Born Sleepy

Sipping From The Fire Hose

2025-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

In the last few years I’ve been switching away from the more corporate social networks, and trying to move to more open, less commercial ones that have less intrusive algorithms behind them.

Migration

I used to use Twitter, but I have such fundamental political disagreements with the people now in charge, that I moved away quite a long time ago.

Luckily, I mostly used Twitter to keep in touch with my professional peers, and a lot of them seem to have the same opinion as me. As a group, we have managed to move over to using Mastodon in sufficient numbers that there is still a coherent network.

In more recent times, I’ve come to the same political conclusions about the people behind Facebook, and so am trying to move away from that too. This is a trickier proposition, since a lot of the people I followed there are friends and family. These people are often less technical, and find Mastodon a bit intimidating. That’s not really fair on Mastodon, as it’s not inherently more complicated than Facebook, but it’s got an image problem, and shifting that with my friends is beyond the scope of things that I can easily achieve.

As a result, I decided to try something else, and I settled on Bluesky. This isn’t an ideal replacement for Facebook, and nor is a totally open, corporate-free platform, but it’s better than many of the alternatives. It also seems to have gained traction amongst many of the political journalists and podcasters that I follow, and so an added bonus of using it was that I could follow those people on Bluesky, and not have their posts muddled up with the technical ones on Mastodon.

Algorithms

In contrast to Facebook and Twitter, the new platforms that I’m using make no decisions about which posts I get to see - they just present them to me in time order.

This is what I want; part of what is wrong with older platforms is how the algorithms are used to steer you in certain directions, distorting your perspective.

However, it does come with an old problem from the earlier days of social media, which is that you can feel a bit overwhelmed with the sheer volume of content.

As the cliche goes, it’s like trying to drink from a firehose.

Sipping

I’ve adopted a simple approach to this problem, which you might also find helpful.

It’s very obvious, and lots of people are already doing it I expect, but just in case you’ve not tried…

Both Mastodon and Bluesky allow you to build your own lists of users, in addition to the main list of those who you follow.

What I’ve done on both platforms is to create a “Priority” list, add a handful of users to them, and set up my clients to only show me posts from people on the “Priority” list by default.

This simple step massively reduces the overwhelm. Whenever I come into the app, there are a manageable number of posts to catch up with. If I still want more, I can switch the client into the “show me everything” mode, and keep going, but I don’t feel like I’m missing out if I don’t do this.

The people I add to these lists are usually friends or colleagues who’s opinion I am particularly interested in, but they are also people who tend not to post too much. In particular, they usually don’t post too much of other people’s content. I aggressively remove people from the list if too much of what they post is a re-post, or does not fit with my idea of what I’m using each platform for.

This isn’t necessarily a value judgement, and certainly not a judgement on them. I used to worry that people might spot that they are not on my list, or were on it and have been removed, and might somehow feel aggrieved. I’ve got over that worry though. Life is too short. These lists are just practical measures that I use to manage not seeing more posts than I can cope with. I still regularly put the clients into “show me everything” mode, and enjoy getting a wider range of stuff. Sometimes this prompts me to add someone to the priority list. Other times I feel like I’ve got too many posts in “priority” mode, and I remove someone who’s got a bit noisy!

All in all, I feel that this approach is simple, and works. It’s allowed me to get back into a feeling of connection with my profession, and with a few friends¹, and that’s great.

Unfortunately I still can’t persuade most people to move off Facebook, which is sad. I do wish that there was something a little better than Bluesky to replace it - particular to replace the community groups side of things. Still, Bluesky is good enough, until something else comes along. ↩

Westminster

2018-08-25T13:25:00+00:00

I see pro-independence¹ rhetoric all the time at the moment in social media posts, which refers to “Westminster” as if it’s some sort of sinister cabal. Usually implied, if not explicit, is that Westminster is populated by “the English”, who are an army of clones that speak with one voice.

These posts often carry a good underlying message - that you should question the motives that lie behind what you read and view, and that there is ignorance and bias at work, even that there is a small elite who do not have the interests of the majority at heart - which is why good people tend to repost them.

However, I worry deeply about this sort of simplification.

It’s very much the m.o. of the Trump/Farage brigade to take a complex situation, or a disparate group of people, and turn them into cartoon plots and villains.

To take inconveniently detailed facts and distill them into a single “truth”.

Then these cartoon messages set up the simplistic notion that somehow “they” are bad, but “we” are good. “They” are all flawed and corrupt and out for their own self-gratification. “We” are competent and pure and have everyone’s best interests at heard.

NOTHING IN THIS WORLD IS THAT FUCKING SIMPLE. STOP SWALLOWING THIS SHIT, AND STOP PROPGATING IT. YOU ARE MAKING THINGS WORSE.

If you want to understand how things work, and how they can be changed for the better, you have to reject the tabloid bullshit and dig deeper.

Westminster is not all Tories, and not all Unionists. Nor is it all corrupt. Holyrood, by the way, is not composed entirely of saintly people who believe in independence because they have your best interests at heart.

There are undoubtedly sinister forces at work in the world, but they’re a complicated tangle of power and business and money and historical privilege and (dare I say it) religious ideology and all sorts of obvious yet subtle stuff. They don’t live in one place. In fact, the very worst of them are supranational, which in the absence of a world government able to tax them and call them to account is a part of the whole damn problem.

The machinery of government of the U.K - which isn’t in “Westminster” anyway - is not all of one view. Simple maths says that most of the people who work in it must be from normal backgrounds, as there just aren’t enough privileged toffs and super-rich elite to go around. The press (and even the BBC), does not speak with one voice. There are very questionable owners and dubious governance and suspect lobbying and corrupting influences everywhere, but dissent and free thought and a range of political views are hanging on too.

Scratch the surface of the “English” (and btw Welsh and N. Irish) people and you’ll find a ton of different views, most of them pretty similar to the majority of Scots. Where they differ it’ll mostly be about perspective and life experience, rather than substance. Most people everwhere are struggling to get by, fed up with their shitty jobs, worried about the state of the world (or hedonistically ignoring the state of the world).

If you look for poverty and lack of privilege, both urban and rural, you’ll find it in abundance, north and south of the border. If you look for privilege, you’ll find it in abundance in Glasgow and Edinburgh as well as London and Manchester.

Unthinking tribalism is a massive problem at the moment, in our nation(s), and in the world. So is an anti-intellectual tendency to wave hands and ignore complicated facts when they get in the way of a good slogan.

I really wish that those of us in favour of Scottish independence (and yes, I am one), could raise the level of the debate. For me, the chance to make a country where that sort of nonsense does not rule is the whole damn point.

That’s Scottish independence, for my non-Scottish friends :) ↩

Culture

2018-08-02T13:38:00+00:00

I believe that everything worth celebrating about humanity is universal.

It’s not tied to a particular place, a particular language, or a particular set of people.

Technical Blog

2018-07-03T17:50:00+00:00

I’ve been pretty bad at blogging any personal / political stuff recently.

There are various reasons for this, but the fact that I’ve generally been taking a break from most of my (previously quite enthusiatic) social media interaction may have something to do with it.

I have however been doing some sporadic technical blogging.

These days, those posts live over at Elegant Chaos.

Here’s the latest blog post, with an update on what I’ve been tinkering with (in between watching World Cup games… and playing Witcher 3… and various other distractions…).

Status Update

2018-04-20T13:38:34+00:00

When I stopped work on Sketch, one of my resolutions was to blog a bit more.

I’m not doing very well on that front!

To be fair, I’ve had a few distractions, including recently standing for election for a local trust here (unsuccessfully!). There’s also been a lot of time spent fighting fires and battling trolls on issues relating to Secularism, Sabbatarianism, and other things starting with an S. I could tell a few tales on that score, but frankly the trolls don’t deserve the oxygen of publicity, so the less said the better. Suffice to say that my faith in human nature, which wasn’t stellar to begin with, has not been improved by the last year or so on the Isle of Lewis…

On the software front, I’ve been having fun working on a few private projects. Most recently, I’ve taken tentative steps towards working on a new game. Games these days are generally massive affairs, with large budgets and multi-disciplinary teams. Having worked in the industry, I know all too well what an undertaking even a modest game would be - and in my case, at this stage, it’s just me in my office, hacking away.

I don’t know if it will go any further than that, and to be honest, right now, I’m not worried. It’s proving to be great fun, and it’s also a useful vehicle for a whole bunch of learning / catching up with new technologies, including getting my head round the best ways to use Swift.

I’ve also been working on a bunch of unrelated side projects, and mulling over ideas for more. Highlights include Swift build systems, Javascript-Block bridging, and some (still private) thoughts on long-term backup/archiving software and project management software.

Most of what I do these days is open source and available on Github.

The game is currently an exception to this, but probably won’t be forever. I just need to find a way to protect my IP (in the unlikely event that it becomes a commercial project), and probably also need to get to the stage where I’m not too embarrassed to let other people see it.

One other note on the technical front: don’t forget that I’ve moved my technical writing over to the Elegant Chaos blog. This blog will continue, but focussed on more personal musings.

Stepping Back

2018-02-27T23:31:01+00:00

Self-knowledge is an elusive beast.

By nature I’m an introvert. I don’t want to be the centre of attention, and I don’t like conflict.

Unfortunately, I’m also someone who tends to analyse stuff. I take things apart, try to figure out how they work, and to solve problems. Whether or not I really ought to doesn’t seem to matter - it just happens. Look, here I go, doing it again.

Doing that tends to leave me with opinions. That’s the first mistake. Having opinions - a dangerous business.

I’m also an idealist. A deeply cynical one, admittedly (and there’s a recipe for misery, if ever there was one), but an idealist nevertheless. This means that I tend to care about things. That, I think you’ll agree, is my second mistake. Schoolboy error in fact.

This combination turns out to be fairly deadly: strong opinions, which you want to voice, because you give a shit.

There’s one final component though, which is the icing on the cake: ego.

It wouldn’t matter if nobody listened, or if I didn’t care who listened. Or, I guess, it wouldn’t matter if everybody listened, and agreed.

Life doesn’t work like that, of course. Enough people listen to give you the illusion that you’re not a total idiot. Enough to make you think that you could, maybe even should, work alongside them to Get Things Done™.

The problem is, of course, that they give a shit and have opinions too - which turn out to be different from yours, sometimes.

“Sometimes” is fine, but there’s a hazy area where “sometimes” becomes “often” becomes “most of the time” becomes “always”. Moving along this line can go a few ways, most of which are not good. Loss of self-confidence. Imposter syndrome. Frustration. Stress. A ton of negative crap which is really counter-productive.

Or maybe you just end up in a pointless pissing contest with someone. Harmless, perhaps, but annoying for everyone caught in the crossfire, and a massive waste of energy.

I wish I was a humbler person, I really do, and could avoid these situations or let them wash over me. Or even that I was a more dominant person, who could just steamroller through the objections and impose my will (no, really, everything would be fine, honest - what could possibly go wrong?).

Unfortunately I’m neither. I’m arrogant enough to care, insecure enough for it to hurt, introverted enough to find it exhausting to deal with.

I’m not talking about a single situation here, by the way. If you’re reading this and thinking you know which specific thing I’m alluding to - you don’t. This is definitely a repeating pattern in my life.

I haven’t figured out the solution, but my current strategy for dealing with it is simple: stepping away. Removing the source of stress and negativity, and finding something else to do with my time.

I’m not sure if this is wisdom, cowardice, or pragmatic self-preservation.

It’s probably not the ultimate answer, but it feels necessary right now.

Moving Things Around

2018-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

When I originally created the Elegant Chaos site, it had a “news” section, which over time mutated into a blog.

At a later date I realised that personal things and work things were getting a bit muddled up, so I split off the personal stuff to this blog instead.

In doing so, I envisaged the Elegant Chaos blog going back to essentially just being a “news” service, and indeed most of the posts there were just announcements about software releases.

At the moment there aren’t really any software releases, however. In addition, this, which was supposed to be my personal blog, still ended up carrying a lot of technical posts, as well as completely non-technical ones.

So I’ve decided to re-organise things once again. It’ll keep you all on your toes, if nothing else.

As a result I’ve moved back most of the technical posts to the Elegant Chaos blog, and henceforth decree it as the place I’ll write about the technical things I’m doing. Born Sleepy will very much remain active, but will be restricted to non-technical things.

I expect I’ll end up changing it all again in a while, but let’s see how long this plan remains in force!

Facebook

2018-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

A friend pointed out to me the other day that the Facebook link (at the bottom of this page, and every other page on the site), was wrong.

It wasn’t broken, more’s the pity, but it was pointing at the wrong person. Awkward!

It’s fixed now.

For the avoidance of doubt: this is not me. On the other hand, this is me.

Glad we got that cleared up…

Bohemian

2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve decided that it’s time for a change, and to move on from my work with Bohemian, so from the end of this year I’ll be footloose and fancy-free.

I intend to have a break, take a bit of time to recharge my creative batteries, and then look for new challenges.

It was 2012 when I started contracting (part-time at first) on Sketch, and a lot has happened since. We’ve gone from having just the two original founders, to a staff of 20+ great people.

It’s been intense, rewarding, challenging and fun, and I’ll always be grateful to Pieter and Emanuel for giving me the opportunity to work on such a great product, and to help to build such a great team. I wish them continued success and all the best for the future.

For me personally though - I’m really excited at the prospect of starting a new chapter in 2018. Watch this space!

Democracy

2017-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

In these crazy times, people have some seriously messed up ideas about democracy.

Here are some things that are not democracy:

winning a vote by lying about what your opponents have done in the past ¹ ² ³
winning a vote by making wild, unsubstantiated claims about what your opponents intend to do ¹ ²
winning a vote by lying about what you have done in the past ¹
winning a vote by making wild, unsubstantiated promises, and then failing to fulfil any (or many) of them ² ⁴ ⁵
winning a vote by framing the question in a way that doesn’t allow people to choose reasonable alternatives ³ ⁴ ⁵
winning a vote by framing the question in such a vague way that nobody can say what the result actually means ⁴
using the result of a vote won using one of these methods to justify never holding a similar vote again ³ ⁴ ⁵

If democracy means anything at all, then it requires informed choice.

Informed choice requires two things: being given an actual meaningful choice, and being given the relevant facts.

When any form of lying, obfuscation or outright fraud is involved in the win, then the winner (and their supporters) do not get to claim the moral high ground.

When any form of incompetent framing is involved, the winner (and their supporters) do not get to claim some sort of finality.

see US presidential election ↩ ↩² ↩³
see UK general election ↩ ↩² ↩³
see UK referendum on proportional representation ↩ ↩² ↩³
see UK referendum on Brexit ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
see Scottish referendum on independence ↩ ↩² ↩³

Jekyll

2016-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

If you follow this blog at all, you’ll probably have noticed by now that the site has been redesigned and simplified.

This coincides with me finally getting round to moving away from Drupal and towards a static design using Jekyll.

There is still quite a lot of the old site waiting to be ported, and quite a bit of cleanup to do on the new one, but hopefully I’ll get there eventually.

Dissonance

2015-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Increasingly, we’re running our lives - living our lives - through computers.

This is certainly true for someone like me. I make my living writing software, working online with colleagues scattered across different countries. I need computers to make what I make, and to test what I make, and to communicate with the people that I make it with. The people who buy what I make need a computer to do it, and then a computer to use it.

I also happen to live in a relatively remote part of the UK, far away from many of my friends and family, and from most useful shops, sources of entertainment, etc. So computers are a big part of my non-working life too. I shop online, I communicate online, I get my music, my reading, my news, my entertainment online.

The fact that I can use computers to do so much ought to be a positive thing, and in many ways of course it is. They can do amazing things, and I can’t even count the number of aspects of day to day living that are quicker, easier, more efficient, or just downright saner when done electronically.

And yet… I find that the more that my life (particularly my non-working life) is mediated through technology, the more frustration I experience.

Why?

Partly it’s because I know enough about the technology to know what’s possible - at least what should be possible - and get frustrated when it turns out that reality hasn’t quite caught up yet.

Perhaps instead it’s just that I’m entering that phase of my life where I truly get to be a grumpy old man, whether I like it or not. Possibly I’d be experiencing the same frustration even if I spent no time with technology at all.

Leaving that cheerful possibility to one side for a moment, I think it’s actually because so much of the software that I use (that I’m sort-of forced to used, unless I want to completely reject the way of life I’ve chosen, and re-invent myself as some sort of Luddite hermit), is so horribly broken.

It’s not broken in the obvious “this doesn’t work, I’d like my money back please” sort of way. Well, some of it is, but whilst those cases are annoying, they are simple to deal with, as long as they are acknowledged.

Instead, much of the software that I use is broken in a pebble-in-the-shoe, splinter-under-your-nail sort of way. It mostly works, except when it doesn’t. Or it always works, but it’s irritatingly quirky, badly designed, just plain ugly. Or perhaps worst of all, it blatantly doesn’t work, but everyone is caught up in some kind of mass-hypnosis, Emperor’s new clothes scenario, and you find yourself thinking “what am I missing here?”*.

In practical terms what this means for me is that I do an awful lot of fixing things that shouldn’t be broken, tweaking things that shouldn’t need tweaking. I have to re-install software that wasn’t touched, re-enter passwords that haven’t changed, work around things that shouldn’t need working around.

