The Engineers Thumb Essays

The Engineers Thumb Essays The Engineers Thumb Paper The Engineers Thumb Paper The setting for The Engineers Thumb is also a secluded house in the dead of night. Again this helps add to the tense atmosphere, as the night is thought to heighten emotions. During the night it is harder to see, and many perceive this as potentially dangerous. Colonel Lysander Stark specifically requests that Hatherly come in the middle of the night so that he was not seen. Along with the fact that they did not want their money scam to be discovered by an engineer coming to the house, this would also be the ideal time for them to commit a murder if need be as, just like in The Speckled Band, nobody would be around to help the victim or hear the crime come to pass. The fact that when they walk into the house it is pitch black makes us feel tense, as the colonel could do anything he pleased to the young engineer at this point. The hysterical woman that tries to help the engineer before his ordeal even starts, puts us the reader on edge, as she would not be in the frightful state that she is in, if she did not fear something terrible. Consequently we fear something terrible is going to happen, hence suspense is created. In both stories the major and most dramatic moments occur during the night, in remote locations. Personally I felt that the description of the setting and atmosphere was more intense in The Speckled Band, especially when Helen Stoner was describing her sisters death. There are also other aspects, which I felt added to the suspense through creating setting and atmosphere. Throughout both stories when tension is at its utmost, Conan Doyle employs other effective uses of language and techniques. One that I noticed he used particularly frequently when tensions were high, was alliteration. I sprang from my bed, wrapped a shawl round me, and rushed into the corridor. Conan Doyle used this technique at almost every period when tension was high. A further example of this from The Engineers Thumb, is when the young woman attempts to warn the engineer of the dangers he is about to face. She held up one shaking finger to warn me to be silent, and she shot a few words of broken English at me. Throughout both stories Doyle uses a great deal of alliteration and in my opinion it is one of the most effective literary techniques to heighten tension and suspense. As the reader, it really puts you on edge, as the words sound sharper and more intense. The language Watson uses to describe the state and physical appearance of Helen Stoner helps to create mystery and suspense. She is fairly young, however the description we are given of her, suggests she has been through some terrible ordeal. Her face was all drawn and gray, with restless, frightened eyes. This description adds suspense to the story as we are concerned for her and are anxious to find out what has troubled this young woman so terribly. Doyle also uses a simile in which he compares her to, some hunted animal. Helen Stoners physical description reflects her emotional state. From her appearance Watson and Holmes could clearly see that she was in a pitiable state of agitation. She acts in a melodramatic manner, which I personally felt was too over-the-top. Dr Roylotts character is one that verges on mania. We are aware almost from the beginning that Roylott is the villain. His physical description again mirrors his emotional state. The portrayal that Watson relays to the reader when Roylott visits them is vivid. He is described as a huge man dressed in the peculiar mixture of professional and agricultural clothes. This is a strange combination, however Roylott is a very atypical man. We are told that he is marked with every evil passion and this alone is a particularly large clue as to the fact that he is clearly the villain. Previously we have learnt that Roylott beat his native butler to death so he is obviously a very volatile man. This kind of remark adds to the sense of suspense, as we know that a young woman has to live alone with this man who is uncontrollable in his anger. He is a doctor and intelligent man, but the Victorians see him as the villain and quite possibly blame his mania on his long stay in the tropics. Indians are bound to lead him into bad habits. He has become a recluse and therefore a social outcast. This makes him, therefore, the perfect person to play a villain in a Victorian short story. Victor Hatherly is the victim in The Engineers Thumb. This is obvious from his horrific injury and the fact that he is not quite stable. When he meets Watson he breaks out into an hysterical outburst which, according to Holmes, comes when some great crisis is over. This comment creates a sense of mystery as we want to know what has happened to this man, and also suspense as it must have been something terrible to get him into the state he is in. He is young, lives completely alone and is fairly new to owning his own business. Therefore he could be seen as vulnerable. Obviously the colonel adopted this attitude as he deceived him, and managed to get the young man to work for him even though the conditions he was offered were very suspicious. The character of the Colonel Lysander Stark is an obvious choice for that of the villain. As is already apparent, villains in Victorian stories were played by social outcasts, people who were not from within our own society. One is at once reminded of a stereotypical colonel, a cruel harsh person with militaristic cruelty at heart. He is depicted as a model villain. He has a German accent, which was, and still is, a very common nationality for stereotypical