on 4 July on the BBC Open Secrets blog about the Council finances briefly being open referenced the Orchard News Agency, which included on their updated table (without any helpful hyperlinks) of councils whose inspection periods are open.

An FOI request for the advertisement obtained the information.

It said (hyperlinks added):

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that pursuant to Sections 15 and 16 of the Audit Commission Act, 1998 and regulations13, 14 and 16 of the Accounts and Audit Regulations, 2003

1. From Wednesday 2 July to Tuesday 29 July inclusive, between 8.30am and 4.45pm any persons interested on application to the Assistant Executive Director (Financial Management), Room 14, Municipal Building, Dale Street, Liverpool L2 2DQ may inspect and make copies, at a charge of 20 pence per sheet, of the accounts of the above named Council for the year ended 31st March, 2008 and all appropriate records related thereto;

2.On or after Wednesday 30 July at 10.00am, the District Auditor, Mike Thomas, 3rd Floor, Millennium House, 60 Victoria Street, Liverpool L1 6LD will be available at the request of any local government elector for the area to which the accounts relate or their representative, to be questioned about the accounts and any such elector or their representative, may attend before the Auditor and make objections to the accounts;

3.No objection to the City Council’s accounts may be made under subsections 16 (1-3) of the Audit Commission Act, 1998 by or on behalf of a local government elector, unless the Auditor has previously received written notice of the proposed objection and of the grounds on which it is made. Where an elector sends a notice to the Auditor, the elector must at the same time send a copy of the notice to the City Council at the address below.

Now, this ad was not meant to be followed up, because when I presented myself between 8.30am and 4.45pm at said offices, nothing was prepared. I had an interesting conversation where I was was told that all the council accounts are posted on-line. This almost put me off track, but I persisted, since not all the books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts relating to them were available there. One of the interesting factors about this is the only exemption to this data is:

Nothing in this section entitles a person to inspect so much of any accounts or other document as contains personal information about a member of the staff of the body whose accounts are being audited;

While it is unclear if this exemption applies to staff employed by a contractor (not the Council) who are named in the books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts, it does not allow the usually unjustified blanket exemption of “commercial confidentiality” on the basis that somebody with commercial experience simply says so, and it is not in the public interest for anyone to cry: “bollocks!”

And since this data has been accessible through this mechanism for many years — even to competitors of the contractor in question — it proves that the information is (a) not confidential, and (b) provides no competitive advantage to those competitors or they would be queuing up at the council offices on day one to access everything they could. Therefore nothing which pertains to money regarding the council business can be denied under the Freedom of Information Act on the basis of commercial confidentiality.

Or at least that would be the case if some appeal court judge could be persuaded to say as much in an official ruling. For now, the closest I can find of the system approaching this point is this press report of a case between the guy running Orchard News Agency and Lincolnshire County Council in 2005, and they don’t mention the issue of FOI.

How did a public right like this slip in through in an Act of Parliament in 1998 at the time when corporate interests were running riot?

Answer: It didn’t. No point in searching for the debates on the “Audit Commission Bill” from TheyWorkForYou.com because it predates their database, which still only goes back to 2001.

So we fall back to the original Hansard search engine to get this written question from 18 February 1998:

Mr. Cohen: To ask the Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor’s Department if he will introduce a statutory code of practice in respect of the provisions in the Audit Commission Bill [Lords] which permit the Commission to datamatch personal data in the name of economy, effectiveness and efficiency; and if he will make a statement. [29114]

Mr. Hoon: The Audit Commission Bill is a Consolidation Bill, which does no more than restate the existing law in clearer form. It is not possible to amend the Bill by adding a provision for a code of practice.

This tells us that that the Act was just a tidying up and drawing together of a whole bunch of clauses from other Acts to put the duties of the Audit Commission into one place.

The clause detailing the rights of public inspection and the right to make objections known to the visiting auditor regarding actual details within the public finances appear as Section 17 of the Local Government Finance Act 1982, though without our modern Data Protection provisions that you can bet are likely to be used to deny access to entire documents on the frivolous grounds that they contain people’s names on them.