I could go on (ad nauseam), but you get the point I’m sure. By the way, I’m not talking about hand-crafted Linux systems with custom kernels. Although I’m a sophisticated user, I’m mostly talking about out-of-the-box, “it should just work” things. I live almost exclusively on the Apple side of the tracks, so perhaps this is just a problem within that particular ecosystem. It does feel to me as though an appreciation for quality (that much-vaunted attention to detail), has badly fallen away recently, and that’s something which has been discussed to some extent in the Apple developer community.

I hesitate to blame it all on Apple though - almost every encounter I have with non-Apple technology leads me to think that things are as bad if not worse on the other side of the fence. Either way, most of the discussion seems to be quite narrowly focussed on software, and not on the wider effect it might be having on us all as people.

For me, personally, it feels like it results in loss of a lot of time - time that I can’t really afford to lose. Worse than that, though, it feels like it has a subtle, invidious, and distinctly negative mental impact.

It’s dissonance, constant dissonance, like a kind of mental tinnitus that never drowns everything out, but never goes away. It makes the simplest tasks difficult, just when you don’t need them to be. It’s deeply unnerving to anyone who finds satisfaction in small local victories over entropy. Not in an unrealistic way, just in an everyday, trying-to-move-forward and make my life better kind of way.

It’s exhausting.

I think that this dissonance has the potential to be a really seriously problem. The more people’s lives are tied to computers, the more that this is going to have a measurable impact on society’s health, particularly its mental health.

Like most problems, talking about it has got to be the first step.

Am I alone out here? Am I just projecting a general theory onto my own experiences? Should I just take a long holiday?

Or is this a real syndrome?

*anything Wi-Fi related that Apple has done for the last, well, forever?

All Quiet on the Western (Isles) Front

2014-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

I haven’t been blogging much recently.

I’m not quite sure why. It’s certainly true that working on Sketch is keeping me busy, and what free time I have seems to be taken up these days by ownership of an old (and leaky) house.

I’m still very engaged in the whole business of doing what we (software developers) do - plus what could be loosely described as life-and-all-that-shit - and I feel that I’ve plenty to say.

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been spending too much time drinking from the fire hose, and not taken enough time out to reflect on what I’ve read and post my comments here.

I hope that I don’t have an unrealistic view about the likelihood of many people reading or responding in any case. This is a prime example of vanity publishing I guess, but I find the process of writing down my thoughts enjoyable and occasionally useful (or cathartic).

Note to self: do a bit less, reflect a bit more, take the time to write it down.

Hope And Fear, Fear And Hope

2014-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

The independence campaign has been fascinating, with a really good level of debate. In my personal world, Twitter and Facebook have been alive with links to brilliant articles from both sides, and impassioned posts by friends and strangers.

Though I think that I’m coming down in favour of a YES, I’ve been very torn, as I can see good arguments on both sides. I say think because I’m still not 100% certain.

Quite a few people I respect have questioned why I can see the sense in many of the economic warnings, and yet still want to go ahead. I know what they mean. I know that my heart says YES, but I’d like to be sure that my head does too.

This post is an attempt to explain why I want to vote YES. You could also see it as an attempt to convince myself that I’m doing the right thing.

Britain: Hope And Fear

First of all, lets be clear: the crude “hope and fear” characterisation is a load of shite.

The reason that I don’t want to vote NO is a competing mass of hope and fear, and the reason I (nervously) want to vote YES is a combination of fear and hope.

My hope for a united Britain would be that we could maintain and build on the things that misty-eyed sentimentalists claim made us great.

An honourable tradition of liberal democracy, tolerance for others, compassion (for people and animals, apparently), and the maintenance of such institutions as the welfare state. Standing as a force for fairness and justice in our own land and in the world at large. Inventing sports and then being crap at them.

My fear is that little if any of this vision of Britain was actually ever true. What bits of it were not complete myth at the time I was born (1969) have been slowly eroded by the successive years of rule under Thatcher, Blair and now the coalition. Much like the effects of climate change on our shorelines, this erosion appears to be accelerating. Much as with climate change, our population seems to have become brainwashed into accepting that there’s nothing to be done, and not even attempting to fight it.

Britain in the world

Though we are no doubt delusional about our actual influence in the world, we undeniably play a role in major international institutions: the UN, the IMF, WTO, the G8-or-is-it-7-now, and plenty more alphabet soups. We participate in international climate change conferences, security summits, fights against world wide crises of health and poverty, world courts against war crime and torture. We reluctantly bomb things when necessary, and dutifully intercept every communication we can, all in the name of freedom.

We dress this up as us having a positive influence on the world. Yet our involvement in all of these institutions revolves around one simple constant - naked self interest. We act with utter inconsistency and the most disingenous kind of hypocrisy - upholding doctrines such as the sanctity of the nation state when it suits us, conveniently ignoring them when it doesn’t.

This is real politik, I hear you say, and who am I to argue? That’s not really my point. My point is that it’s nothing to be proud of. It’s not a great tradition to be preserved. Frankly, it’s an embarassment.

Naive or not, I’d happily leave it behind. I’d happily swap a (largely delusional) position of hypocrisy masquerading as influence for one in which we were able to actually pursue a consistent and ethical (though potentially ineffectual) foreign policy.

Britain at home

One of the things that the Better Together campaign has been emphasising is that there’s no going back from independence. They say this as a scare tactic of course: “don’t screw this up, you won’t get a second chance”.

The same people have spent the last forty-four years of my life quite literally dismantling the state and selling off the family silver. Again and again they have made decisions which degrade the quality of life of the majority, reduce equity, and increase the gap between the privileged and the rest of us.

Like some monstrous piece of clockwork machinery, every time one of the nationalised industries has been sold, every time regulations have been relaxed, or internal markets been created, we’ve lurched forwards over another ratchet, locking us further into a position that cannot be reversed.

Each of the privitisations in particular has been a “don’t screw this up, you won’t get a second chance” moment. Invariably, of course, they have screwed many of them up.

Even if they haven’t directly, in many cases the entire basis for selling off national infrastructure was screwed in the first place. A competitive market? For electricity? Gas? Rail? Don’t make me laugh. This is the stuff we all need - providing it is the very definition of what a government is for. Increased efficiency? Only in the sense that profit has been efficiently extracted from these industries, to the detriment of us all.

The machine is advancing too for the parts of the state that haven’t been sold outright. Many are now in hock, in the form of PPI and outsourcing. NHS contracts are being handed off to private healthcare companies. Schools, prisons, even the police are going the same way. If the TTIP goes through, we could be in a situation where we literally cannot withdraw from some of these contracts, ever, without being sued.

Again, I have no illusions that there are simple answers to these problems. I’m well aware of the hypocrisy and corruption that crept into the once-honourable trade unions. I have no time for the moronically simplistic “us against them” mentality of class warfare. I have no time either for small-minded dogmatic power-mongers on either side.

The realisation I come to though is that if we continue with the status quo in Britain, we are fucked. There is an agenda being pursued by all of the mainstream parties that seems to be nothing to do with evidence, nothing to do with the long term benefit of the population. They are making decisions that will effect us for years to come, and being completely dishonest about why the decisions are being made.

Whether it’s due to a sinister conspiracy, small-scale greed, naked ambition or mere incompetence, I don’t see democracy in Britain as working any more. I don’t mean by this the trite “they’re all the same” idiocy that you hear in a stereotypical vox pop.

And yet.

Whilst they aren’t all the same, they do all seem to be equally unable, unwilling, or ideologically opposed to doing anything that I would regard as a rational response to the situation we find ourselves in. It seems as though decisions are being made, day in, day out, that nobody wants, but which the democratic process is unable to prevent.

I don’t see this as a system so precious that is worth preserving in aspic.

Something badly needs to change. I don’t want to dismantle everything. I really don’t want change to come in the form of a popular uprising. Anarchists are idiots, and revolutions never end well.

A legally negotiated, amicable, secession of Scotland, on the other hand, might just be enough to disrupt the status quo. It might force Labour to re-evaluate its position and work out why the hell it actually exists anymore. It might help the Greens to break through, or another progressive voice to emerge.

Most of all, these things might be possible in a newly independent Scotland, which might help to inspire the rest of the UK.

Scotland: Fear And Hope

Lest I haven’t made it clear enough yet, let me be explicit - I’m a cynical bugger.

I have many fears for the way an independent Scotland could go.

Right now, Scotland is a more left-leaning country than the UK, and it’s one of the many things that attracts me to living here. It’s not always been that way though, and there is no guarantee that it will continue. It’s also quite a small-C conservative country, and religion holds too much sway for my liking.

The Yes campaign is more than just the SNP, but it is they who are leading the fight, and who potentially get the biggest say in writing the constitution. The SNP is a loose coalition of people with very different agendas. Some of these people are socialists, but some are out and out nationalists (and I really dislike people from anywhere who think that where you are born somehow makes you better).

I have no doubt too that some in the SNP are arch pragmatists who will espouse socialism now, but when the economic going gets tough in a few years, will happily get into bed with Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump, and sell this country out just as heartily as Westminster is currently doing.

Meanwhile, the economy could go into decline. Large companies could leave. Prices could rise. Putin could send an “aid convoy” to Scotland.

However, whilst these are hypothetical fears, I have a real concern about what is happening right now in the UK. I have an even bigger concern about what is happening in the wider world, and how little we appear to be doing about it.

When I’m faced with a choice between actual bad stuff happening today, and possible bad stuff that might happen tomorrow (if we let it), I am inclined to take a chance on the future.

Yes, I admit it, I am inclined to hope.

I hope that in Scotland this future will be decided in part by the 90%+ of people who care enough to have voted in the referendum. No doubt a lot of them on either side are voting for utterly the wrong reasons, but even so: 90%.

I hope that, although we have oil, we will use the income from it to invest in publically-owned renewables, which we also have in abundance.

I hope that in a newly invigorated democracy, the Greens might fare rather better than they do right now, and that the Labour party might remember who it was.

I hope that we will hold on to the NHS.

I hope that we will continue to invest in education in a way that makes us a small but well-educated country - where high tech industry flourishes, and there’s a sufficient level of schooling in the general population to pursue socially progressive policies because they are in everyone’s interests in the long term.

I hope that we will manage to find a sensible balance between economic prosperity and, for want of a better word, humanity.

I even hope (whisper it quietly), that I might be asked to pay a bit more tax, in return for living in a country where I don’t have to feel embarassed about having a house and a job, and I don’t have to fear for my future if one day I have neither.

In short I have many hopes.

The hardened cynic in me screams that they are naive and unreasonably idealistic.

He’s probably right, but the overriding hope is that somehow with independence I can play a small part in making change happen. I’d be one of five million instead of one of sixty million. I’d be living in a brave and scary new world, rather than continuing to sleepwalk towards the dystopian future that seems to be right round the corner in the UK if we maintain the status quo.

I think I’ve convinced myself. I seem to be a YES.

Second Chamber

2014-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been pondering what to do about the house of lords for quite a while, and at some point last year I came up with a scheme that I liked. I’m sure it’s not an original idea, but I haven’t actually seen it expressed elsewhere, so I’ve been meaning to write it down.

I live in Scotland now, and so the Independence debate that is currently raging has a direct impact on my future. I’m broadly in favour, but I recently discovered that the proposal includes no second chamber. This seems like a bad idea to me, so I humbly submit the following as an alternative plan…

A Small Negative Digression

First, it’s worth saying briefly what I don’t want, and why.

A house of lords, with membership chosen on the basis of parentage and/or hieararchical position in various religious bodies. Do I really need to explain why this is a bad idea?
A house of politicians, elected on broadly the same basis as the first chamber, but with superficial differences in the length of their term or their consitutencies. This seems to be to simply entrench the political orthodoxy, and hand complete control to the party machines.
A house of political appointees, chosen by the establishment, for the establishment. Kind of like the house of lords now, without the hereditaries. This is actually the best solution in this short list, in my opinion, because the people who make up this body tend to be more experienced, and have actually done things other than politics. They are also generally older and care less about the need to toe any particular party line. There’s still far too much opportunity for reenforcing privilege for my liking.

My Plan In A Nutshell

So my alternative, in a nutshell, is this:

A house of elected representitives of non-geographic constituencies
A regular, parallel, referendum to decide those constituencies

Lets unpack this a bit.

I would like the house to be elected. Democracy is flawed, but, to paraphrase Churchill, it’s the least worst alternative.

I would like to avoid another house organised on party lines.

I would like a house that retained the likelihood of most members being substantial, experienced, and having had a life outside of politics.

I would like to retain the possibility of people in the house being there to represent things that large numbers of people in society at large care about. A tiny selection of examples might be ecology, animal rights, religion, social justice, pacifism, free trade, protectionism, law and order, human rights, freedom of speech, net neutrality, or the merit (or otherwise) of early Johnny Depp movies.

I’d like the list of these groups to be fluid, and to reflect what society feels is important at the time. No more permanent seats for religion, but while enough people care about it, that’s just fine. Much like the basket of items used by the government to estimate the current value of inflation, it should evolve as the world changes.

The Process

The way I see this working is broadly as follows.

People propose constituencies.
The entire population votes for the top X constituencies (where X is the number of seats in the house)
People then stand for election as a candidate under one of these constituencies. You can only stand for one constituency.
The entire population votes. Each person gets to vote in one constituency. It’s completely up to each person to choose which constituency they vote in. They either vote for one candidate, or perhaps have some form of PR allowing them to apportion preferences amongst the candidates for the chosen consituency.

Whilst this sort of system would have been completely impractical before the internet, in today’s world it is utterly achievable.

Constituencies

The process of proposing constituencies could and should be a pretty free-form business. It’s possible that it would require some form of bureaucracy to avoid time wasters - requiring a small group of interested individuals to self-organise first - but that’s about it.

The people who are paying attention at this point might be saying: “Wait - there’s a danger of duplication of effort here. What if the People’s Front of Judea and The Judean People’s front both propose virtually identical but different constituencies?”.

That’s a risk, but by definition, the serious groups, the ones addressing issues that enough people care about, are likely to organise themselves and emerge. The ones that are divided won’t get their collective shit together, and will fall by the wayside.

Whilst the process of choosing constituencies sounds like an added complication, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be run in parallel with the election for candidates, simply offset by one term. So whilst you’re electing this term’s candidates, you also express your choices for next term’s constituencies.

This requires a single, initial choice of constituencies, but after that the process sustains itself.

One danger I can see is an impractically large churn, with too many constituencies coming and going. A way of avoiding that is that for every election, we only get to replace a small percentage of the constituencies - say 10%. Much like football teams at the end of a season, a few of the least successfull ones get replaced with a fresh crop of up-and-coming hopefuls. Short-term stability is maintained, but the composition of the league may be radically different after a number of seasons.

Candidates

My hope with this system is that the candidates who emerge to stand for the various constituencies will generally be substantial, experienced people. One can imagine that they might be religious leaders, industry leaders, trade union leaders, senior police officers, military, academics, activists, artists, journalists, and so on. People who know a lot about their chosen field, and have something intelligent to say.

Of course, there’s still plenty of potential here for privilege to win out, and for career politicians to sneak in by the back door. Aguably, it’s hard to get to the top of any profession or organisation without political skills.

I think that a couple of things will help to guard against this however:

Firstly, the constituencies aren’t just professions. They are anything that enough people care about. This includes “alternative” things that currently have very large communities who are essentially underground.

Secondly, by definition, the people who are voting for a given constituency are the people who think that it’s the most important issue for them to express an opinion on. My hope is that this will result in a positive bias towards candidates who actually know what the hell they are talking about. The fakes and fraudsters, and people who are acting as puppets for others, will have a lot more chance of being found out when subjected to scrutiny by their (no pun intended) peers.

Conclusion

So, there you go.

I’m sure there are problems with this idea, and as I said at the beginning, I’m sure someone’s thought of it before.

I do, however, think that it may be the kind of thing that is only now becoming achievable, due to advances in technology.

I’d like to think that it might go someway towards retaining the fairness of the one-person-one-vote principle, whilst fracturing the current effective monopoly enjoyed by a small number of monolithic political parties and a relative small political elite.

Bohemian Coders

2014-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

As you may have realised by this point, I’m now contracting pretty much full-time for Bohemian Coding. We’ve been rather busy on Sketch 3.0, which is one of the reasons why my blog posts have dried up a bit.

I’d like to try to remedy this in the coming weeks. One thing that should help is the new Bohemian Coders blog that Pieter and I have set up.

This is a companion to the Bohemian Coding blog, but where that one deals with general stuff, the Bohemian Coders one is solely focussed on the technical issues we’ve encountered.

There are an awful lot of interesting topics to discuss, relating to how we do certain things internally, how the code ended up that way, what changes we have planned, and why.

Why not head over, and check out the first few posts. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more from me, both there and here…

Mark Elliot

2014-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

I first got to know Mark at a small gathering at his place. I was feeling shy and didn’t want to go as I didn’t really know him, but I was persuaded by Caroline, and as the evening progressed and I got to know Mark, his boys, David, Debs, Catriona and Jana, I relaxed.

At some point, RockBand was fired up. My normal option would probably have been to watch self-consciously from the sidelines, but aided no doubt by the pint sized measures of vodka and coke that Mark was feeding me, I had a go… and thus the greatest rock band never to perform a gig was born! Mark and Debs on vocals, Stu on lead guitar, me on bass - epic! The drum pads weren’t working, but no doubt we would have made do with a succession of spontaneously combusting drummers for our American tour. Or perhaps William would have stepped into the breach.