villains of stories such as this. The engineer describes him as a man rather over middle size just like Roylott. Conan Doyle creates stereotypical characters. The people who visit Sherlock Holmes are always clearly the victims of crime. This can be determined by the melodramatic manner with which they act and from the vivid descriptions of the way they look. Both Helen Stoner and Victor Hatherly could be perceived as vulnerable people, as Helen is a young woman living with a daunting stepfather, and Victor is a young man with not a lot of experience living alone. The melodramatic manner with which they act is epitomized well here. Helen Stoner, in The Speckled Band explains that it is not cold which makes her shiver, but fear, Mr Holmes it is terror. Similarly when Victor Hatherly in The Engineers Thumb first convenes with Watson he breaks into a hysterical outburst. Conan Doyle exaggerates physical characteristics to heighten the sense of battle between good and evil, as is typical of Victorian short stories. Conan Doyle also uses the characters physical appearance to emphasise their emotional state. Helen Stoners hair has gone prematurely grey, and Conan Doyle compares her restless, frightened eyes, to some hunted animal. This simile adds suspense as we are reminded that Roylott is trying to kill her. Personally, I thought this aspect of the story was a little predictable, however I felt that this was maybe a good thing as it meant the readers had something to go on when trying to deduct their own conclusions from the story. Similarly, the villains are clear from the outset and obvious outsiders. In both stories they are large men who do not seem to be vulnerable in anyway. Again the emotional state is emphasised by their appearance, but I felt this was more so The Speckled band. In The Speckled Band we learn a great deal about Dr Roylott from Helen Stoner, and then he visits Holmes and Watson. It is very clear that he is of a volatile nature, and has an uncontrollable temper. However in The Engineers Thumb the colonel is a bit of an unknown quantity. All we really learn about him is that he is tall and of an exceeding thinness. Obviously we are aware that he has something to hide, as he is very suspicious and questioning. During Helen Stoners account in The Speckled Band she tells Holmes that on the nights leading up to her sisters death Julia, her sister, heard a whistling sound at about three in the morning, and on the night of her death she too heard it followed by some metallic sound. This sort of detail helps build up a sense of mystery and encourages the reader to read on, because it is obvious that we are being given clues. We want to know what happened to this poor girl, but we also want to be the one who discovers the cause of her death. There are various other details that also build up the mystery in Helens account such as the fact that Julia had locked her door but when Helen heard her scream and went to help the door was unlocked. Although this detail creates a deeper sense of mystery it also acts as a small decoy as to the actual cause of Julias death. The fact that as Julia is dying she stabs her finger towards Roylotts room and screams Oh my God! Helen! It was the band! The Speckled band! This more than anything creates mystery, as we all want to know what this speckled band is and how it could possibly have played a part in this womans death. When Holmes visits Stoke Moran in The Speckled Band to find some clues that will help with the investigation of this murder, he makes some strange observations. In my opinion these observations add to the suspense the reader feels. The first of these is that Helen seems to have had to move rooms for no apparent reason. Although Roylott tells her it is because repair work is being done, there does not appear to be anything to repair and there are no workmen around. In Julias former room Holmes discovers that the modern looking bell pull, which already appears to be out of place amongst the other more antique furniture, is actually fake. Secondly he notices that these is a ventilator that provides a connection between Dr Roylotts room and the room Helen is now sleeping in, the murder scene. Holmes appears to be perplexed as he rightly says, what a fool a builder must be to open a ventilator into another room, when, with the same trouble he might have communicated with the outside air. The fake bell pull was connected to a hook just above the ventilator and the tassel at the end of the rope lay on top of the pillow on Julias old, Helens new bed. A further abnormal characteristic about the room was the fact that the bed was clamped to the floor and therefore always remained in that same position and was always in the same place in relation to the bell pull and ventilator. Then when the company of Helen Holmes and Watson move into Roylotts room Holmes makes some further interesting observations. There is a small saucer of milk in the room on, even though the only cat Roylott owns is a cheetah. Holmes also expresses an interest in a locked safe, a dog lash that was peculiarly tied and a chair. All these elements add suspense, as we are aware from these observations that her death was definitely deliberate. Suspense is created as we want to know why and how, we are also becoming aware at this point that Holmes has solved the mystery, and as the reader we want to do the same. The story of The Speckled Band is told through a variety of different people. Watson is the narrator, and is used by Doyle to relay all the information Holmes discovers to the reader. However there is a large portion where Helen