It’s important to retain the right of the Government to keep such records, sell them to supermarkets, lose them on laptops off the back of trains, and generally mishandle and (mis)use it for any purpose falling under the terms of “securing the efficient and effective provision of public services,” whilst at the same time denying a public right to find out anything that goes on in Government or who by.

Back to the point.

One thing that’s confusing we have an Act of Parliament, followed by some Regulations about the implementation of the Act. The Regulations explain how the Act is applied, including minor details about how the public can be ineffectively notified of their rights. Harry Cohen MP above was asking whether the Regulations would be updated with the consolidation act (the Audit Commission Act, which necessitated no debate). Mr Hoon said: No. They were updated five years later by the Accounts and Audit Regulations 2003, Section 16 of which says:

“Not later than 14 days before the commencement of the period during which the accounts and other documents are made available in pursuance of regulation 14, a relevant body to which regulation 11(2) applies, or in the case of a parish meeting, the chairman of the meeting, shall give notice by advertisement of the [date, place, time, etc]

Got that?

Right. Now it is possible to delve into the debates in Parliament around the time of 1982 by searching on millbank systems.

This throws up a very revealing speech on this particular clause by Lord Bruce of Donington. It seems that this is the point where the the Audit Commission was first established:

The Committee will be aware that under the 1972 Act, the approved auditor, which in practice meant a firm of chartered accountants, or a firm of accountants acting on behalf of local authorities, differed considerably from the position of the district auditor…

The position is going to be rather different now… If the Committee will refer to Clause 11 [which] states: “At each audit by an auditor under this Part of this Act any persons interested may inspect the accounts to be audited and all books, deeds contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts relating to them and make copies of all or any part of the accounts and those other documents.”

For reasons that the noble Lord knows quite well, while that is done the auditor or one of his staff has to be in attendance. The examination may be quite lengthy and time-consuming. At Clause 11(2) it says that the auditor is required to give an elector the chance to question him and he is required to answer. This once again is completely outside the normal audit process as is generally understood in the profession itself and may once again be very time-consuming.

In some local authorities the publication in the local newspaper of the fact that the accounts of an authority are available for inspection and the auditors are available to answer questions as from a given date to a given date, may attract no interest whatsoever. There may be other advertisements in the paper, not always on the same page as legal notices, which people find more attractive. Some local authorities may indeed “get away with it” — I do not mean it in that sense — nobody ever questioning the auditor at all.

The Committee might consider the case of other local authorities where sometimes political passions have been known to run high, either one way or the other, and a group — one or many — of local electors get very disgruntled with the way things are running. I can envisage a fairly continuous procession of one aggrieved person after the other — whether politically or actually aggrieved — going to the audit office or other prescribed address that is required in the notice and questioning them.

All good common sense.

In fact, when you get down into the detailed discussions and investigations in Parliament, there’s plenty of common sense in evidence everywhere. The political process then magically cleanses itself of the common sense where it is not beneficial to the powers that be.

To track this further, I’d have to go to the excellent Liverpool Central Library and leaf through the old volumes of Hansard, as well as any copies of the Bills which they retain, in order to determine if 1982 was the source of this public right, or if it was copied from the earlier Local Government Act 1972 (check out that Wikipedia page there).

Meanwhile, after two weeks of emailing back and forth negotiating (people in the Council checking with their lawyers), I got access to some of these here accounts. In particular the Mouchel Parkman 2020 Liverpool partnership transactions and some transactions from IPS Services (note: FOI for contract still overdue), all laid out on paper. I got one electronic spreadsheet of costs from the 2020 Liverpool thing (and learnt about the limited login system that the council officer had into their system, contradicting the “open book” provisions), but the IPS Services details appears to be printed out on paper and mailed to the Council hard-copy.