Fast forward a few months, another night round at Mark’s, many of the same faces, and an introduction to Chaz and Tracey, and Hélène. Ridiculous amounts of alcohol flowed (I think it was pints of G&T this time), much nonsense was talked. Tenuous connections were discovered, shared interests revealed, war stories from games industries exchanged, musical tastes found to be compatible! Turns out Mark and Chaz were in Colindale at the time I was growing up in Kilburn. The age gap was small enough - surely we must have passed in the street, stood next to each other in Games Workshop, jumped up and down with the rest of the Iron Maiden or Marillion crowd at Hammersmith Odeon?

Forward again, this time a barbecue at Mark’s with Nigel in attendance. Once more the world was put to rights, ably assisted by alcohol (I seem to recall Slippery Nipples featuring heavily). Another storming night. Another stonking hangover. There were more nights like this, though sadly not nearly enough. Relaxed chats in An Lanntair. Innocent meetings at MacNeils for a few drinks which magically mutated into HebSar drinking nights. A systematic assault on the HS1 cocktail menu (I blame Debs).

Each of these is a treasured (though somewhat blurry, for some reason) memory.

Yes, alcohol features heavily, but it was the easy drinking of relaxed company, not the mutually assured destruction of a search for oblivion.

I treasure them for the sense of welcome and friendship that Mark created amongst the kindred spirits he gathered around him. He had an easy generosity, and always went out of his way to help us. He also wore his heart on his sleeve, and had plenty of stress in his life when I knew him. I hope I occasionally managed to provide a sympathetic ear to him, though I wish I had done more. Somehow despite his own concerns, he always had time to listen to my troubles, offering advice and reassurance.

I only knew Mark for three years or so, and I wouldn’t presume to claim to have been a close friend, but I wish it had been much longer, and that I’d had the chance to become one.

I wouldn’t normally consider doing anything so gauche as quoting Marillion lyrics in polite company, but I suspect that Mark would let me off. There’s a bit in one of their songs about losing one of their friends in a car crash: “I remember Toronto when Mylo went down / And we sat and cried on the phone / I never felt so alone / He was the first of our own”. Death is part of life, and like everyone reading this I have lost people very dear to me. Somehow though, it feels like Mark was the first of my own.

And now I’m crying again. Bugger.

Miss you Mark.

Tumbleweed?

2013-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been a bit quiet here, but I’m still alive.

One part of the explanation is that my new contract has been taking a lot of my attention. This is fab, and I’m having a great time taking Sketch apart and putting it back together again ;)

The other part is that my partner Caroline and I have recently bought a house! Moving home is of course massively time consuming at the best of times. Actually buying a property was a first time thing for me, and it’s been not only time consuming but a bit traumatic for various reasons (which mostly boil down to naivety on our part, and the potential need for some building work… sigh).

So, yes, I’m still here. Not finding a lot of time to work on Elegant Chaos projects right now, which is frustrating, but I will get there eventually.

Less Chaotic, More Bohemian

2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve tended to go back & forth in my working life between gainful employment as a full time wage slave, and the happy go lucky life of a contractor.

On the one hand, the camaraderie that comes with working in a small team on a project that you’re all passionate about is hard to beat.

On the other hand, the freedom to choose what you do, and how & when you do it - and not to be frustrated by ego trips, politics, and plain old bad judgement… is hard to beat. It’s in my nature to think long-term when coding, and I generally want to do things properly as I know that everyone will reap the benefits over time. This can be tricky if you’re working to short-term deadlines, or for companies that are in constant fire-fighting mode, or who have a dubious commitment to quality.

When contracting, this is bearable, as you know that you’ll be moving on eventually, and someone else will reap the questionable benefits of the decisions that you’re arguing against! It’s not ultimately fulfilling, however - but needs must sometimes, as the rent has to be paid.

When in full-time employment, the knowledge that one won’t be moving on, if combined with a continuing failure to get one’s point across, inevitably leads to great frustration on my part, and rarely ends well.

I’ve been in both of those places multiple times, and since leaving SI (my last full-time job), I have been trying to avoid going there again.

I’ve had a lot of fun working on my own products, but I made a deliberate decision not to put all my eggs in one basket and work on one project of my own to the exclusion of everything else, so I have also been contracting. My recent contract employers have been great, and not at all short-term in their thinking. If I’m honest, though, they have eaten up more time than I originally intended, to the extent that I my own products have been neglected. Since I was viewing my products as the long-term route away from frustration, the fact that I wasn’t working on them much has been a constant (if minor) niggle.

Happily one of my contracts has now mutated into a full-time role, and I’m really pleased to say that I’ve joined Bohemian Coding full time.

I was delighted to be asked, and it is the best sort of job offer to have - from people who you’ve already been working with, on a product that you already know (and who’s code you’ve already delved into!).

For me, it’s also the best sort of job to have - a small, focussed team, with everyone pulling in the same direction on some great products. Pieter and Emanuel have been steering a very sane path with the growth of Sketch, pragmatic in the short term (realising that they can’t do everything at once), but totally committed to engineering quality in the long term, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to add something to the mix.

So what does this mean for Elegant Chaos? Well, I’ll be posting more details on the Elegant Chaos news section, but the bottom line is that I may retire some products, but not all. The deal I’ve worked out with Bohemian does still allow me some time to work on Elegant Chaos stuff, so it won’t all die, and I still have lots of plans.

For now though, my main focus is on the exciting new world of Sketch.

Nationalism

2013-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

“Nigel Farage has a point”… isn’t a phrase that I thought I’d ever find myself thinking, let alone uttering in public.

There’s no doubt that there’s a delicious irony in Mr UKIP finding himself the victim of some - what shall we call them - intolerent views, robustly delivered.

There’s also no doubt that he’s milking it for everything that it’s worth.

As for UKIP themselves, and their views, I have no time for them*.

I’ve also no idea whether he was really barracked by genuine students, or a bunch of anti-English idiots (see here for my views on that sort of thing).

However, I do think that we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that Scottish nationalism is, well, nationalism. If Scotland were an independent country right now, and had been for ages, and the SNP didn’t exist, a new party calling itself the Scottish Nationalists would probably be treated with the same disdain as the BNP/EDL are in England, and other pseudo-fascist (or overtly fascist) “nationalist” political parties around the world.

Of course, Scotland isn’t independent, and is in the midst of an independence debate, and of course, the vast majority of the people who vote for the SNP are absolutely not right-wing bampots.

That doesn’t change the fact though that the nutters do exist, and that currently their existence is probably masked by the legitimacy of the independence debate.

Since moving to Scotland (I’m a Londoner, and I now live in Stornoway, in the Western Isles), one of the few things I’ve been genuinely dismayed by is the amount of casual racism that I see and hear around me. Not anti-English, incidentally, but anti-black, anti-muslim, and anti-immigrant in general. I’m not saying it’s endemic, but there’s definitely more of it, and it’s closer to the surface, than it was in London.

I’d like to think that mostly what I’m experiencing is just the difference between growing up and living in one of the world’s largest and most diverse cities, and living in a fairly small and still essentially quite rural part of Britain. I’d quite probably have the same experience in a small town in Norfolk or Northumberland or Wiltshire.

[To give some context: the comprehensive school that I went to had about 1100 pupils in it, including folk whose families hailed from pretty much every part of the world. That’s small incidentally, compared to many schools in big cities. The Nicholson here has about 1000 pupils too, and the pupils come from pretty much every part of… Lewis. It’s got to do something to one’s attitudes when you simply don’t grow up with other cultures all around you.]

I also think that there’s a real possibility that people here are no different in their views from people in big metropolitan areas, they’re just less guarded about expressing them. There’s a whole other can of worms there about social engineering and political correctness etc, but let’s leave that to one side for now.

Suffice to say that it feels to me that there is a general trend to be discerned. When you scratch the surface of the nationalist debate, you’re more likely to encounter some sort of anti-other sentiment amongst those who are strongly pro-Independence. Correlation does not imply causation, but even so - there may be a seedy underbelly to the independence movement.

If the vote next year is a yes, it’s something that’s going to have to be guarded against. It would be horrible to wake up on the morning after, to discover that we’ve accidentally also opened the door to a few crazed xenophobes and extremists.

*Although I do think that their current popularity is something that liberal and left-leaning types like myself have to actually think about. It’s all too easy to dismiss their supporters as right-wing nutters, but it’s not just the right who are voting for them, there are plenty too from traditionally socialist areas. Ignorance and bigotry isn’t the exclusive domain of the right, and we need to fight it with intelligence and education, not with a dogmatic ideology that falls into the trap of stereotyping these people.

iTunes Match Ate My Meta-Data, Mangled My Collection!

2012-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

My iTunes music collection has over 1400 albums in it (no doubt plenty of people have more, but still, that’s quite a lot of music).

A couple of years ago I decided to re-encoded all my CDs as Apple Lossless, since the physical discs were going into storage and I wasn’t sure when I’d see them again.

I store my collection on a mac mini, which is my media server. However, I also had a copy on my laptop, which I kept as AAC 256k, to save space (and because, frankly, it’s hard to tell the difference).

I like using the meta data tags properly, and I hate it when people abuse the Album tag to indicate what disc it is (by adding “[Disc 1]” on the end), when they mark an album as “Compilation” when it’s a collection of songs by the same artist (for me that tag is only supposed to be used to group together tracks by different artists), or when they use the Artist tag to name check collaborators (by adding “feat. Joe Blogs” or whatever), so you end up with one album scattered across multiple artists (if you’re going to do that, use the Album Artist tag to unify the album under the main artist).

Over the time that I’d built up the collection, I had spent a lot of time editing the meta data to get it into the format I wanted it. Unfortunately, re-encoding everything undid a lot of this work, and left me with quite a few duplicates - some with my “correct” meta data, some with the rubbish tags from the internet.

I managed to clean up a lot of the problems on the mini, but of course that didn’t fix the laptop. Worse, thanks to iTunes match, the problems started to multiply again. iTunes Match on the mini has become confused on multiple occasions and “forgotten” me, so I’ve had to add the entire collection to it again. At which point it started adding duplicate AAC copies of every album where I’d edited the meta data.

I guess that this is because it had matched different encodings of the same tracks on different machines, in some cases with different meta data. The upshot is that now on my mini I’ve ended up with two copies of a lot of stuff, with both the correct and the incorrect metadata - and my iTunes match collection is now in an almost unbearable mess as a result.

I try to remove the duplicate, but they’re not always easy to spot unless I fix the meta data problems first, because they get filed in different places. I attempt to delete these duplicates from the cloud at the same time, but I’m quite scared that I’ll end up removing the only copy of something from the cloud too, by accident.

It seems to me that the root of this problem is that there’s no ‘authoritative’ place to view your match collection as it exists in the cloud. That and the fact that match seems to take the approach of avoiding touching your meta data whenever possible - which sounds sensible but isn’t if you end up with the sort of mess I’ve got.

What I badly need is a way to view the collection on the web, remove duplicates, clean up meta data, and then sync these changes down onto all my machines. I’m really not entirely sure how it deals with meta data changes right now - I suspect that it basically does nothing, which means that if you ever re-sync your collection, you end up with duplicates again.

For now, things are so messy that what I’d really like to do is delete everything from all but one machine and from the cloud, and start again. Except that I don’t really trust that everything that needs to be stored in the cloud is, and that it’s in the correct format, with the correct data, and that deleting it all from most places wouldn’t end up with me losing stuff.

In a word: “aaaaaaaarrrrrghhhh!”.

Why Facebook Is Broken For Me

2012-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Ever since Facebook woke up and started a series of relatively major changes to its user interface, I’ve been finding it frustrating to use.

I’m not alone of course - many people have said the same. I’m not from the “all change is bad” school of thought, so it wasn’t just that a few buttons had moved around - which seems to be the gist of most of the criticism I’ve seen and heard.

For some reason, I just started to enjoy using Facebook less. The stuff it showed me seemed less relevant, and I felt less engaged.

I’ve been puzzling for a while about why exactly this is, and I’ve come up with a theory. I think that Facebook broke for me at the point at which they started heavily pushing linked content over original content.

What I mean by this is the point at which Facebook started showing you the content of a link that a friend posted, rather than just the link.

Facebook really has never been the place that I go to for interesting links to other content on the internet. I use RSS feeds and Twitter for that.

For sure, Facebook friends would occasionally post an interesting url, but I was always free to ignore the link, and would generally do so unless the friend also included a description - generally in their own words - about why I might be interested in the link.

The majority of Facebook content used to be my friends, talking about my friends. As it turns out, that’s what I’m interested in.

Friends talking about themselves gives me a sense of connection with people who’s lives may have diverged greatly from my own since we first met, and who I may not have seen physically for years.

There’s a touch of voyeurism perhaps, but far more I think a sense of a relaxed, extended community based on shared experiences.

In addition to this, having friends talking in this way means that they are actually expressing themselves.

People’s characters are revealed in what they say, and how they say it. This can prompt fond memories of why you liked someone, or it can provoke wild revisions of opinion about someone (for good or ill).

Contrast this with Facebook now. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be “memes”.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the occasional picture of an animal doing something cute, but I don’t want to see an endless succession of them.

Where once I could ignore the links, or my friends had to make a little pitch to me to get me to click, now I typically have the content of the link shoved down my throat whether I like it or not.

Worse, the vast majority of this content wasn’t made by my friends. It might in some broad sense reflect their sense of humour, or of politics, but it doesn’t really reflect them.

That sense of community that I used to genuinely cherish about Facebook seems to have been drowned under a sea of lolcats and amusing pictures posted by George Takei (why? I mean really, why George? What’s that all about?).

That, for me, is why Facebook is broken.

I’d love them to fix it. A big start would be just to give me the option to turn off the previewing of linked content. Come to think of it, maybe that option is there somewhere… there have been so many changes recently that I’m no longer sure.

I’ll think I’ll go and have a look.

Is it just me?

2012-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Stephen Fry writes:

“On a wholly different note, is it just me, or are the big internet players all getting rather nasty and styleless at the moment? Google is irritating the crap out of everyone with its new rules and protocols. It has also, quite literally, been caught with its hand in the cookie-jar. Spotify has lost all the world’s affection and respect by locking itself into Facebook. Facebook continues to startle everyone with new depths of asinine redesign and security madnesses. And Twitter, Twitter has taken Loren Brichter’s (@lorenb) quite brilliant original Tweetie client, turned it into the “official” Twitter app for desktop and mobile devices of all stripes and is slowly stripping it of all useful functionality and the almost lickable glide, ease and sweetness of use that first brought it to everyone’s attention. Maybe Dick Costolo (@dickc) and Biz Stone (@Biz) of Twitter and other players in these huge entities all feel that it is payday – time to cash in. Maybe they know something we don’t about the future of banking and need liquidity now.”

Nope. Not just you Stephen.

Comments

2012-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just realised that since I moved to the www.bornsleepy.com domain, comments have in effect been turned off.

This was an accident, and not tacit agreement with Matt Gemmell!

They are now back on, for now at least. I have some sympathy for the idea of turning them off, but traffic here at the moment is low enough that I can cope.

New Domain

2011-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

I now have the registration for the bornsleepy.com domain, so in the next few days this site will be moving over to http://www.bornsleepy.com. The original address should continue to work.

That means that you can also reach me at sam AT bornsleepy.com if you really want to (but I’ll continue to use my elegantchaos.com address as my default).

Apple Barometer

2011-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

This not very exciting story caught my attention this morning, as it occurred to me that this sort of behaviour is a pretty good barometer of Apple’s post-Jobs health.

If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, it’s basically about the fact that negotiations between Apple and the Japanese mobile phone carrier have stalled because Apple have a long-standing policy of not allowing carriers to pre-install software on the phone.

This kind of junk-ware (often characterised as helpful, but typically just a vehicle for marketing and cross-promotion), is endemic on many other phones and on Windows PCs, and it really, really sucks.

I don’t worry too much about things like product innovation at Apple continuing after Steve. I worry a lot more about Apple losing the independence of spirit and strength of character that allows them to overturn the business orthodoxy and do things in the right way for the optimum user experience.

If Apple ever start allowing carriers to pre-install software on the iPhone, or partners to put stickers on the box, it will be a sign that the end is nigh.

On FIFA and poppies

2011-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a big furore in Britain at the moment about the fact that FIFA have told the England and Wales football teams that they can’t wear poppies on their shirts during their upcoming international fixtures.

For those who don’t know, the red poppy is worn by many people at this time of year here in commemoration of Remembrance Day.

It’s understandable that there is strong feeling, given that war (and death) are emotive topics at the best of times, but the level of debate on this topic has been incredibly poor. The typical reaction has been along the predictable lines of “this is political correctness gone mad”, “who are FIFA to interfere”, and so on. Even the prime minister got in on the act today. I believe that this is misguided.

The basis of FIFA’s decision is a broader rule that they have of “member nations not adorning their shirts with ‘commercial’, ‘political’, or ‘religious’ symbols or messages”.

Most people here are interpreting it as FIFA saying that wearing poppies is “political”, in the sense that it indicates some political allegiance within UK politics, or perhaps some more philosophical allegiance in favour of war in general, or one or more of the wars we’ve been involved in specifically. To some extent that might even be true - although it’s fair to say that many people wear the poppy as a general recognition of the pain, suffering and sacrifice of war on all sides - but in any case it’s totally missing the point.

The point is that what is a “war” is subjective, what is a “just war” is even more subjective, and who “the fallen” might includes depends entirely on your point of view.

If you allow the England team to wear poppies, you’d have to allow players from any nation in the world wearing items commemorating their own particular conflicts. Other parts of the world might regard these conflicts as anything but just - they might involve alleged genocide, terrorism, and so on.

Simply calling something a war is a political act.

FIFA aren’t passing judgement on any particular war, they’re enforcing a general rule precisely in order to avoid having to do that.

