James Barlow's Blog

Right, August Bank Holiday is over so that’s the summer dispensed with. Here’s one for the previous administration’s scrap book:

Heatwaves are forecast to increase in frequency in the coming years – this plan provides important guidance on how to reduce the impact they will have upon health and in doing so, will save lives. Climate change is increasingly acknowledged to be a serious threat to population health. These impacts are highlighted in the updated report Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK 2008.

The Climate Change Act 2008 now makes it a requirement for all statutory sectors, including the health sector, to have robust adaptation plans in place. The National Heatwave Plan is an important contribution to this work. Further information on climate change and health can be found in the Department of Health guidance document and summary, The Health Impact of Climate Change: Promoting Sustainable Communities.

Climate change means that heatwaves are likely to become more common in England. By the 2080s, it is predicted that an event similar to that experienced in England in 2003 will happen every year.

In Northern France in August 2003, unprecedentedly high day and nighttime temperatures for a period of three weeks resulted in 15,000 excess deaths [note – it’s so unprecedented the French coined a word for it in the 14th century: La Canicule]. The vast majority of these were among older people.

The full document:

UK Heatwave Plan (March 2010) Department of Health

My IT support career extends back just far enough to recall the first era of “big iron” – when men were real men, women were real women, and a proper computer had its own postal code.

Admittedly, by the time I started climbing down the rungs of the support career ladder most of these beasts were deactivated, derelict and otherwise defunct due to the rise of personal computers. But they still looked amazing, and were a useful source of 3-pin plugs, 13-amp fuses and similar consumables if you needed one in a hurry.

One anecdote I recall hearing from an old lag in the mainframes team was about the engineer from IBM with his “magic screwdriver”; let’s say your company had purchase a large and powerful machine back in the seventies (something with a tiny percentage of the computing power of a first generation iPhone for example) then IBM would arrive in a fleet of trucks, install it, negotiate with the local electricity board for power connections, arrange for a new substation to be installed, reinforce the floor, fit all the data cabling, fit some enormous air conditioning units and then leave you a signed off installation and a staggeringly large invoice.

If a year or two later your company needed an upgrade to a machine twice as powerful, then this time IBM would only send one engineer who would rotate a small switch ninety degrees clockwise using a flat headed screwdriver, and then leave the new upgraded installation, not forgetting the invoice which would be – and this is the clever bit – exactly the same staggeringly large value as the first one.

Elements of this are apocryphal (it may have been a Phillips head screwdriver ) but in-place upgrades that were actually the removal of previously installed limiters were a pretty common element of old data centre life. And as I was typing my upgrade code into a Windows 7 Home Premium installation today, and seeing – ten minutes, one reboot and £100 later - that it was now Windows 7 Ultimate, I realised that there are no new tricks in the world of IT marketing. But they have phased out the screwdriver.