The chaps gave me plenty of time to discuss with them the whole concept of how it worked and explore the procedures. The summary is that experts with a high degree of business and accountancy training think its great, and other people who only have their common sense to rely on believe it’s nuts. The points seemed to be:

• Ignore your intuition of flow of work, excess overheads resulting from not hiring staff directly, and other matters; you should focus on the Mouchel (pronounced Mou-shell) brand and how well you can imagine that they manage and motivate people in their organization, than if they were just doing jobs they felt were directly for the public interest.
• According to the Mouchel Parkman spam on Wikipedia, the company was founded in Liverpool in the 19th century, and this work with the Council, which is done by former Council employees TUPEd across, is a way for it to get back to its roots. Yeah, right.
• 2020 Liverpool is a partnership company between Liverpool City Council and Mouchel. The Council has an important stake in its success and wants the business to prosper.
• Oddly, if the Council owned 100% of the Company then the zero-sum nature of the direct correlation of profit of the Company relating exactly to costs on the Council would be clear. But when the figure is only 20% (not even factoring in the undisclosed Mouchel Parkman management fee of a fixed percentage of the turnover), this decouples it completely, even though according to common sense analysis it should make it four times worse!
• Ah, but 2020 Liverpool can bid for work in other places, not just from Liverpool City Council (from which it gets only 80% of its business).
• The other 20% seems to involve designing the rebuilding of schools, ultimately funded by the Council (unless you buy into that whole sub-prime-mortgage-like PFI hogwash). It was confirmed to me that Council architects used to do this work before they were transfered to 2020, so pretending it isn’t part of Council business is being economical with the actualité. Anyways, if there was anything lucrative going, Mouchel itself go for the contract directly and cut out that oh-so-valuable stake of Liverpool City Council by simply relocating the 2020 staff to that part of the business.
• Basically, the operation of the business can be finely tuned to meet and never exceed the aspirations of the Council. Losses and financial difficulties, however, commonly find their way back into the public finances, in spite of the fact that it’s never part of the plan — so there is no point in looking at it for predictions.
• In spite of the Council having to ensure that a steady flow of work goes to 2020 to maintain the success of the business, one of the supposed advantages of procuring it this way is that it gets the staff off the Council’s payroll, so that when business declines they don’t have to keep workers idle or sack them, because Mouchel can relocate them to other parts of their bigger business — for example, to satisfy lucrative contracts it has bid for itself against the fictional interests of the pretend-person legal entity that it has managerial control over known as 2020.
• Like those suspiciously common Very Bad Deals that occur throughout Government procurement of software, although the Council pays the entire up-front hourly costs of all work done for the design of an item of infrastructure, 2020, and therefore Mouchel, retains absolute copyright for all work done.
• I was told this was a good thing, because if the 2020 can make more money by selling this same work to other customers, then the Council, which has a stake in the success of the Company, will benefit.
• For business minds, this is enough to disconnect the fact that the electronic plans for a road traffic island in a junction in Liverpool will probably only ever be bought in the future by Liverpool City Council, and you have now made renationalization of the city planning department in 20 years time when the contract expires subject to a potential utter rip-off should the Council want any of the documentation of the infrastructure it paid for in the first place to design — even should someone who has the sort of common sense that comes from not being business trained has a say in the decision at the time.

I must check that last point out. I wonder if any of those great highly-skilled contract negotiators thought of this.

The habit of claiming that fractional revenues returning from theoretical and dubious business opportunities adequately compensates for delivering intellectual property into the private sector for free is not new.

Back in 2002 the e-Envoy, after selling out the whole of central government and then some to Microsoft, was interviewed:

Geraint Davies MP: Microsoft have been given the responsibility for the construction of the gateway technology, have they not?

Andrew Pinder: Microsoft have been one of a number of partners we have used to build that site although we own the intellectual property rights to that. They are a contractor along with Dell and a number of other contractors.

Geraint Davies MP If they sell it abroad to other governments we get a margin; is that correct?

Andrew Pinder Microsoft have asked us if they can use our intellectual property rights for building products for other governments.

Geraint Davies MP: Exactly how much are we going to get for that?

Andrew Pinder: We take a commission on their gross sales of that product through a contractual arrangement. 24% of their gross sales of the government gateway intellectual property will come to us. They have made two sales so far and have a number of other sales in prospect, so we have got a contract with Microsoft US to get that commissioned. We felt it was right, rather than just hold on to the technology ourselves because there was an opportunity to recoup some of the cost of building that technology through a licensing agreement.

Geraint Davies MP That 22% of the intellectual property must be bringing in money.