For once in my life, I’m surprised to find myself agreeing with Sepp Blatter and company!

Guardian iPad: Is The Daily Edition A Dead Model?

2011-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

I pretty much stopped reading traditional newspapers many years ago (Caroline gets the ~~Grauniad~~ Guardian every Saturday, and that’s my only regular exposure).

I am a news junkie though, and as well as listening to a lot of BBC Radio (4 & 5), I fairly regularly check the Guardian and BBC news websites, and subscribe to a whole ton of RSS feeds, which I read on my iPad and my laptop.

I don’t generally use iPad news apps. I actually did some work on the Telegraph and Economist iPad editions, so I have them on my iPad, but I rarely remember to launch them!

Recently though, the Guardian released a new iPad application, and I’ve been trying it out.

The application is perfectly functional, but the main thing that it has reinforced in my mind is just how outdated the concept of a daily edition of a newspaper feels. Most, if not all, of the iPad versions of daily newspapers religiously reproduce this model in their electronic incarnations. Why?

The front page, whilst a fine tradition in print, isn’t actually that useful in an electronic context. Yes it highlights one or two major stories, but the rest of it is filled with links to the lead items on other sections. I suspect that, like me, most of us don’t read all of the sections, so half of what the front page contains won’t be of interest to any given user. An auto-generated front page based on some combination of the popularity of current articles and a history of what I’ve read in the past would probably do a much better job for me.

The idea of taking a daily snapshot in time and calling it “today’s” news also seems anachronistic in a world where breaking news is available the instant it happens.

Admittedly, a well informed and considered editorial or newspaper article can present a much more coherent picture of a story than the sort of inane verbal diarrhoea that you normal get from rolling-news reporters “on the scene” regurgitating third hand information because nobody actually knows what’s happening.

A daily edition isn’t required for that though - all you need is some actual facts and the kind of intelligent analysis of the overall picture that a bit of distance and a few hours reflection will give. Inserting a pause for intelligent though doesn’t have to require waiting for the next day. In any case, newspapers are perfectly capable of producing drivel too if a news event happens to occur at the right point in their daily cycle where they have time to get a story in but not enough time to actually know anything meaningful about it.

The obsession with daily editions tends to shape the architecture of the applications too. You often have to download the content for a whole edition at once. This is like having to put up with the cascade of sections in a modern Sunday paper - most of which go straight into the recycling. Bandwidth may be relatively cheap, but it still feels a bit pointless that I must wait for an app to download some stuff about gardening that I will never read! The waste of resources involved in real newspapers is one of the reasons I stopped buying them - and yet we’re doing our best to reproduce that waste digitally.

Daily editions also impose an cut-off on the life of articles. If the navigation of a newspaper app forces me to choose a day first, then a section, then a story, I won’t get to see yesterday’s stories unless I deliberately choose to look at yesterday’s edition first - and why would I do that until I know what’s in today’s edition?

In a world where I already know that I won’t have time to read everything, this compartmentalising of stories into days has the useful effect of cutting down the overall volume, but it’s cutting it down using the wrong criteria. If I’m looking at the sports section and I’ve been out of touch for a week, I don’t just want yesterday’s results, but I’d be happy to never be shown anything about horse racing. Similarly if I want to read some book reviews, I’d probably prefer to pick a genre first, and not have to select them based on the date they were published.

It’s early days yet, but I really think it would be good to see newspaper publishers take a more creative approach to re-packing their content for the digital era. I do see value in some human mediation - suggesting interesting stories for me and arranging the content in a suggested order in the way that editors do on physical papers - but I’d like to see it happen in more imaginative ways, rather than continuing to work within restrictions that no longer apply.

When Does Respect Go Too Far?

2011-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

The recent death of Steve Jobs is very sad, and I like many other people in the world of Mac and iOS software development would like to acknowledge how much the products that he helped to create changed my life. My sympathy goes out to his family and close friends.

A post on this topic by Jeff LaMarche crystallised something that I’ve been feeling though about the coverage of Steve’s death.

I’ve heard and read many heartfelt expressions of sadness from people - at his loss, and of respect for the work that he did and the impact that he had on their life.

However I’ve also heard some hyperbolic statements, mostly by prominent public figures, that made me feel a little uneasy.

My experience is that excessive eulogising can be a burden too if you lose someone close to you.

It is nice to remember the good sides of someone, but it’s unreal to pretend that they didn’t have quirks and flaws, and it can get a bit painful if you feel that someone is being turned into something that they weren’t. If you lose someone close, you want to remember them as they were - a human being - and not as some sort of mythical paragon.

Of course in this case it is very complicated because Steve has such a public profile and genuinely was a hero to many.

I suppose I just wish that people would limit themselves in these cases to saying what a good effect someone had on their own lives - and leave speculation about their overall place in history, or the effect they had on society as a whole, for another day (and the perspective that a bit more time will bring).

Experimenting with Disqus for comments

2011-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve had all sorts of problems over the years with spam and comments on Drupal, so I’ve decided to look for another solution.

After a recommendation by Matt Gemmell, I’m giving Disqus a go. So far the system seems very easy to set up and configure, but I’ve hit a problem with the the facility to import the old Drupal comments into the new system.

The import seems to have worked, in the sense that Disqus now appears to contain a copy of my old comments. However, they aren’t showing up on the site, so somehow it is failing to connect the comments with the pages that are supposed to contain them.

More info to come if/when I resolve this…

Jobs a good 'un

2011-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

It does seem to me that Apple will struggle to replace Steve Jobs. He has an unusual combination of talents.

As the near-hysteria surrounding his resignation illustrates, perhaps his greatest talent is that of making other people believe - in him and his plans.

Not just people too, but smart, creative, difficult people; programmers and artists. If managing programmers is like herding cats, he is a cat whisperer par excellence.

Allied to that, he obviously has a compelling vision to believe in.

He’s not perfect - he doesn’t get everything right, and when he chooses to focus his micro-management skills on you, I expect it’s a complete nightmare. He doesn’t strike me as capricious though, and whilst I suspect that a lot of what he does is driven by intuition, his intuition is well tuned and consistent. Under Jobs, Apple has had a clear philosophy, and on the whole the products that it sells fit together, do what they are meant to, and just make sense.

It’s going to be hard for Apple to replace all of the above. They can find a charismatic leader, a details guy, or a visionary, but all three in one is asking a lot. More to the point - finding one who’s vision is already compatible with Apple’s current position and future heading is going to be very difficult. You’d think that the most likely place to look for someone with a compatible world view would be within Apple, albeit not at the board level. Ask yourself this though - “would Steve be working for Steve?”. Maybe not.

Whatever happens, I’m sure that Apple have enough inertia to be fine in the short to medium term. Longer than that, and it’s possible that things will drift. That’s natural though, and probably healthy. I suspect that Apple’s position of dominance now would have been anathema to many of the early employees, who were also instrumental in making it what it is today. The new versions of those people shouldn’t be at Apple now - they should be working in the startup that will knock Apple off its perch one day. Overseen and driven on by the next Steve Jobs. Which is entirely as it should be.

In the meantime, I wish Steve well. He and a handful of other people at Apple, Xerox and Next have changed my life, and I’m grateful to them all for that.

A Hint For Online Food Shops

2011-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

It always amazes me that online food shops fail to ask me whether I’m a vegetarian, and then go on to offer me meat products even though I’ve sometimes been shopping with them for years and not bought any meat during the entire time.

I suspect that the reason for this is that many of the products in their catalogues will be suitable for vegetarians but not explicitly labelled as such. For example, who in their right mind would label a vegetable “suitable for vegetarians”?

This means that their dumb computers can’t work out that it’s ok to offer vegetarians apples.

I’ve got a solution for this. Include an option that says:

“Please don’t show me:”

meat
poultry
fish
dairy products
products that aren’t labelled “suitable for vegetarians or vegans”
products that aren’t labelled “suitable for vegans”

and so on…

By couching it in terms of “don’t show me”, you can avoid the problem of explicit labelling. Of course you could also extend this to include nut allergies, wheat intolerance, kosher/halal, or anything else.

Come on supermarkets, sort it out.

Uncle Roy

2011-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

When I think of Uncle Roy, two things spring immediately to mind - a relaxed smile, and a certain predilection for bad puns.

For most of my life we’ve lived quite a distance apart, so we didn’t meet often, but from childhood onwards I was always pleased when I knew that I was going to see him.

No doubt he had his off days - Deane men have something of a capacity for melancholy, and I expect that Roy was no different - but past the puns, the impression that came through to me was of someone who was interested in the world, and someone who cared - for his family, his friends, and the general state of the planet.

There was one other thing about Roy that made a big impact on me - his love of music. When I say impact, I mean it literally - as he inadvertently had a major influence on my musical taste (and some people might say therefore that he had a lot to answer for).

When my grandparents went to stay in Australia, we inherited their cassette player (stereo - woohoo!!) and Roy started sending Dad tapes that he’d copied. Exactly what came from Roy is a bit blurry now in my mind, but there are some that I remember for sure. Obscured by Clouds, by Pink Floyd and Songs From The Wood, by Jethro Tull, found their way onto our tape player from him, and into my head and heart forever. I’m fairly sure that he introduced me to Talking Heads, Crosby Stills & Nash, Wishbone Ash, Hugh Masekela, Tom Waits, and The Orb, to name but a few. His tastes were eclectic, and I’ve no doubt that they opened my eyes (and ears), which is something for which I’ll forever be grateful.

I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I do believe that people live on in a way, in our memories. Roy liked a beer (another thing that we shared, though I didn’t have nearly enough chances to share one with him). So each time I sit back with a beer, or crank up some Jethro Tull (both regular occurrences), I’ll be thinking of him.

On Banker Bashing

2011-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not an apologist for bankers, but whenever I hear people on the radio, or read people in the press, blaming all the world’s woes on them, it really gets on my nerves.

Blaming bankers for making too much money is like blaming lions for killing and eating other animals.

Expressing surprise at such behaviour is naive at best, ignorant at worst. It’s like admitting that you have absolutely no idea how the world works, or that you frankly couldn’t be arsed to pay attention to anything that didn’t directly involve you.

Bankers, particularly investment bankers, are part and parcel of the current economic system. They exist because of it, and insofar as they are regulated at all, they are regulated by it.

Most of us, most of the time, are complicit in keeping that system going because we like the good things it does for us, and conveniently forget about the bad things it does to other people. We are as responsible as anyone for the regulation regime, because we’re not prepared to support the kind of people who want to put a tighter regime in place - or accept whatever consequence might come back to affect us.

I’m not saying that the system is good, but unless you’ve been actively campaigning for a different system, it’s terribly complacent to blame other people for the mess we’re in right now.

If you don’t like it, it’s up to you, as much as anyone else, to do something about it.

I’m not saying that you can take on the banks individually, but when the next election comes round, vote for a party that offers a sensible alternative (for whatever value of “sensible” appeals to you).

In the meantime, if you’re lucky enough to have some, move your money into (slightly more) ethical banks, if you can find them. If you’re lucky enough to have substantial savings, invest them in ethical companies.

We need to take collective responsibility for this stuff, and we need to have a sophisticated understanding of how the world works.

It’s not good enough to just look around for easy scapegoats. That’s lazy, and a dangerously simplistic way of looking at the world - and it’s that sort of thing, as much as the behaviour of bankers, that I think is wrong with it.

Oh the irony

2011-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Whilst proof reading my previous blog post, I was reminded of how much I really don’t like the theme I’m using on this blog!

When I split it off from my main Elegant Chaos site, I grabbed this theme as a quick way of differentiating the two.

I really must get round to replacing it with something better… something… designed?

What I Don't Understand About Fukushima

2011-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

No doubt there’s a lot that I don’t understand, but a few things seem really weird, with the benefit of hindsight.

A lot has been made of how earthquake proof these stations were, and yet it seems that it was probably the tsunami that buggered up the backup generators. I’m no seismologist, but even I know that earthquakes and tsunamis tend to go hand in hand when you’re on the coast. So what exactly was the plan? Surely they must have thought about it, so what went wrong?

It also seems quite common for nuclear power stations to contain multiple reactors. Presumably there’s an argument for this, based on minimising the number of sites, and sharing infrastructure. Presumably there’s also a large nimby factor which makes it much more likely that a second reactor gets sighted where there’s already one. That said, isn’t it Pretty Fucking Obvious that the last thing you want to be next to, if you’re trying to battle with a malfunctioning nuclear reactor, is another (possibly malfunctioning) reactor?

Another thing that is puzzling me is that that the reactors apparently shut down automatically in response to the earthquake, and yet this seems to have been a large part of the problem. Presumably it was the automatic shutdown with caused the loss of power to the cooling systems, thus requiring the backup generators which then went wrong or ran out of fuel or whatever actually happened. Yet the failure of the cooling systems seems to have been a relatively slow process. Admittedly it might have been a lot quicker if the reactors hadn’t shut down, but it still seems a bit arse-about-tit to shut them down before knowing what is wrong, thus precipitating the very disaster you are trying to prevent.

On Nuclear Power...

2011-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

As a computer programmer, science fiction fan, card carrying geek, you might be forgiven for assuming that I’d be in favour of nuclear power. It’s shiny, sexy, the future. It’s the appliance of science. What’s not to like?

In fact, the opposite is true - for as long as I can remember, I’ve been against it.

Perhaps this is just due to my inherent pessimism, but I’d like to think that it’s an intelligent response to the balance of risks and benefits. One thing I can definitely say is that it’s an opinion heavily influenced by my experience as a computer programmer.

Writing software is a strange hybrid of art, craft, science, but it most definitely involves engineering. When you make software, you’re effectively building very complex machines, albeit ones without much in the way of physical manifestation.

Like any engineering discipline, you have to make hundreds of decisions based on what you want to happen, think will happen, fear might happen, definitely want to avoid happening. You typically have a plan, and a way to put it into action, but you also know that your assumptions might be wrong. You have to design for situations where some data is missing, or too big, or the wrong format. You have to cope with the computer running out of space, or going to sleep, or randomly being reset half way through the program’s execution.

How well you do this ultimately determines how solid your software is. There are other factors that also influence whether it’s good software, but it definitely won’t be good if it isn’t solid.

What programming teaches you is that reliable engineering is very hard to achieve. No matter how good you are, and how sensible your methodologies may be, you are endlessly reminded of how bad you are at correctly guessing exactly what is going to happen. Programs go wrong - all the time. Testing is a major part of the process, and testing is always breaking things. More to the point, things that have been exhaustively tested are always breaking as soon as they get out of the test lab and into the real world.

Programmers are endlessly claiming to have it all sorted out and to know that their code definitely works (the smart ones claim it to themselves, quietly, but they still do it). They are endlessly proven wrong. I’m not talking about stupid people here. I’m talking about mostly young, mostly male, often very smart people. Admittedly people who sometimes find personal hygiene and interpersonal communication skills a bit of a challenge, but seriously, scarily clever people - smart enough to be rocket scientists, or… nuclear engineers…

The scary thing is how many of these very clever programmers are possessed with an abundance of testosterone and hubris, and a distinct lack of humility and perspective. Again and again they tend to say things like “that can never happen”, “we thought of all the possibilities”, “we’ve tested it extensively”.

If you’re smart, you learn not to think like this after a while. You also learn to be very, very sceptical when you come across people who do. Luckily, most of these people write word processors and computer games. Admittedly, some of them write software for nuclear power stations, which ought to give us pause for thought. Even they aren’t the ones I’m really worried about though. Software is a lot easier to test than hardware, but the same mindset is prevalent in both. The people I’m really scared about are the ones who are making the hardware…

Fuck The English

2011-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been enjoying reading Kevin MacNeil’s “The Stornoway Way”. It’s a funny book, and one thing that’s been amusing me is the regular disparaging references to “The English”.

To “The Scots”, of course, “The English” are the cause of all that’s wrong with the world. I recognise the sentiment. Strangely, as soon as you step over the border, the target becomes Southern Ponces. Approach Watford, and Southerners become Londoner Wankers. Enter London, pause for a while for a slight detour as you debate the relative merits of North vs South, or East vs West, and you’ll eventually settle on a target of Rich Buggers, or perhaps Posh Twats. Which is fair enough of course - those bastards really are to blame for everything.

Though I was born and raised in London, and will soon be a permanent resident of Stornoway, you’d be more likely to hit me if you aimed your ire at “fecking computer programmers”, or maybe “beardy blokes who like rock music”.

English, I am. The English? Away wi ye! I’ll no be tarred wi that particular brush…

Linode migration

2010-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

As I’m now selling software from my website, and as I’m also planning to relocate to Stornoway in the next few months, I decided that it was time that I moved it off the trusty Mac Mini that sits under my desk here, and back onto some sort of remotely hosted service.

After taking advice from a number of people I went for Linode, which comes highly recommended*.

So far the transition has been fairly painless, and the linode service seems very easy to set up. Migrating my server contents is not trivial as I have multiple virtual hosts with a variety of configurations, but hopefully I’ve got it pretty much done now, and the DNS records should be updating as we speak to point to the new server.

If you notice any broken links on the site in the next few days, please let me know, since I have taken the opportunity to move one or two things around and I’m almost certain to have missed an update somewhere…

disclaimer: that link is a referral link - if you sign up to Linode with it, I get a bit of cash off my bill. Go on, you know you want to…

Spotify Thoughts

2010-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been paying for Spotify for quite a while now.

I probably use it enough for the payment to be worth it, and it also allows me to use it on my iPhone and iPad, both of which can be useful.