Stoner is the storyteller. In The Engineers Thumb Watson keeps his role as the narrator, but the bulk of the story is the engineer explaining his ordeal. Both stories are similar in this way with the victims of crime telling a large bulk of the story through explaining to Holmes and Watson. Personally I found it quite unusual to read a complex story with so much speech. At the end of The Speckled Band Holmes and Watson enter Stoke Moran. Their journey across the grounds was full of trepidation as they were reminded, by the sight or Dr Roylotts baboon, of the cheetah that was also roaming at liberty. When they finally found themselves in the room Helen was supposed to be sleeping in they sat silently wide-awake, as the slightest sound could jeopardise the whole plan, and falling asleep could endanger their lives. This point in the story is riddled with suspense as both Holmes and Watson sit in a state of nervous tension. As the reader, we anticipate the intense excitement that is to ensue. The climax of the story occurs when Dr Roylott once again tries to murder his stepdaughter by standing on a chair and putting the poisonous snake through the ventilator so that it could crawl down the bell rope and bite Helen Stoner. However unknown to Dr Roylott, Watson and Holmes, who were anticipating this attack, are waiting. As the snake slithers down the bell-pull, Holmes launches his assault as he lashed furiously with his cane at the bell-pull. All this action that is taking place, unbeknown to Dr Roylott, is actually to culminate in his death, as the snake escapes from the fury of Holmes and returns to bite its master. There is clearly a moral to this story, as Roylott eventually gets his comeuppance. This is typical of the Victorian morality as good always overcomes evil. As Holmes puts it, Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another. Roylott was a murderer and therefore, in respect of Victorian morality, must die. Holmes states In this way, I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr Grimesby Roylotts death, and I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience. In the The Engineers Thumb the ending is very different, as the facts evolve throughout the story. At the end of the Engineers narrative the Engineer finds out about the colonels money making scam. The colonel reacts badly to this and tries to kill him by locking him in the room where they press the money. The colonel then wickedly turns on the machine in an attempt to kill the young engineer, as we later find out he did to the previous engineer. Thankfully the engineer finds another door and escapes. Personally, I find this twist in the tale rather disappointing, as I think it is a rather easy way out for the author. The hysterical woman tries to help him to escape by taking him to a room and assisting him in climbing out of the window. However the colonel tries to prevent his escape by trying to chop him to pieces with an axe. The engineer was quick enough to narrowly escape death but not quick enough to escape with his thumb. As he becomes aware of his gruesome injury, he faints in the bushes and wakes up by the railway station, to his surprise, as he was under the impression that he was twelve miles away and the colonel was trying to kill him. Once he had finished his narrative, Holmes, Watson, the engineer and two police officers from Scotland Yard, went to try to locate the scene of the crime and the criminals involved. Holmes uses his deductive skills in concluding that, as the horse, which took the engineer to the colonels house, was fresh, it cant have travelled twelve miles previously. Therefore he immediately locates the house, much to the astonishment of his companions. However the house is on fire as the lamp, which the engineer used to examine the machine, was not put out. Unfortunately the occupants had already left, taking their fake money with them, but their machine was destroyed. Again there is clearly a moral to this story, i. e. that it is unacceptable to meddle in affairs, which you may suspect to be immoral or illegal. Holmes told the engineer that he had gained experience and he also had a certain degree of revenge on the criminals, as it was most probably his oil lamp that destroyed their house and money-laundering machine. Throughout both stories Arthur Conan Doyle creates mystery and suspense with a use of various techniques. He uses language to create character and atmosphere. Doyle uses a combination of melodrama, vivid descriptions of atmosphere, setting and character along with language and various literary devices to build up a sense of mystery and suspense in both short stories. In conclusion, with his Holmes stories, Doyle did two things: he established the conventions of the detective story genre, and he achieved enormous popularity because the world and action of the stories reflected the values of their late Victorian audience. In each story good overcomes evil and this is vital for a popular short story in the Victorian era, as this reflected Victorian morality. At the time Sherlock Holmes was introduced society was confident in its industrial and imperial force, valuing science and rationality. Everyone was conscious of a relentless improvement in all aspects of life stemming from the power and prosperity society was experiencing. Whatever problems threatened their society, including crime, could be solved by rational means. Holmes demonstrated this, and readers responded with a love for the character. This link, between the values of a society and the methods and values of its crime solvers, has endured in crime fiction ever since.