Andrew Pinder We rather hope that it will give us quite a lot of money, yes. In this particular respect we wish Microsoft every good wish in their sales efforts.

Ah. Wrong quote. Can’t seem to find documentation of a deal this bad, regarding ownership of IP. I was looking for information about the contract between EDS and the Inland Revenue where EDS owned all the source code, but I can only find this record detailing the suspicious success of that brand to obtain contracts, regardless of its track record.

Brand perception management. Evidence-free planning that can be trusted.

Must move on. Tune in next time. Or to one of these while I’m away.

It’s not enough to make a newspaper story (a limited genre of information presentation), but it is interesting and may lead to something important one day.

While we’re waiting for someone to ask the Question from Hell, Becka has appeared in today’s New York Times.

Evidently this is related to the conference in Hamburg she’s just been to. I can’t give you a link because conference alerts takes things down too quickly, and I can’t even check it up yet on archive.org. I’ll be able to find out maybe in 5 months time what it was without asking. This is an information black-hole.

A tip for any of you reporters who don’t see your job as sitting back and waiting for the PR industry to spoon-feed you with well-crafted press-releases, she’ll be at the ECVP 2008 in Utrecht showing off her haptic experiments.

Update: Stumbled upon this crude visualization of point-cloud data used to make a music video. For decades CADCAM engineers have been trying to convert this sort of data into usable surface models (eg at the meshing round table). This is one of those insoluble problems, because only when you make a concerted effort to solve it do you realize that what seems to be enough data is in fact insufficient, and everyone who hasn’t gone through that process just thinks it’s because you’re not smart enough.

Anyway, what’s makes this effort cool is they’ve released the point cloud data in downloadable format so people can play with it. Some results, using standard applications, are here. Maybe someone in the wider audience will prove smart enough, having been exposed to some real messy data. Working from clean data at the start seems always to spoil the intuitive understanding of the problem. That’s why I am thankful that my initial CADCAM experience was with the output of NCG Toolmaker, where everything was broken and none of the surfaces connected up, as you get from proper solid modellers these days.

This is the result of a rapid “old feature” -> “idea” -> “new idea” -> “experiment” cycle of about a week. The Danes said they needed the feature to measure how long the toolshaft should be for a given toolholder and surface model.

In Machining Strategist/Depocam, this feature is implemented by analysing all the positions of a theoretical tool holder at every point of a given toolpath and comparing its interference with all the triangles in the model in a potentially n³ algorithm. This produces a monotonic graph of height above tooltip against maximum diameter the toolholder could be at that level and not collide with the part. You can use this to instantly predict the length the tool shaft needs to be (the stem between the cutting tip part of the tool and the chuck) given different shapes for the holder or chuck.

This is nice in theory, but in practice chuck shapes don’t change, so you might as well start with a single holder or chuck shape and calculate how high it has to be from the tool tip along every part of a given toolpath. The calculation gets faster and faster as you sample along the path, because you need the global maximum value, and with every increment of the running maximum there are fewer triangles to test the toolholder against. Add to this the fact that the operation is trivially parallelizable, and that my 3-axis holder location function is surprisingly fast (designed without compromising on memory), and the result is responsive without this intermediate data.

However, the Danes want something even more user-friendly. They wanted the tool holder length for the job without giving it a toolpath to begin with.

I couldn’t see the point in this, because the only way to implement it would be to produce a dense toolpath across the part, call the previous function, and then discard this useless toolpath. Now you’ve got a single number for the length of tool shaft, and you calculate the toolpath you wanted to anyway. Then you’d have to verify the shaft length against it just to be sure. And really you should just have the patience to wait to get this number at the right time in the course of the calculations, so you don’t waste duplication of so much cutter locationing on the surface. Unlike the tool shaft height algorithm, it doesn’t get faster the more you sample. You’ve got to scan everywhere densely because there might be just one deep narrow slot into which the tool falls, necessitating a very long tool shaft.

(Thinking about it now — and perhaps the Danes knew this and forgot to tell me during the ensuing argument over the pointlessness of this feature request — this feature does have an application for 3+2 machining when you want to to access the model from different directions in order to get away with a shorter tool.)