However I also chose to pay for it because I wanted to play a small part in helping Spotify to send a message to the music industry - namely that a micro-payment or subscription style financial model can work and will earn them money.

Unfortunately, I’m beginning to wonder whether Spotify are making any headway with that particular debate.

I’ve always put up with the fact that a lot of the more obscure acts that I like are missing from their catalogue - for example everything by King Crimson. I think that the artists that ban their content from Spotify are fundamentally misguided, especially those who do so in the belief that it will direct people to their own websites or streaming solutions. The main effect it’s had on me is that I simply listen to less of their music, and instead listen to new acts that I’ve discovered on something like LastFM and then found to be available on Spotify.

Recently though, some music that I’d found this way has been removed. Not having access to some rock monster like Led Zeppelin is one thing, but when new and relatively obscure music (e.g the excellent Gavin Harrison and 05ric album, which I’d been enjoying listening to), suddenly disappears, I do have to start questioning whether I want to continue paying for this service.

The 2004 album Marbles by Marillion has also gone, as has music by Sidsel Endresen and Elvind Aarset. These artists aren’t exactly household names in the UK, and one has to wonder what is going through the minds of the people making the decision to remove them. It’s quite possible that they weren’t supposed to be available in the first place, but frankly I don’t care - I just see music that I liked vanishing from what was a good service, reducing it’s value in my eyes.

Very frustrating! I’m tempted to look for an alternative service, but I can’t help feeling that it’s probably the music publishers that are the problem, and so I may have the same experience elsewhere.

My Forking Blog!

2010-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve decided to split off my personal pages and blog from the main Elegant Chaos, and move them to this site instead.

For now this new site is a clone of the old one, but they will gradually diverge. I want to simplify the main Elegant Chaos website and remove some of the more personal stuff from it so that it’s a little less confusing for people who arrive at the site simply wanting to know about Elegant Chaos and the software we sell.

If you have an RSS/Atom subscription to my blog (or the whole of the Elegant Chaos site), you might want to update it to point here instead.

For the sake of history, and to preserve old links, I will continue to host all previous posts on both sites, but as time goes on I will set up some permanent (http 301) redirections to try to teach the search engines etc where the definitive copy now lives.

Disruption Over (Hopefully)

2010-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Well, the electrical work seems to have finished, and other that a bit of local DNS weirdness that I’m experiencing here, everything seems to be ok.

Let me know if you have any problems viewing this site.

Expect Disruption...

2010-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

We’re having some electrical work done here at Chaos Towers in the next day or two*, which I fear will mean that our servers may be coming and going a bit, since they are hosted locally.

So if everything disappears for a while on Thursday/Friday, fear not - it should be back by Saturday at the very latest.

(* it’s amazing how much power killer death rays draw - turns out that world domination can only be achieved with three-phase power**)

(** actually, that’s a lie, we just need a new fuse box***)

(*** or is it…?!)

QPR Too Big For The Cup?

2010-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

Last weekend QPR started off our league campaign with a 4-0 victory over Barnsley. Whilst the result was a bit flattering (two of the goals were penalties, and Barnsley were rubbish), it was hard to complain with a start like that. We ended the day top of the league on goal difference.

Fast forward three days and we played Port Vale in the League Cup. Despite them being two levels below us in the league structure, they comprehensively beat us 3-1.

I was more disappointed with the team selection than the ultimate result of this game. We made quite a few changes from Saturday’s team, and although some of them were necessitated by international call-ups, not all of them were.

We gave every impression that we were “concentrating on the league” - ie not taking the cup seriously.

WTF? Hello? We’re QPR. We’re in the Championship. We’re not Barcelona, snowed under by Champion’s League fixtures and World Club Cup malarky! And anyway, it’s the first week of the season!

It seems to me to be pretty poor psychology to pick a weakened team for cup games, especially coming off the back of a good victory. It puts the fans in a negative mood. Let’s face it, football fans are never happier than when in a negative mood (perverse and perhaps even oxymoronic, but true). They love nothing better than having a bit of a whinge.

When we pick a weakened team, they have the perfect excuse, especially if it results in a defeat to opposition who we clearly ought to be beating. We pay our money and turn up on a wet Tuesday, and in return we get to see some players who the manager probably doesn’t rate, or who are too young and inexperienced for the first team at this point. Occasionally they impress, and a new legend is born, but more often than not they display all of the qualities (or rather, all the lack of qualities) that the manager saw in them, and which placed them into the reserves in the first place - and so the fans get on their case.

Knocking the confidence of players who are struggling for form is bad enough, but of course some of the players who played on Tuesday were first team players, some of them playing only their first or second game for their new club, and they got tarnished by a bad performance too.

Before you know it you’ve got a few idiots in the crowd who’ve convinced themselves that someone is rubbish on the basis of one performance in a bad team. That sort of thing rubs off on players, turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In extreme cases, it can complete bugger up a players career at a club.

So like I said, bad psychology from the manager!

Surely, so early in the season, it’s better to maintain momentum and pick your strongest team. Apart from anything else, they need more pitch time together, and they need that mercurial match fitness that only playing regularly gives them. This has got to be even more true when you’ve got six or seven new players in the team who barely know each other.

And surely we’re not worrying about them playing too many matches at this stage? If they can’t cope with an extra game now, we’re going to be in big trouble in the spring!

I have one theory about all this. Neil Warnock knows that we need some better players, so he deliberately chose a team on Tuesday that would illustrate the weakness of our squad to the board. If true, I’d say that part one of the cunning plan worked - we clearly do need some better players. Whether part two - the buying of said players - will follow, it remains to be seen.

Whether or not this theory is true, I still think that the danger of some of our better players suffering collateral damage as a side effect is real, and wasn’t worth the risk.

Oh, and of course, I’m pissed off that a wasted a couple of hours of my life on a wet Tuesday!

Reading on the iPad

2010-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just finished reading my first novel on the iPad.

There was a certain irony in my choice of material - Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross - as I’d already read half of it as a paperback on holiday a while ago, only to be scuppered when I turned from page 138 and found myself on page 203.

Yes, it turns out that paper books can have bugs in them too! In my case the book had been mis-bound causing a sizeable chunk of the middle section to have been replaced by a copy of another sizeable chunk! Much swearing ensued…

Anyway, that was the paper version - what of the iPad? Overall I found the experience quite favourable.

I’d read a few technical documents already using iBooks, which is pretty functional. The display is great (though an iPhone 4 style retina display would be even nicer), and even reading documentation outside in the park is very manageable.

I’d wondered though whether I’d get tired or feel awkward reading fiction on the thing, late at night or for extended periods of time. Apparently not! Despite it being a bit heavy, the iPad is no worse than a large hardback, and reading in bed was fine. Reading on the train was easier too - other than generating a few interested glances from fellow passengers - since it’s considerably slimmer and easier to fit into my bag. The only thing I missed was reading in the bath!

Regarding software, as it turned out, I didn’t use iBooks, I used the iPad version of the Kindle application instead - which has pretty much the same interface.

My choice of the Kindle app reflects my only real criticism of Apple in the iPad experience so far, which is that the UK book store is absolutely rubbish. I can only assume that this is down to a failure to negotiate licensing deals. The upshot seems to be that if you want to read something that isn’t on the best seller lists, you’re out of luck. Science fiction? I think not, unless it’s so popular that I’ve already read it…

Luckily, Amazon, whilst still not having anything like universal eBook coverage, nevertheless has a much better selection, and the Kindle application is at least as functional as iBooks.

Overall conclusions? Much as I like paper books, I’m sold on the iPad as a reading experience. I have approximately 1000 paperbacks and a couple of hundred hardbacks on my shelves at home, and they don’t half take up a lot of room. One or two are special, but the vast majority are cheap paperbacks, bought second hand, with no intrinsic sentimental value above and beyond their contents. At this stage in my life, the opportunity to do one of my favourite things (reading), without adding more clutter to an already too cluttered existence, feels highly attractive!

QPR fixtures iCal calendar 2010-2011

2010-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve updated my iCal calendar of QPR fixtures for the 2010-2011 season.

You can find a link to the calendar on iCalShare here.

Fingers crossed for a better (and more stable) season this time round…

Anonymous Comments Broken

2010-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

For some as-yet-unknown reason, anonymous comments don’t seem to be working on my installation of Drupal 6. Which is a bit of a pain in the arse.

I’ll try to figure it out, but for now, if you want to comment on a post, you’ll have to register (which is quite safe - I don’t use the email addresses or do anything else nasty with your data).

Update

I’ve worked out what was going on - somehow my anonymous user had got removed during my upgrade and server migration.

These Drupal threads helped:

http://drupal.org/node/243423
http://drupal.org/node/501286

The solution was just hack the users table manually and add back a user with uid = 0. Scary!

Upgrade Complete

2010-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Right, hopefully I’ve finished with upgrading my server and this website is back in the proper place.

If you notice any broken links, please let me know…

Content Coming And Going?

2010-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

If you’re noticing that some content on www.elegantchaos.com keeps appearing and disappearing mysteriously, it’s because I’m switching back and forth between the original version and the new Drupal 6 version which is running on an old (and slow) server.

Apologies if this confuses your rss news reader! Eventually I’ll finalise the update and switch over permanently to Drupal 6, at which point it will go onto my proper server and things will stop changing!

Drupal 6 Experiment

2010-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

As an experiment, I’ve ported this site across to Drupal 6.

The new version of the site is running on a test server at the moment, so you might notice a bit of a drop in performance, and one or two old links may be missing since I’ve not bothered to copy the old static content over yet.

Hopefully though, the basic stuff will work. I’m also hoping that moving to Drupal 6 will allow me to re-enable comments, and to add various other bits of functionality.

If you notice anything that seems to have gone badly astray, give me a yell!

Work Diary

2010-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

When I was working at Sony, I got into the habit of keeping a ‘daily status’ log on the wiki - a kind of rough work diary listing what I’d been doing each day.

Initially this was prompted by some sort of project management initiative that asked us to report what we’d been doing each week, but I found it to be a really handy discipline, and carried it on long after the pressure from above died away.

When I moved back to Sports Interactive I started to do the same thing again (setting up the SI wiki in the process). I tried to get everyone else to do the same thing, but it only stuck with a couple of people.

Pragmatically, one of the advantages for me was being able to answer the “what have you been doing” type questions, especially when they were really just a thinly veiled “why is this late?”. My job, especially at SI, often lead me off on detours that were entirely necessary, yet completely ignored by the schedule. These were usually things that I’d always just quietly done, or that blatantly needed doing, but that had never been acknowledged - writing them down felt like a good step towards presenting a case for them to actually be part of someone’s schedule.

Beyond that, though, I also found it helpful as a way of focussing my thoughts on what had been done, what still needed doing, and specifically what to do next. For that reason, I think I’ll try to continue the same thing now, even though I’m my own boss and essentially will just be talking to myself!

I’d be half tempted to make the diary public, but it might get a bit tricky if I have to refer to top secret new projects by code names (though on the other hand having fancy code names for everything would make me feel all grown-up and professional!). Of course there’s also a more relevant point - who in their right mind would want to read them :)

Blocking Facebook Ads with GlimmerBlocker

2010-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

I use GlimmerBlocker and Click To Flash for ad blocking on the Mac.

Annoyingly, GlimmerBlocker doesn’t seem to block Facebook sidebar ads by default.

However, that’s easy to fix.

Add a new rule. Set

Action: Whitelist URL
Host is: “www.facebook.com”

Click the css tab at the top.

Enter the following CSS:

#pagelet_adbox { display: none !important; }

Click “Save”, and try loading a Facebook page.

It worked for me… your mileage may vary…

Exciting Times

2010-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Well my notice period is finished finally, and as of today, I am no longer working for Sports Interactive.

Instead, Elegant Chaos is fully back up and running, and I am planning to create and publish my own iPhone, iPad and Macintosh software.

I have a number of product ideas, ranging from the tiniest of utilities to some fairly large applications which may end up being long-term projects. Currently I’m aiming at the utility / general-purpose application market, and not at games. This isn’t through any great bias one way or the other, but because I’ve always been a believer in making software that you need yourself, and right now there are lots of utility applications that I need. That said, I do have at least 3 game ideas which may see the light of day eventually. I’d love to work on games, but I think that they’ll generally take longer and require more people, which isn’t practical for me at this moment.

I am well aware, incidentally, that making a living as an indy application developer is hard, and I’m definitely going into this with my eyes open. You need good ideas, good execution, and probably a fair bit of luck too if you want to make proper money. Only time will tell if I can tick any of those boxes, let alone all of them at once. A few people have applications that are runaway successes, but the vast majority sell only a small number of copies, probably not even enough to cover the development costs.

So there’s a possibility that I might not be able to do this full time, and might also have to spend some time contracting.

That’s fine by me - I enjoy working with other people so a bit of contracting would actually be welcome anyway.

I want to give this indy thing a go first though - have some fun, learn some new things, and unwind a bit after years and years getting frustrated having to make things to other people’s specifications!

It’s a risk, of course, but every now and then, you have to take a chance. So wish me luck, and watch this space!

Born Sleepy might move

2010-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve got a lot to do, and fairly high on the list is sorting out this website.

As part of that, I’m toying with the idea of splitting my blog and more personal stuff off onto a separate site.

The blog has always nominally been called “born sleepy”, which is why there’s a link of that name at the top of the site.

If I do move the blog, it will probably get its own url: http://bornsleepy.elegantchaos.com. If this happens, the link to that at the top of the Elegant Chaos site will change accordingly.

I’ll also try to make sure that links to old articles continue to do the right thing - though whether I’ll move them and redirect, or just leave them where they are, is undecided at this stage.

QPR Woes

2010-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

The BBC report for the QPR match last night said “there were plenty of positives for Paul Hart to take from this game”.

I’m not sure what match they were watching, but the only positive that I could think of was that he’ll probably not be in the job long enough to have to worry too much about what’s going wrong.

Not that it is entirely his fault - the situation off the pitch at QPR is a complete joke - but unfortunately one has to say that Hart has had no discernible positive impact since coming in, and in fact we seem to be going backwards.

The progression of the team over this season might be described as follows:

Under Magilton:

first: playing nice football but losing
next: playing amazing football and winning by lots
then: playing nice football but often failing to win

Under Hart:

playing unattractive percentage football, and losing badly

Under Magilton we appeared to have the basis of a plan. We were distributing the ball from keeper to fullbacks, to midfield. We were generally solid and well marshalled at the back (until Fitz Hall got fit and returned to the side, at which point everything went tits up). Our holding midfielders did a good job of protecting the back four. Our main downfall was Faurlin’s over-eager passing (he has a bad tendency to hit blind first-time passes), plus a large dose of over-elaboration by our creative players. That was serious, but could have been fixed with some coaching.

Now, the keeper and defenders are back to hoofing the ball up front, and look to be playing to no plan at all. The central midfield seem to have lost their composure, and the creative players are either not getting picked, not getting the ball, or appear to have lost their touch (or possibly the will to live).

Dire stuff.

QPR Fixtures Calendar iCal Subscription Address

2009-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

The last link I gave for my QPR calendar was a bit wonky.

If you want to subscribe to the calendar with iCal, choose “Subscribe…” from the “Calendar” menu and enter the following URL:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/b4ap3k1k0olfk8oqbqcqtmu898%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Don’t just follow this link in your browser. Doing that would download the calendar events and import them into your iCal calendar. That’s not as good as subscribing, as you won’t automatically receive any updates.

You can also view it on the web here.

QPR Fixtures Calendar Updated

2009-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve updated my public iCal calendar with next season’s QPR fixtures.

The calendar can be found here: http://bit.ly/RsycM.

No doubt there will be a few changes due to televised games and so on - I’ll try to keep it updated as & when these occur.

So Much For Open Letters

2009-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Ah well, eventually I crumbled and renewed my season ticket… so here’s to another year of fun and frolics at QPR.

I can’t help feeling a little underwhelmed at the appointment of Jim Magilton. Not that I have anything against him at all, and Ipswich have played some attractive football in the last few years.

However, he does appear to have been sacked by the Ipswich chairman having only got them to roughly the same league position that we were in when Iain Dowie and Paulo Sousa both, ahem, departed, from QPR. Which makes one wonder what exactly the QPR board are looking for in a manager.

My fear is that they are looking for a yes man who will put up with the high levels of interference from the board that the previous three or four managers are alleged to have had. My fear is also that the fact that they met with Magilton four times has more to say about the number of other managers who were also interviewed, and who quite possibly rejected QPR (rather than the other way round). There are a lot of managers unemployed at the moment who have a better pedigree on paper - one wonders how many of them have said “QPR? You’d be mad to even contemplate it.”.

Hope springs eternal, however - so I’m going to do my best to trust the board, get behind the new manager, and behave like a loyal ~~customer~~ fan… and only put a modest bet on him being gone by Christmas.

Open Letter To QPR

2009-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

This open letter to QPR from James Higgs echoes my sentiments about QPR at the moment.

Like him, I’m seriously considering not bothering to renew my season ticket.

BBC Rant

2009-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

Lauren Dempster asked a question (about a year and a half ago!) which got me going when I read it today:

http://www.laurendempster.com/2007/11/27/the-golden-compass

This was going to be a comment, but turned into a full-on rant!

The BBC news output is of an increasingly poor standard, if you ask me. Much of it is inane, self-obsessed, drivel or pointless “analysis” which actually amounts to stating the bleeding obvious.

For example, a news announcer gives a nice précis of a story. So far so good.