Relational Databases, Normalization, and SQL

Relational Databases, Normalization, and SQL A database is an application that can store and retrieve data very rapidly. The relational bit refers to how the data is stored in the database and how it is organized. When we talk about a database, we mean a relational database, in fact, an RDBMS: Relational Database Management System. In a relational database, all data is stored in tables. These have the same structure repeated in each row (like a spreadsheet) and it is the relations between the tables that make it a relational table. Before relational databases were invented (in the 1970s), other types of database such as hierarchical databases were used. However relational databases have been very successful for companies like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The open source world also has RDBMS. Commercial Databases OracleIBM DB 2Microsoft SQL Server Ingres. The first commercial RDBMS. Free/Open Source Databases MySQLPostgresSQLSQLite Strictly these are not relational databases but RDBMS. They provide security, encryption, user access and can process SQL queries. Who Was Ted Codd? Codd was a computer scientist who devised the laws of normalization in 1970. This was a mathematical way of describing the properties of a relational database using tables. He came up with 12 laws that describe what a relational database and an RDBMS does and several laws of normalization that describe the properties of relational data. Only data that had been normalized could be considered relational. What Is Normalization? Consider a spreadsheet of client records that is to be put into a relational database. Some clients have the same information, say different branches of the same company with the same billing address. In a spreadsheet, this address is on multiple rows. In turning the spreadsheet into a table, all the clients text addresses must be moved into another table and each assigned a unique ID- say the values 0,1,2. These values are stored in the main client table so all rows use the ID, not the text. A SQL statement can extract the text for a given ID. What Is a Table? Think of it as being like a rectangular spreadsheet made up of rows and columns. Each column specifies the type of data stored (numbers, strings or binary data - such as images). Unlike a spreadsheet where the user is free to have different data on each row, in a database table, every row can only contain the types of data that were specified. In C and C, this is like an array of structs, where one struct holds the data for one row. For more information see Normalizing a database in the Database Design part of databases.about.com. What Are the Different Ways of Storing Data in a Database? There are two ways: Via a Database Server.Via a Database File. Using a database file is the older method, more suited to desktop applications. E.G. Microsoft Access, though that is being phased out in favor of Microsoft SQL Server. SQLite is an excellent public domain database written in C that holds data in one file. There are wrappers for C, C, C# and other languages. A database server is a server application running locally or on a networked PC. Most of the big databases are server based. These take more administration but are usually faster and more robust. How Does an Application Communicate With Database Servers? Generally, these require the following details. IP or Domain name of the server. If it is the on the same PC as you, use 127.0.0.1 or localhost as the dns name. Server Port For MySQL this is usually 3306, 1433 for Microsoft SQL Server.User Name and PasswordName of the Database There are many client applications that can talk to a database server. Microsoft SQL Server has Enterprise Manager to create databases, set security, run maintenance jobs, queries and of course design and modify database tables. What Is SQL?: SQL is short for Structured Query Language and is a simple language that provides instructions for building and modifying the structure of databases and for modifying the data stored in the tables. The main commands used to modify and retrieve data are: Select - Fetches data. Insert - Inserts one or more rows of data. Update - Modifies existing row(s) of data Delete - Deletes rows of data. There are several ANSI/ISO standards such as ANSI 92, one of the most popular. This defines a minimum subset of supported statements. Most compiler vendors support these standards. Conclusion Any nontrivial application can use a database and a SQL-based database is a good place to start. Once you have mastered the configuration and administering of the database then you have to learn SQL to make it work well. The speed at which a database can retrieve data is astonishing and modern RDBMS are complex and highly optimized applications. Open source databases like MySQL are fast approaching the power and usability of the commercial rivals and drive many databases on websites. How to Connect to a Database in Windows using ADO Programmatically, there are various APIs that provide access to database servers. Under Windows, these include ODBC and Microsoft ADO. [h3[Using ADO So long as there is a provider- software that interfaces a database to ADO, then the database can be accessed. Windows from 2000 has this built in. Try the following. It should work on Windows XP, and on Windows 2000 if youve ever installed MDAC. If you havent and want to try this, visit Microsoft.com, do a search for MDAC Download and download any version, 2.6 or higher. Create an empty file called test.udl. Right click in Windows Explorer on the file and do open with, you should see Microsoft Data Access - OLE DB Core Services. This dialog lets you connect to any database with an installed provider, even excel spreadsheets! Select the first tab (Provider) as opens by default at the the Connection tab. Select a provider then click Next. The data source name shows the different types of device available. After filling in username and password, click the Test Connection button. After you press the ok button, you can open the test.udl with file with Wordpad. It should contain text like this. [oledb] ; Everything after this line is an OLE DB initstring ProviderSQLOLEDB.1;Persist Security InfoFalse;User IDsa;Initial Catalogdhbtest;Data Source127.0.0.1 The third line is the important one, it contains the configuration details. If your database has a password, it will be shown here, so this is not a secure method! This string can be built into applications that use ADO and will let them connect to the specified database. Using ODBC ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) provides an API based interface to databases. There are ODBC drivers available for just about every database in existence. However, ODBC provides another layer of communication between an application and the database and this can cause performance penalties.