So, anyway, leaving it for a couple of days, coming back to it, and thinking some more, I realized the bit I didn’t like was the huge calculation resulting in one lone floating point number. What if I produced a height field where at each XY point on the drive plane it gave you the minimum length of the tool shaft? You could colour shade the surface instead of producing a height map if you had to. But still you need the numbers. I realized I could build it into my under-used stock model algorithm (it’s used to produce the fillet surfaces, but it doesn’t do animations, so no one wants it when they can bring in MachineWorks, which already works for everything, like 5-axis, which this one doesn’t). The other advantage of the stock model algorithm is it’s the same one that runs all the other algorithms (scallop, zslice, pencil, area detect) and so is already parallelized. So there.

Probably going to run out of memory, but who knows. It makes the right picture. As you can see, the high points correspond close to the steep walls. And if it was ridiculously fast, (which is isn’t going to be) you could use the mouse to vary the tool-axis in real time and see the heights changing as you maneuvered towards a more optimum position.

We’ll shelve it for another couple of weeks and come back to it. I’m minded of the fact that users normally have to type in their “desired” 3+2 style tool axis in a dialog box, usually by guesswork or using their favourite default number (eg 45degrees from vertical). It is possible that this will work will move towards the computer discovering the optimal tooling angle on its own. Or at least shifting it slightly to a better position (such as 39degrees from vertical) in a way that suddenly allows you to use a shorter tool from your stock list. The truth is, in any user interface dialog box which allows the user to set it to “any number they like” (as if this is an advantage), the option should be to type in: “The best one”.

Meanwhile, we’ll just check out check out a number of very uninspiring websites, declare it forevermore now unpatentable, and move on.

CADCAM employees, respecting the irrational demands of their companies, are normally astoundingly reticent about any kinds of innovations and ideas that might be going on. The official reason for this habit is that the atmosphere in their office is so bubbling with heaps of potently good CADCAM innovations that if one such idea leaked out, someone who heard it would be able to apply it, win the entire market share, and put them out of business. Another explanation, probably closer to the mark, is it’s like the secret conclusive evidence for weapons of mass destruction. The secret was there wasn’t any. The commercially confidential information is that all the programmers in the office are bored out of their tiny minds, don’t want to have any ideas that just cause more work and absolutely advantage or glory coming back to them owing to the anonymized force of the corporation, and can’t even be bothered to surf around the internet for places where some sort of half-formed ideas might be disclosed by some nitwit who’s out of control of his employer and doesn’t understand the protocol of silence and the jealous protection of technological stagnation that allows clanky old ancient first-draft CADCAM kernels to continue to compete in the market like they were fresh out of Stanford, and be bothered to leave an anonymous comment at the bottom of their blog to encourage them to continue this nutty practice of giving away important secrets that harm his own business and helps everyone else’s to get better. It’s not like ideas only develop without sharing and testing and discussions and different implementations to get towards something that might eventually be half good, like the sales-theory that it will all come out straight and perfectly formed in the next release and take the market by storm. People are not that excited by things any more. And those developers who do still have some life left in them to offer need to understand this so they can move their work forwards and faster and eventually leave this tranche of ossified kernels behind, because at the moment it takes more than a decade for the market to notice that the programmers have, like Elvis, left the building and that ten years of uninvested consumer profits have been frittered away like a sour bet on the stock market and a yard deep stack of pointless legal paperwork. It’s amazing any progress gets made in spite of this sickening business cultural attitude. And that’s exactly how long your shaft needs to be.

Rather than take still photos, here’s a camera video of the ingenious pump sump down in Ireby Fell Cavern at the weekend of 12 July 2008.

I’ve been helping out with drawing the map (and updating the special software to help with drawing it), written in Java — a language which someone has called “the COBOL of the 21st Century”. Ouch!

Here’s a sample of the map at that section, which I don’t have time to do my XML sit-ups necessary to put in the colour.

Key: The Crossed region is the sump (a water filled passage you normally need to cave dive to enter. The squiggly passage at the top is at least 50metres higher in a dreadful area called Cripple Creak. Gotta go.