They then “go live” to a correspondent who is standing outside the venue describing how events are “unfolding”. Said correspondent then repeats the précis, often word for word, adding no additional information. As with most events, the unfolding generally takes the form of nothing much happening for long periods of time. Often, nothing more is going to happen anyway, because the “event” has already taken place.

To fill in the gaps, the correspondent is asked to speculate on why/what/how “it” happened. They happily do this with minimal recourse to factual information (as they have none at this point). Quite often this speculation will end with a reiteration of the précis.

No better informed than we were when we started, we now return to the studio, and cut to an “expert” who has joined the announcer. They are then asked to comment, generally resulting in further reiteration and inane speculation. They have minimal actual knowledge because nobody actually knows what’s going on.

Aaaargh!

This is all bad enough, but it becomes much, much worse when the story is about the media itself, and exponentially worse again if it is about the BBC. Ross & Grant anyone?

Then there’s the use of phrases like “stepping up” and “the pressure is mounting” or “is under increasing pressure”. These are typically used to indicate that something is still happening, or even just that the media are still talking about something that happened a while ago. So they will say “Gordon Brown is under increasing pressure today as revelations about the donuts-for-honours scandal continue to emerge” - when what they actually mean is “Remember that thing yesterday about the bloke with the donuts, well, we’re still talking about it because nothing else has happened”.

Most of this isn’t unique to the BBC of course, but I’m certain that the BBC is getting worse.

And as for the “arts” slots on the Today programme - give me strength!

Right, calm down, deep breaths…

My Mac Of The Future

2009-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Dear Apple, this is what I want:

tablet format
eInk style screen with refresh speed fast enough for video games
multi-touch
no keyboard (but maybe an external one which is specially designed to clip on or integrate in some way)
high spec usb, bluetooth, wifi, ethernet ports for connectivity
gps for location aware stuff
external monitor port
solid state drives
super drive? (I’m really not sure how much I care about this)

Optional extras:

stylus for easier typing/drawing
wireless inductive charger
waterproof skin that makes it safe to use in damp environments
built in optional 3g support; especially if I can share the same account with my iPhone
a nice little docking pod / stand I can drop it in when I get home, to use it as a desktop computer

Try Voting On Behalf Of Someone Else

2009-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

The thing that’s depressed me most about the response to the recent budget in the UK is the same thing that depresses me at election time (or for that matter when reading most of the commentary in most of the British press).

It’s the fact that there appears to be such a lack of empathy amongst the general population. Most people’s perspective, be they rich or poor, seems to be so narrowly focussed on themselves.

The media plays its part, by endlessly focussing the debate on individuals, asking people how they think this or that policy will effect them. The media isn’t to blame though, it’s just not helping.

Rather than just moaning (I’m good at that), I came up with a crazy idea.

The next time you’re going to vote, forget about yourself. I’ll say that again, just in case you got confused. Forget about yourself. Don’t vote for your own interests.

Think of the two people that you know who probably need a lucky break most right now. Then work out what would really help them, and vote accordingly.

I’m not saying you should imagine your way into the mind of a homeless person sleeping under Waterloo bridge (unless you happen to know one). Just pick a friend, family member, someone you see on the bus each morning, whatever. Someone “normal” like you. You don’t have to be an angel - just try to be honest and pick people who need the help.

Picking two people gives a bit of balance - maybe they’ll need different things, so you might have to compromise a bit.

Perhaps you’ll still end up voting for selfish policies, but at least you’ll be doing it for someone else, and not for yourself. Who knows though, maybe the act of thinking about others will give you a bit more perspective.Don’t forget, you need not worry about yourself whilst doing this - your friends and neighbours will be looking out for you. Just worry about them.

Of course I realise that there’s a danger of this ending up with little cartels of people voting to preserve each other’s interests (sounds awfully familiar, come to think of it). Taken to extremes, it could get parochial and insular, nationalistic even. Ok, fine, don’t take it to extremes - obviously (like, duh…). Maybe pick someone from, oh, the next town or something!

You never know, maybe, just maybe, thinking about other people might turn out to be habit forming.

PS.

If you’re one of those shit-for-brains people who doesn’t vote because “they’re all the same, nothing I do will change anything” etc etc, then this counts double for you. If you look hard enough, you will find a policy that someone is proposing which will help someone who you know. If you can’t find one, you’re not looking hard enough. Put aside your own cynicism, and vote for them.

Why Microsoft? Why?

2009-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Despite being a bit of a Mac fan, I don’t make a habit of bashing Windows or Microsoft - I got bored with all that religious warfare 20 years ago, and I happy live and work on a combination of OS X, XP, and Vista.

There are times, though, when I am rudely reminded why exactly it is that I like Macs, or rather, why I don’t like Windows. Today is one such occasion. All I’m trying to do is install the “Service Pack 1” update to Visual Studio.

You’d think - naively - that it is just a case of downloading an installer, running it, perhaps restarting. Sadly, when I did this, the installer sat there for a couple of hours, stuck at an unknown point of the install. Four or five slightly different attempts later, it is still doing the same thing.

After various searches of the internet I came across the release notes for SP1:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/2/8/A2807F78-C861-4B66-9B31-9205C3F22252/VS2008SP1Readme.htm#Installing

This read me lists nineteen different known issues with the installation process!! WTF?

These are major issues which prevent you from installing an update to an IDE. That. Is. Fucking. Pathetic.

As if that wasn’t bad enough - none of them appear to be my problem. Remind me again why I bother using this shit?

The exception proves the rule

2009-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Apropos nothing at all…

This phrase is often used to mean the wrong thing. People often use it to mean “the rule must be right, because I’ve found an exception that seems to directly contradict it”. Which is plainly nonsense in many cases.

I had always suspected that the real meaning was “the exception tests the rule”, but it turns out that I’m wrong too.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtheexc.html

The real meaning seems to be more like “if you have to make a new rule for an exception, then there’s already an implicit rule for the normal case”.

In the example given, there is a statement: ‘Special leave is given for men to be out of barracks tonight till 11pm’. This statement is talking about an exception (‘special leave’), but it’s also implying that there’s a normal rule that men have to be back before 11pm.

You live and learn…

Update: see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

Gamasutra article: Key Principles For Coping With Game Team Meltdown

2009-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

I came across this piece on Gamasutra the other day, and I thought it made an interesting read. If anything the comments are more interesting than the article. There’s definitely some good insight in there.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21488

One of Brenda’s key pieces of advice seems to be “complain upwards” - ie go to your boss, don’t just moan to those around you, that just spreads the negative vibes. I can see the sense in this, especially as someone who often gets frustrated and ends up moaning.

As one of the comments hints at, that only really works if you have a sufficiently structured team: “this article was really important, teams melt-down follow me around, and now I see that this is because of the trashtalk that we do (basically, in the university the team structure ends with noone being the lead, since we have noone to complain from other person, we complain with everyone else…)”.

BetterExplained.com

2009-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

For some reason, it’s been a day of random musings and serendipity.

I stumbled across http://betterexplained.com/, which has some nice, intuitive explanations of mathematical and technical topics. I can’t even remember now how I got there in the first place.

Festive Greetings from Chaos Towers

2008-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

Have a fantastic «fill in your festival of choice» everyone, and a Happy New Year if it is a new year for you!

And if you’re not celebrating, then enjoy the peace & quiet at work :)

Every bad back has a silver lining

2008-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

I’m laid up at home, having done something to the muscles in my lower back whilst playing football a couple of days ago.

On the plus side, I’ve had a bit of time to fiddle with the look of this site. It’s cleaner than it was… and greener. It may be leaner, but probably not meaner.

You Know We're In A Credit Crunch When...

2008-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

The envelope enclosed with a VAT return is no longer pre-paid.

Stingy bastards!

Evolution of Little Big Planet

2008-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Joshua Portway just sent me this link to a video showing the evolution of little big planet.

The graphics were generated by something called Code Swarm, by analysing the source control system to track changes to source files!

How cool… I wonder if I can get it working over the Football Manager code base…

QPR's Balance Is All Wonky

2008-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

We started pretty well this season, but things have started looking a bit flat and we’ve stopped scoring.

It’s hard to work out exactly what’s gone wrong, but my guess is that the balance of the side is a bit off, particularly in midfield. The fans have been moaning about the formation, but 442 vs 451 vs 433 isn’t the problem.

The problem is that playing Dani Parejo (on loan from Real Madrid!!) as a deep-sitting playmaker was asking too much from him, but dropping him is equally stupid. We need players of his quality on the pitch, but we can’t expect them to do everything.

I’d put Parejo back up front, dropped off behind one striker, as he played earlier in the season. We can rotate him and Buszaky in this role (and Vine, when he’s back). I’d also make the striker Agyemang or Balanta, and not Blackstock. Balanta was excellent in the early games, and I don’t understand why he’s not featuring. Blackstock may be popular, but I don’t believe he ever makes goals for us. He pops up to tap/head the ball into the net, which is obviously a valuable quality in a striker, but he is way too passive most of the time, and I don’t believe that any of our other strikers would get any less tap ins.

I also think that dropping Ledesma is ridiculous. We can’t expect him to be on fire every game, but his delivery, especially from corners and free kicks, is infinitely better than any other options we’ve got, and he makes things happen.

Rowlands is truly awful on the right, and if we have to find a way to lever him into the team each week (I’m not convinced that we do), that is not the solution. I think Rowlands is decent as a more defensive midfielder, but if Dowie feels he needs two out-and-out defensive midfielders, then I’d rather see Rowlands play on the left instead of Cook from time to time. He played well there a few seasons ago, and although his left-footed crossing is poor, he would cut in and unleash some great right footed shots which got us a few goals. And Cook is still a shadow of the player he was a couple of years ago - I don’t think it would do him any harm to be rotated or come on from the bench from time to time.

Joe Kinnear in full flow...

2008-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/oct/03/newcastleunited.premierleague

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Richard Wright - RIP

2008-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Last week, Richard Wright, the keyboard player with Pink Floyd, died.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve heard surprisingly little in the mainstream media, which is a travesty.

He always came across as a quiet, private and modest person, but he was a key part of a great band - and will be sadly missed by many, many people.

Tom's iPhone - Managing Expectations

2008-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Tom Smith really doesn’t seem to be having much joy with his iPhone.

I, on the other hand, love mine (despite the occasional glitch, random departure of what appeared to be a fully charged battery, or stupid loss of preferences when upgrading).

This may be something to do with the fact that Tom seems to have about 100 third-party apps installed on his, and I (remembering the days of OS 9 extension madness all too well) have about 10 on mine.

I suspect though that it’s all about expectations and the managing thereof.

I can’t speak for Tom, but all I really wanted from my iPhone was something that replaced my old iPod and phone, and by the way was a better internet device than my previous Sony Ericsson not-at-all-smart phone. Expectations well and truly met.

Throw in the fact that I’ve now got always-on, eat-as-much-as-you-can data access wherever I am (yes, at super slow 2G speeds - so what? How fast can you read RSS feeds anyway?), and I am a happy bunny.

Apart from the bloody recessed headphone socket of course, which is right pain in the arse.

For what it’s worth, my list of apps, in rough order of usage:

NetNewsWire (news)
Things (to do)
iFooty (footy news)
TubeStatus (travel news)
Remote (kewl)
Palringo (chat)
LastFM (music)
OmniTuner (making music)
VNC (nerdery)
Facebook (social)
Stanza (ebooks)
eReader (ebooks)
Light (illumination!)

NetNewsWire

2008-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

On the subject of MarsEdit… I’ve been more than a little disappointed with the iPhone version of NetNewsWire (if you don’t know the connection, you haven’t been using a Mac long enough ;) ).

Admittedly my list of feeds is a bit bloated (typically I have between 1000-2000 unread items, which I have no doubt is actually a comparatively small number by Tom Smith’s standards).

However, I’ve found NetNewsWire to be slow, crash-prone (although definitely improved with the 2.1 os upgrade, so maybe we can blame Apple for that one), and generally not very smart about the way it works.

On the whole I think I prefer the NewsGator iPhone site, which essentially does the same job in a browser - but only because it gets me there quicker, not because the interface is necessarily better (in some ways it is worse).

In the unlikely event that Brent Simmons is reading this, here’s my quick fire list of how you could improve NNW on the iPhone:

allow me to order my list of feeds; alphabetical is so not how I want to read my news
give me a way to read the previous item; sometime I click “next” too soon…
update the unread counts quickly; surely you can cache the list of unread items on the server and download them first, before refreshing the actual articles?
fetch stuff from the feeds that are empty first; I have a few feeds I read a lot, and a lot of feeds I read rarely. The rare feeds already have tons of unread stuff in them. The popular feeds are empty, because I’ve sucked ‘em dry! Refresh those ones first please.
fetch the articles in a more just-in-time manner; I know this may be trickier given the format of feeds, but it ought to be possible to just start by fetching one or two articles, then get the next one whilst I’m reading, and so on. I often seems like I’m waiting a long time just to find out if there’s anything to read
be a bit smarter about moving on to the next feed or category; I have a bunch of Mac related feeds grouped together into a folder - I often find myself moved on to another folder, only to go back and discover that somehow a bunch of unread items in the Mac folder got skipped
mix things up a bit; off the top of my head I can’t remember whether the feed formats give dates per item, or just an update time for the feed, but I’d quite like to view a bunch of related feeds together in a mixed up order; in other words, it would be quite nice not to have to read all the Register articles, then Slashdot ones, then the TUAW ones, etc - juble them together a bit, sorted by posting date if possible
spot and remove duplicates; sometimes I end up with the same story twice because I subscribe to a main feed and a filtered version of it. It would be good if NNW could spot the duplicates and mark them as read for me

My Next Job

2008-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

I often get mails from recruitment people (I seem to be on everyone’s databases), urging me to get in touch because they’ve got lots of exciting jobs that I’d be just right for.

Then it turns out that the job involves something I know nothing about, would never want to do anyway, pays less than half of my current salary, and/or involves working for a company that I’d rather not touch with a barge pole. A very long barge pole. Operated remotely. From a different planet.

Frustrating though this inevitably becomes, it does occasionally prompt me to wonder what I would actually like my next job to be. Ok, not occasionally… all the time.

Not that you should read this as me saying “I want a new job” or “I’m leaving SI” (don’t forget, I left SI once already, and they still managed to drag me back! If you count freelance contracts, I’m actually on my fourth stint at SI).

What I’m describing below probably won’t happen for another ten years if at all, but just for the record all you recruitment types, this is what you’ll have to do to get me even vaguely interested:

1) Find me a way to work for myself, to my own deadlines, and sell my own software. This is most likely to be the next move I make anyway, but if someone can help me do it, then fine.

2) Find me a Mac or iPhone job. I still work on a Mac every day, but I don’t write proper Mac software any more, and I miss it. Failing that, funky technology is good. Funky languages are good. Yet more tedious legacy C++ is bad.

3) Find me a job on a very small team. I’m talking less than 10 people. All of my most enjoyable jobs have involved working closely with 2-5 people.

4) Find me a research focussed job where I don’t have to work to unrealistic deadlines. I don’t mind deadlines at all (despite what some people think!). The right deadlines are essential if anything is ever to get finished. I do mind it though when I can see what needs to be done, but don’t get given the chance to do it. Ever. Year on year. Job satisfaction does matter, and too many years spent making too many compromises inevitably lead to a loss of morale and motivation.

5) Find me a job with people I can learn from. There are some amazing people out there, but only a few of us are ever lucky enough to actually work day to day alongside great coders like Kent Beck, Scott Meyers, et al, or great managers like Fred Brooks or DeMarco and Lister. I’ve been programming for nearly thirty years but I’d gladly halve my salary and give up all responsibility or kudos to be apprenticed to one of those guys for a while.

6) Find me the right money/quality-of-life trade off. As I mentioned in (5), I’ve been doing this a while now, and consequently I earn a decent wage. I think I’m a good coder, but I also think I’m an ideas person, and sometimes these days I feel trapped in a world that doesn’t give me the chance to express any of those ideas. To a large extent that’s just the human condition, I know. That said, I have no children and no mortgage (but no house, mind you) - I’d be very happy to trade some of my salary for intellectual freedom.

So there you go. I don’t want much, do I?

And finally, if there is anyone from SI reading this who is determined to interpret what I’ve just said in a negative fashion or get all insecure about it (which is really not how its intended), then all I can say is this: I’ve just given you a great list for how to keep me happy! What you do with it is entirely up to you :)

Synergy update

2008-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

It turns out that the synergy problem was caused by my Macs failure to register it’s name with the dns/dhcp server, which is good & bad. So I have synergy working fine with 10.5.5, but there may be other issues…

Ho hum.

Getting Things Done

2008-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve never really tried the whole GTD thing formally, although I think I’ve been doing some of it for ages, and I have been looking for a good tool or combination of tools that will let me organise my copious work-related task lists for as long as I can remember.

Nothing quite seems to do it right, so a while ago I started working on my own solution. Unfortunately, since I tend to have about half an hour of free programming time per century these days, I haven’t got very far.

In the interim, I also ended up with a manual solution based around Confluence (the very excellent Wiki software we use). This is better than nothing, and in fact the rest of the team adopted my scheme as a way to manage their lists too, but to be honest I find it very cumbersome.

So recently I gave up on a large number of my requirements (for now at least) and decided to go back to basics and try an existing commercial tool.

I realised that these days at SI I tend to spend about 50% of my time dealing with, or recovering from, interruptions of a non-programming nature. As a direct consequence of this, I spend a lot of time thrashing. I concluded that it’s most important for me to just be able to enter small tasks quickly into some sort of vaguely ordered list. It has to be easy enough that I can force myself to do it (the entering of the task, that is), as a matter of course, as soon as something occurs to me - even if I’ve already started the task in question.

Getting into this habit is essential, since I often start a task then don’t get to finish it immediately because I get interrupted again; or I start something and that immediately prompts me to think of five other things that need doing.

The simple of act of entering tasks like this reassures me that eventually I’ll come back to them. Even if I do get interrupted and completely forget what I was doing, the task will be sitting there, somewhere quite high up the list (since I tend to enter them near the “top” to begin with).

The tool I’ve started using is Things, from Cultured Code - which so far I really like.

It doesn’t do everything I want, and it does a few things I don’t really need, but it has the great advantage of being simple, nice to look at, and easy to use. It is a native Mac application, and also has an iPhone version (not free, but only £6), which is a major bonus.

Of my “ideal” requirements, the main things it doesn’t do are hierarchical sub-tasks, and group-wide task sharing.

For the group-wide sharing, I’ve just given up for now. Yes it would be nice to have team task lists, but I decided it was more useful for me to be able to get my own house in order first, before worrying about everyone else.

For sub-tasks and hierarchies of tasks, Things seems to have a concept of Areas and Projects, but they don’t seem to be multi-level, and they appear to be exclusive - move a task into a project and you seem to move it out of an area. That wasn’t quite what I expected.

So instead I’ve just gone free-form and decided to use tags for everything. I tag a task with a category, a project, a vague area, and try not to worry too much about it. This may become unruly eventually, but for now it’s working fine. I’m not trying to strictly order or decompose tasks - most tasks seem to have from one to three tags, and related stuff gets tagged similarly and seems to cluster naturally. That’s the theory anyway, and so far, so good.

If you’re looking for some “To Do” list software, I’d suggest that you give Things a try.

Drupal Blogger For iPhone

2008-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

There doesn’t seem to be an iPhone tool for blogging to Drupal, which is surprising since I can’t believe it’s that hard to do.

Until I got my iPhone, I tended to use Flock as my browser, and blog via that (not that I’ve blogged much in recent months anyway).

However, the utility of bookmark syncing with the iPhone was enough to force me back to Safari once I had one, and in any case Flock’s no use if I’m sitting on a train with just my phone.

Entering any amount of text is pretty painful on the iPhone at the best of times, but doing so in a web form via Safari is just too awful for words.

Which is annoying since I use my phone a lot now during my commuting, and it would be the ideal time for sharing the occasional random thought with this world - if only there was an easy way to get them down onto (digital) paper.

As I write this, I’ve just switched back to MarsEdit to give it a try. I used it all the time before switching to Flock, and might go back, especially since I gather that there’s an iPhone version in the works…

10.5.5 and Synergy

2008-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just installed 10.5.5 on my Mac here at work, and for some inexplicable reason Synergy seems to no longer be working.

I’d be interested to hear of anyone else who’s having this problem - especially if they can figure out a solution… Tags: synergy, macos

What I've Been Working On Recently

2008-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Well, we’ve finally announced this stuff publicly, so I can talk about it. Not that I need to, as you can watch this video instead.

Delicious Library 2

2008-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve finally got round to upgrading the excellent Delicious Library to version 2.

One of the features of the new version is publishing your library to the web, which means that mine is now online.

Unfortunately it doesn’t do a particularly fantastic job of the export - everything is there, but there’s not really any sort of index, and since I’ve got over 1100 items in the library, it’s kind of hard to find anything.

Tags: deliciouslibrary

Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2008-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

If you loved the old Infocom adventure games as much as I did, and also loved the work of Douglas Adams as much as I did, you won’t want to miss this post from Andy Baio. Tags: games, infocom, hitchhikers

Every Cloud...

2008-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

QPR scored two late goals… I lost my keys… but then something nice happened.

I’ll let Neil tell the story.

Live Update Updated

2008-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve updated the Live Update widget slightly, to fix a bug which caused problems when the station being displayed doesn’t list the platform numbers.

I’m not sure quite why some stations don’t do this, but apparently they do!

Live Update dashboard widget

2008-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been fiddling around with Dashcode, and have created my first widget.

It displays live train update information for the UK train network, of the sort that you get on the live indicator boards on the platforms.

Dashcode itself is quite cool, except for its utterly infuriating habit of completely destroying and recreating the entire directory structure of your project all the time, thus rendering it utterly incompatible with Subversion.

sigh.

iPhone Wishlist

2008-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve had my iPhone for a couple of weeks now, and I must say I love it.

It’s not perfect though, and I’ve got a fair few things that annoy or puzzle me, such as:

no cut & paste? what?
why is the iPod functionality more limited than the iPod? no random album play - or am I missing something?
why is there no auto-completion / history facility for the keyboard, especially when typing email addresses or urls? surely it’s obvious that it should remember what you’ve been typing recently (except passwords, obviously)
when you save a bookmark onto the home screen, then click on it multiple times, why isn’t safari smart enough to take you to the same “tab” (it opens a new tab and loads the page again)
no option to view passwords in clear-text (sometimes I know nobody is looking, and I just want to type the damn thing)
when I click the headphones button, why does the iPod only start playing sometimes?
why is the camera so poor
why don’t notes seem to sync with anything?
why no unified inbox for mail from multiple accounts?
wot no iChat?

Tags: iphone, apple

iPhone Cut & Paste

2008-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Talking about cut & paste on the iPhone, I was thinking about how I’d do it.

The main problem is that Apple have already used the obvious gesture for selecting text - “click” and drag-select - to allow you to position the text cursor using a magnifying glass.

This is indeed a useful gesture… when you need it… which is less often than I need cut & paste. However, given that they are unlikely to change the purpose of that gesture, we’re in need of another one.

The best I can think of, currently, is a two finger gesture where one finger remains static, whilst the other one drag selects. The static finger is almost like a depressed modifier key in this situation, and a similar use of it could be made in other contexts.

Currently the gesture I’ve described would be interpreted as the “pinch”, but I think that’s a mistake. I think that the interface should only recognise a pinch when both fingers are moving. This would allow the one-in-motion, one-static gesture to mean something else.

Once text selection is cracked, the rest is relatively simple I think - some sort of contextual interface or halo that presents itself around the selected text, given the normal cut/copy/paste type options.

There are still a few questions - like how do I paste in to an empty selection - but I think that they are easily solved. A paste button on the keyboard would do it.

Tags: iphone, interface, ui

Show A Little Respect

2008-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

If the fans of a football team, as the saying goes, are truly the twelfth player on the pitch, then its about time that the Loftus Road faithful realised that we are quite capable of scoring an own goal.

It started tonight with throwing the ball away from opposition players, which is something that has been creeping in at QPR lately. This is not just childish, it is un-sporting (sorry, an old fashioned concept I know) and whether it comes from the players or the fans, it reflects badly on us all.

Then there’s the treatment meted out to visiting greats. Tonight it was Andy Cole’s turn. You may not like him (personally I do like him), but he’s one of the highest scoring players in English footballing history, and there’s no doubt that he deserves respect from any true fan of the game.

A bit of ironic banter along the lines of “who are you?” or “you’re not famous anymore” is fine by me. But outright abuse, such as yelling “wankerl wanker” isn’t just in poor taste, its downright dumb when directed at a player of his quality.

At that stage, we were 2-0 up and cruising. Then a few bright sparks decide to wind up Mr Cole. The result? A hatrick for him, and a 2-4 defeat for us that he orchestrated.

I used to be proud of the atmosphere and quick-fire wit at Loftus Road. Now I fear we’re in danger of having it ruined by the kind of morons who think its funny to sing songs about people having aids. Tags: qpr, football

The DRY principle

2008-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

At the risk of repeating myself ;)

If there was one thing I really wish that more of the programmers I’d worked with over the years had learnt, I think it would have to be the DRY principle, namely: “Don’t Repeat Yourself”!

And if you haven’t read The Pragmatic Programmer, go out and buy it now!

Ecclestone on the upcoming FA cup tie with Chelsea...

2007-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

In January, QPR visit Chelsea in the FA Cup. Ecclestone, a Chelsea fan and a mate of the owner, is relishing it. “I go to Chelsea with Roman now and again,” he says, “so we might have to go easy on them, put out a weakened team and give them a bit of a chance.”

Bungie and Independence

2007-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

I read a nice interview with Harold Ryan from Bungie in this month’s Develop, about their decision to split from Microsoft.

In it he says:

“so we’ve chosen people to balance that out but who understand that the primary aim of the company is to make the best innovative, creative entertainment possible. And if that means we’re a break-even company instead of a massively profitable company, then that’s where we’ll go. We’re going to make the games that both gamers and us ourselves would want to play. If that makes us successful from a financial point of view then awesome, but we’re not going to do it the other way – target being profitable and see what kind of game we could make to do that.”Suffice to say that this spoke to me. I wonder if they’ve got any jobs going :)

Tags: bungie.games, development

Gianni taking lessons from Ollie?

2007-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

From a recent quote about QPR’s new manager, from Gianni Palladini (QPR chairman):

“If you’ve met a lovely women, do you really worry about what she did before she met you?”

Could have come straight out of the Ian Holloway book of quotes that one…

Updated Last.fm client for Leopard

2007-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

One thing I would say about Leopard is that if you use the Last.fm, you’ll want to get the latest beta build - version 1.3.2.15.

Previous versions had a few problems, but this one is working fine so far.

See this forum thread for more details.

Early reaction to Leopard

2007-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Actually, I’ve been using Leopard for a few months at work, but when we got hold of the real thing I finally got round to cleaning off both my development machine and my laptop and doing a full re-install on both.

So far, I have to say, my reaction to it is very positive. I haven’t discovered many revolutionary changes yet (I haven’t played with Time Machine, although I think it could be just what I want), but I’ve found lots of small improvements and nice tweaks.

The interface changes are a bit dour, with the whole thing feeling slightly more corporate and less glam, but on the whole they have improved consistency which can only be a good thing. And everything feels a little bit slicker and smoother. It might even be faster, although sometimes that can be caused more by the overall spring-cleaning than by the new OS, so I’m not certain.

The biggest improvements so far are in the general area of networking. Integration seems to be a lot better, it’s much easier to just find and use network devices. Finally, all the PCs on our office network just show up instantly in the network browser, as do printers etc. The user and network administration has had some nice tweaks: single-use guest logins and sharing-only users are both neat additions.

Best of all, they’ve actually put a feature into Mail that I asked for! You can now choose a smart folder that Mail will use when calculating the unread count to put in the little red badge it shows in the Dock. This is excellent for me - I tend to have a lot of unread mail but I have one or two smart folders which filter out the stuff that I actually need to deal with right now, so having the red badge show only when there is something to look at in one of these folders is really handy.

Early days yet, but so far, so good.

CheckPoint VPN-1 SecureClient and Leopard

2007-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

We use a VPN solution called SecureClient at SI, made by a company called CheckPoint.

Unfortunately we’ve had all sorts of hassles with it’s Mac support over the years. Now, surprise surprise, MacOS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) comes out, and what do you know? Checkpoint doesn’t work!

This is despite the fact that as registered developers with Apple we’ve had access to pre-release versions of Leopard for months and months, and so, presumably, have CheckPoint (if they wanted).

Luckily, there seems to be another option. We’ve discovered something called IPSecuritas. This seems to work with our VPN hardware, supports 10.5, and best of all, it’s free.

Channel 4 - Appear to be just as dumb as the BBC

2007-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

So it would appear that Channel 4’s new video on demand service doesn’t work on a mac either.

Their excuse is quite spectacularly pathetic:

“This is an industry-wide issue caused because the accepted Digital Rights Management (DRM) system used to protect online video content, which is required by our content owners, is not compatible with Apple Mac hardware and software. The closed DRM system used by Apple is not currently available for licence by third parties and there is no other Mac-compatible DRM solution which meets the protection requirements of content owners. Unfortunately, we are therefore unable to offer 4oD content to Mac users at this stage.”

When they say “the accepted”, what they mean is “the one we chose to use”. Which is another way of saying “We decided not to support the Mac. Tough”.

When they talk about “The closed DRM system used by Apple” they are just spouting spurious nonsense to try to confuse the issue. Apart from anything they are completely ignoring the fact that all such systems on the Mac are built on top of Quicktime, which would quite happily allow Channel 4 or anyone else to support their own DRM if they could be arsed. Which they can’t.

Idiots. Tags: channel4, video, drm. stupidity

Goodbye Gregory

2007-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Apparently QPR have just sacked John Gregory - oh dear, here we go again.

I wasn’t a great fan of Gregory before he took over at Loftus Road, but I have to say that in the last year he has done nothing but good for the club, and has earnt my respect by the way in which he’s behaved. The signings he’s brought in haven’t all been perfect, but they’ve been of a different order from those that Waddock and Holloway managed before him, and whilst there have been a few turkeys there have also been a few gems - Nardiello, Ledgerwood, Walton, Bolder and Camp are all clearly better than the players they have replaced.

I do think he’s made some dubious selection decisions - sticking with Rehman and Moore, and largely ignoring Ward, Bignot and Timoska both seem strange to me.

However, considering the ridiculous conditions he’s been forced to work under, I think it’s completely stupid to sack him now. We’re finally in a position to buy a few better players in January, so why not give him a chance until then.

More to the point, what exactly is a new manager supposed to do differently between now and January? Unless they manage to bring in someone spectacularly well connected who has quality players flocking to come and work with him… hmm, that bloke Jose is free apparently.

QPR Today

2007-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

QPR Today is a new site run by my friend Neil Dejyothin, who has the season ticket next to mine at Loftus Road.

There’s some great analysis on his site, well worth a read for any hoops fans out there.

Theme Mania

2007-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

As you may have noticed, I’ve been messing around with some new themes from Drupal’s site.

At the moment my favourites are:

burnt
blue_zinfandel
kubrick
itheme
barron

The current default theme is a modified version of blue_zinfandel, which I’ve tweaked to use a right nav bar.

Very much work in progress…

Football Fans: Not just a bunch of drunken blokes yelling insults at each other

2007-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Occasionally they can rise above that sort of stuff…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/606/A26479876

The Dangers Of Firefighting

2007-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a dangerous tendancy in the programming industry to spend one’s whole time fire fighting.

Because we’re largely deadline driven, there is always pressure to get things done yesterday, which inevitably leads to corners being cut in order to ship stuff on time.

Some of this is pragmatism, and entirely justified in the context of needing to turn a profit in order that everyone gets paid - but I believe that a big danger lies in the fact that fire fighting is habit forming. It’s a mentality which is very easy to slide into, and once you’re in it, it is hard to escape.

If I had to sum up a programmer’s fire fighting state of mind in words, it would be “I haven’t got time to do this properly”. Most of the time this is utter bollocks. A more accurate translation would be “I can’t be arsed to do this properly”.

Unfortunately most technology projects are run by non technical people who aren’t in any way qualified to tell which of these two statements applies in any given situation. Worse than that, they actively encourage the “haven’t got the time” mentality, which plays right into the hands of the “can’t be arsed” mentality - “look boss, it should have taken two weeks, but I got it done in a day (it doesn’t work for a few edge cases which I haven’t spotted yet, it breaks encapsulation, doesn’t follow any of our standards, and is totally unmaintainable, but did I mention that I got it done in a day!).

Larry Wall is fond of saying that a truly great computer programmer is lazy, impatient and full of hubris. When he says "lazy", he means in it a good way - as in "I don't want to do the same damn thing again and again, so I'll do it properly now, in order to avoid future wasted effort".

Unfortunately, the vast majority of programmers aren’t great - they’re just lazy - and the kind of laziness involved in the quick bodge is seductive. They live in a world where most people (especially their bosses) don’t know what they do or how they do it. What begins as a “I know I shouldn’t, but I’ll bend the rules just this once” soon becomes second nature, to the extent that the part where the programmer works out whether they “have time” to do it properly gets missed out entirely, and it’s just assumed that there isn’t time. Worse still, many programmers don’t even for sure what “properly” actually means. They may know it in an abstract, “this is what the lectures said” way, but they haven’t learnt the truth of it through bitter experience. The quick bodge method seems to work fine (for a while), and by the time they realise that it doesn’t actually work at all, it may be too late for them to get out of their bad habits.

This isn’t some sort of calculated wickedness on the part of programmers. There’s nothing suprising in it - it is simply human nature - which is the very reason why it should be actively fought against by managers who have the foresight to encourage quality and excellence (not to be confused with self-indulgent noodling).

Most corporate environments strive hard to keep their employees cocooned away from any “negative” temptations, such as the temptation to read email, surf the internet, or (heaven forbid) think about something apparently unrelated to work. This is usually futile and counter-productive and tends to produce sterile environments where all creativity is suppressed. So it’s doubly ironic that programming studios often seem hell-bent on actively encouraging their technical staff to give in to the temptation to produce sub-standard work in the name of spurious efficiency.

What they don’t realise is that quality and pride in your work isn’t something that can be turned on and off at the flick of a switch. The more corners one is asked to cut to meet deadlines, the more the pride in one’s work is eroded, with serious long term effects as a result.

The good programmers tend to react to this state of affairs by getting frustrated and grouchy. They either start doubting themselves, or they get pissed off and leave (often discovering in the process that the grass is no greener elsewhere). Or they retreat into their own world, ignoring both reasonable and unreasonable requests for a pragmatic approach, and become completely un-manageable.

The efficient but unimaginitive programmers thrive, because they are good at doing stuff quickly, and clever enough to layer hack upon hack and keep everything running against all the odds. There’s always a brick wall, and eventually the project hits it, but by this time the efficient programmers have made enough of a name for themselves as people who “get things done” that they are seen as the heroes. They can make a compelling case for throwing everything away and starting again, but they don’t really have the imagination or motivation to design the new version properly, thus beginning a new cycle of bodging.

The vast majority of the other programmers just go with the flow - happily pottering along and never stretching themselves or achieving their potential. They may have it in them to become great, but they probably won’t be arsed. Life is easy, they can get enough done to keep the bosses happy, and they don’t ever really have to make the mental effort to actually think hard about anything in order to do it right. It is so much easier to bodge than it is to come up with an elegant design.

Sadly these people are destined to never discover how much more satisfying it is to do things well, to come up with a really clean design, then implement it. They will never experience the pleasure of working with something that is well thought out and knowing that you are reaping the benefits of earlier planning and discipline.

More sadly still, the studios that employ these people are ultimately destined to fail. It may take years, but they will slide slowly into decline as the products that they make become ever slower, more bloated, uglier and less reliable - whilst the managers scratch their heads and wonder where it all went wrong.

BBC iPlayer Petition

2007-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a petition to stop those idiots at the BBC from making their on-demand video service Windows only.

Go and sign it now!

Upgrading

2007-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

I’m going to make another attempt to do some upgrading tonight, so the web site will probably be up & down a bit, and I’m temporarily resetting the theme back to a default.

Normal service may be resumed at some point, possibly, if I’m lucky.

Upgrading MySQL on MacOS X whilst running Drupal

2007-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

The short version: it’s a bit bloody hairy! I’d avoid it if I were you.

The long version:

I was running MySQL 4.0, and trying to get Django to work.

Running ./manage.py syncdb, it said “server is too old to set charset”

It seemed to need 4.1 to get some Django stuff working, so thought I’d upgrade. I’m running Drupal 4.7 on the same server, which is a Mac running 10.3.9. I was (fairly) confident that Drupal was backed up ok, so decided to just download the DMG for MySQL 4.1 and give it a whirl.

So, after installing and restarting, I tried to access my website - hello? anyone there? Oh bollocks… no website.

Looking at the /usr/local/mysql/data/ folder I was horrified to discover that all my databases had disappeared. Brown trousers time…

At this point I should point out that I am an idiot. If this happens to you, don’t panic. The installer has not eaten your databases, which is what I thought it had done!

If you look in /usr/local/ you will discover that mysql is aliased to the actual installation, for example mysql-max-4.1.22-apple-darwin7.9.0-powerpc. I didn’t realise this, and I had the directory aliased from somewhere else too, so I thought my databases were gone.

I was remarkably calm. Oh well, I said, time to discover if the backup script actually works.

I am using mysqlhotcopy to back my databases up, and I’d never had to actually do a restore (I can’t believe I’m saying that - I hadn’t tested my backups - but then testing them isn’t that easy when you have no time and no spare server). Anyway, I had no idea how to turn the backup back into a working database.

The answer, in case you are wondering, is remarkably simple - copy it back into the right place. Wow - it’s almost like using a Mac (apologies to the hardened unix geeks out there, who must be wondering what kind of an idiot I am. The answer is, I am a very technical idiot who, due to a career spent programming macs and the occasional pc, has never had to deal with any of this shit before). I love that the Mac is based on unix now, I really do. I just wish unix would catch up sometimes…

Anyway, I copied the backup back into the right place, and as luck would have it, it seemed to work.

Of course, I had to spend a while fixing up all the sql users and passwords and privileges and all of that malarky. I always forget my MySQL root password for some reason, which really doesn’t help. Lucky I wrote it down ;)

So, I had the databases back, and everything should be hunky dory. Hit reload in the web browser, and… Drupal was complaining that it didn’t have access. To be precise, it was saying “Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client”. Eh?

I rummaged around a bit, and started thinking, uh-oh, maybe Drupal 4.7 doesn’t work with MySQL 4.1. After a bit of searching, I got the vague impression that there were some problems, but there seemed no clear solutions.

Right, I figured. In for a penny… lets upgrade Drupal to the very latest 4.7 variant, that’ll fix it.

So I did, and it didn’t.

Oh so it, maybe Drupal 5.1 will fix it.

It didn’t.

Oh, I’ve found a note saying you have to go to 5.1 via 5.0. I’ll install that.

It didn’t help.

At this point I was wishing that I hadn’t started. However, a bit more googling finally gave me this: http://drupal.org/node/13977. Aha! Nothing to do with Drupal at all.

Turns out that the password format has somehow changed and you have to do a bit of mucking around to fix it. Ok, fine, I can do that. So try again, and thank something or other, it worked. The web site came back.

Whoohooo.

This is probably where I should have stopped… except that when I tried to log in to the site to blog all of this, I couldn’t. It just silently failed to log me in, and I ended up back on the log in page. What???

I had a vague notion that a similar passwordy sort of problem was perhaps occuring, this time with Drupal’s own user table, but I couldn’t get it to work and I didn’t know how to change Drupal’s own password entries with SQL. I had gone back to 4.7 by this time, but I still couldn’t log in.

I tried running the various Drupal update scripts for various different versions of Drupal, but no joy. In fact, they didn’t work because of various other permissions problems. Some of them turned out to be the fact that I hadn’t got the permissions for the database files right when I restored them.

Ah well, thought I. I’m in a right pickle now, but at least the site sort of works. What the hell, maybe MySQL 5.0 will fix it. You can tell I was feeling optimistic tonight.

So, another DMG install later, and no further on. Actually, things were worse. Drupal 4.7 wasn’t talking to the database again, at all.

Luckily it was around this point that I realised that the multiple MySQL installations were happily residing in different directories on my server, along with my original databases. This is exactly how I’d expected it to work in the first place, I’d just got a bit confused.

So, realising that I still had my original installs of MySQL, Drupal, and the original data files, I figured that I could probably just get things working as they originally were.

I did. It works.

Interesting evening that.

The only problem is, I still can’t get Django to talk to MySQL. Arse.

Site Upgraded

2007-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Well I finally managed to figure out some of the problems I’ve been having and upgrade both MySQL and Drupal.

As you will notice, the site theme has changed as a result, and it’ll probably take me a while to get things straight.

The route that I took in the end was to use mysqldump to back up the entire database, upgrade to MySQL 5, and restore the database from the dump. This seemed to work fine and left me with a working database with my existing 4.7.0 install of Drupal.

I then upgraded Drupal in stages from 4.7.0 -> 4.7.6 -> 5.0 -> 5.1, running update.php at each stage. A bit laborious perhaps, but it worked without a hitch.

Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for a handy link, which put me on the right path.

MacOS X 10.3.9, MySQLdb 1.2.2, Python 2.5

2007-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Another nice little gotcha for you:

If you get this error after building and installing MySQLdb 1.2.2 on 10.3.9:

ImportError: dlcompat: dyld: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python can't open library: /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient_r.15.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)

have a look in your /usr/local/mysql/lib/ folder. You may discover, as I did, that the library it’s looking for is in that folder, and not in a subfolder called mysql.

I spent ages on this before realising what was wrong.

The solution is simple, just make a mysql subfolder and alias (or copy) the library into it.

Aaaagh!

Tools that I use

2007-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Inspired by a similar page on Boah’s website, I decided to start listing the tools that I use. Apart from anything else, it gives me a handy place to keep my tool related notes and links.

BBC tedium

2007-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

The beeb seem to be working themselves into a mouth-foaming frenzy about the fact that they accidentally showed the press some footage of the Queen which implied that she might have been a bit pissed off during a photo shoot. Like we are supposed to care…

What century are we in again?

The worst part of it isn’t even the sycophantic fawning over the Queen - distasteful though that is, I’m used to it by now.

No, the worst part is the illustration of just how self-obsessed the BBC have become, and how low their standards of journalism.

The story achieved almost blanket coverage last night, and featured heavily on both Newsnight and the Today program. It’s a growing trend that the BBC cover their own internal dealings as serious news, giving undue prominence to stories about their own programs which often amount to little more than promos.

They should still be a serious institution, and I have a great deal of time for an organisation who’s avowed aim is impartial reporting. Sadly though, the BBC are rapidly undermining that status by behaving like everyone else around them, and taking themselves far too seriously.

In this case, like so many others, actions would speak far louder than words.

Oh Damn, I Think I Need To Manage!

2007-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

I've been reading Joel on Software recently (the book of the website, rather than the website itself), and whilst I think he's a bit of a keen self-publicist and not always right, on the whole he talks a lot of sense.

The main thing that I get from this book, as with a few similar ones I've read over recent years, is a sense of reassurance that there are other people out there who think the same way.

This is pleasing and frustrating in equal measure - the former because it's nice to feel that you're not completely barking mad, the latter because of course it confirms what I already knew, namely that management is the main problem and that there are no magic bullets.

Increasingly over the last few years I've started to realise that I get more frustrated by bad working practices or silly decisions, and my inability to change them, than I do about almost anything else. I think I'd probably prefer to work the "right" way on something innately boring, rather than the "wrong" way on something sexy (of course, really I want to have my cake and eat it too).

I still love programming, but there's a limit to what you can do on your own and I've spent much of the last 19 years of my working life searching for the perfect manager who is technically savvy enough to know when I'm right (and correct me when I'm wrong), and politically savvy enough to protect me whilst I get on with doing things the right way. I'm now increasingly of the opinion that I probably need to give up on the search, and instead attempt to become that person for a new generation of coders. Either that or set up on my own as an indie developer, and accept that whilst there's a limit to what you can do on your own, you can still do a lot (I am sorely tempted, except that I like working in a team). I think I came to this realisation at Sony actually, but it somehow has taken quite a while to filter properly through my brain.

Apart from anything else, the argument for moving into management is a case of just keeping the blood pressure down. It is amazing just how soul destroying it is to have to put up again and again with the minor niggles that result from systemic things being wrong. To come in every day and find that the source control system still doesn't work, or to watch colleagues make the same mistakes, for the same bad reasons, again and again. Not that I don't work with some smart people, but sometimes things are just wrong. And when you know what's wrong, you know how to put it right, and you even know that it would make more sense and save the company more time and money for you to put it right yourself that to wait for the person who's job it is to do it, yet something is conspiring to prevent you, it's torture.

When you're young, you tend to either be oblivious to this stuff, or just have the time and energy to steam-roller through it (the build scripts don't work properly? No problem, I'll just work through the weekend and get them knocked into shape. Dave won't let me refactor that file system, fine - I'll just do it at home and prove to him that my way will be better). The older I get though, the more I find myself wondering why the hell I should have to put up with it. More to the point, why should Caroline have to put up with me slaving away in my spare time trying to do someone else's job as well as my own? Life is too short.

Of course working in a team is all about compromise, and I know that. I can't get my way all of the time, there are commercial realities anyway, and I can live with all sorts of rubbish practices if I feel that they are a necessary short-term evil which will be addressed once our current deadline is over. I've written more than my share of crap this-stinks-but-it-will-do-for-now code to ship things. If you have any pride in your work though, you do that sort of thing under protest, on the basis that you will get the time to go back and clean things up later.

And even under tight pressure, I'm firmly of the opinion that if you see a problem you fix it. You don't leave it for a while, until it's a really really bad problem. If you can hear it ticking, you definitely don't leave it until it blows up in your face.

Yet mysteriously that "clean things up later" bit never quite seems to happen. There's always something else with a higher priority. It seems to me that the only way to make it happen is to be the one setting the priorities, even if that does mean more time in meetings, and little or no time spent in front of a compiler.

Damn! I wonder if I can convince anyone that I'm right?

Smart And Gets Things Done

2007-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Many thanks to cousin Keith for recommending this book to me.

It's a good read, and whilst I don't agree with 100% of what Joel says, he still talks a lot of sense. Definitely one to give to your manager too.

QPR Fixtures iCal Calendar

2007-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

For those of a blue-and-white hooped persuasion, you might find this handy:

or here’s an iCal link.

technorati tags:qpr

Why I like Facebook

2007-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

It seems to be flavour of the month, but there is definitely something about Facebook which appeals to me in a way that Orkut, LinkedIn and MySpace don't.

I think that what I like about it is that in many ways it feels like its more about your friends than it is about you. To a certain extent all of these social sites feel like a big exercise in self-publicity: "look at me, I do this, I like that, blah blah blah". I'm sure that's true of Facebook too, but for me at least it does seem to genuinely encourage interaction in a way that the other sites don't.

Why Hiring Is A Bugger

2007-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

We've been interviewing quite a bit recently, and I have to say, we're learning a few lessons.

The main one is that hiring senior people is hard, especially if you are too small to have someone dedicated to that task alone. If you are prepared to be fussy (which we are, and you obviously should be if you don't want to employ idiots) then hiring can take up a lot of your time.

Not only does it take up a lot of your time, it also just takes a long time, period. We have some roles that we just can't find the right person to fill. It sounds like stating the obvious, but don't assume that you can fill a role in a given amount of time, and don't put yourself in a position where you can't deliver something that you've promised because you don't actually have the people in place to do it!

Of course, not only does not having the people in place cause problems, you also lose more time because the people who will be working with the people you haven't hired yet (are you still with me?) are probably intimately involved in the interviewing process - hence even they aren't working on the project that is already suffering from not having the staff you are trying to hire!

Time, of course, is also money in this business. There may be a temptation to avoid expensive agencies. Whilst I certainly wouldn't say that agencies will solve all your problems (they haven't solved all of ours yet), it is certainly worth bearing in mind the cost to your existing staff when you do your sums. If an agency does the weeding out for you, then your staff can get on with their day jobs.

Agencies do have an annoying tendancy to put people forward who aren't really appropriate, so you obviously have to watch for that, but on the other hand they are capable of reaching senior people who will probably never need to get as far as reading an advert. It's definitely worth weighing up the pros and cons.

Finally, you should definitely do as much sanity-check screening as you can. We were recently advised to do a quick phone interview before getting people anywhere the office, and it's definitely good advice. How many hours do you want to spend interviewing people who turn out not to have a desire to work in your industry / knowledge of what your company does / permission to work in your country / clue why they are there...

Facebook

2007-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

You can now find me on Facebook, here. I have to say I much prefer it to MySpace, not that I hang out in either place much…
technorati tags:facebook, MySpace, social

We're Hiring!

2007-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

In case you hadn't noticed, Sports Interactive are hiring!

Take a look at http://www.sigames.com/jobs for more details.

technorati tags:jobs

Devstation

2007-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hi folks,

It's been a while since I've posted, simply because I've been a bit hectic recently.

I'll be at DevStation for the next few days - if anyone else is going and fancies meeting up for a coffee, give me a yell.

Bobby Cook

2007-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

My cousin Bob is playing at Blue Flowers tonight. I’m hoping to go down, so if you’re in the area, drop by!

QPR in victory shock!

2007-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

We beat Burnley 3-1 this afternoon, and looked ok for a change. Two major positives: the new signings looked good, with Bolder in particular making a big difference in midfield, and the return of Rowlands and Ainsworth from injury also improved matters.

We're still far from safe, but I certainly believe that all is not lost.

The Fans Are Getting Restless At QPR

2007-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

This post about QPR prompted me to respond - I agree with some of it, strongly disagree with other bits. My response:

Mancienne looks far better at centre back. As for Rehman, all I can say is we're missing Biggy badly at right back. Rose's form was far too dependant on confidence, and was generally awful, so I'll not miss him at all.

Nygaard is a complete waste of space and I don't understand why he ever gets picked. Jones is young though, and needs to be treated carefully, so we can't necessarily expect him to play every game. Gallen has been terrible for the last couple of seasons for us - if he's doing well for Plymouth then good luck to him.

The real problem for me is the midfield. It's not fair on Baidoo to play him on the right. I'd like to see Smith tried out there - for all his occasional spectacular goals I think he's pretty anonymous as a central midfielder, when what we need is a couple of ball winners there. In the centre, lets hope that Bolder can make an impact. I also think the way that Nick Ward has been treated is a tragedy. He looked great at the beginning of the season, but his confidence has obviously been shot to pieces by the fact that he's largely been warming the bench, and in recent games he's been forced to play out wide where he clearly isn't comfortable. I really hope that a spell elsewhere revitalises him as I think he's a far better player than most of the QPR fans have given him credit for.

Troubled times at Loftus Road. I still think that we can escape relegation, but I must admit that it's looking pretty tough.

Meretto

2007-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

I wen't to see Stu's band Meretto last night at the Lark In The Park. They played a short accoustic set due to a temporary lack of drummer situation.

It was the first time I'd seen them live, and despite the lack of drums (I'm a bass player, so I tend to be dissapointed when there's no drummer!), I thought they were great. I'll definitely be seeing them again - check out their website for details of upcoming gigs.

Vista DRM

2007-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Richard Buckle pointed me at this interesting document about the DRM measures in Vista.
technorati tags:vista, drm

Twittering

2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

Kevin Marks recently introduced me to Twitter. It's a simple idea, well executed, and I particularly like the instant messaging integration which makes it very simple to update.

All I need now is some sort of plugin to integrate it with Adium.

Fiendish Chocolate

2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

As if chocolate was fiendish enough in the first place, we recently came across this monster during a trip to Bruges:

technorati tags:demonic, chocolate

Moving Offices

2006-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Sports Interactive are moving offices over the next few days, so there are packing crates everywhere at the moment, and not much work getting done.

We're not going far - from Upper Street to Old Street - but it's quite a major operation. When I first came here to do the Mac port of Championship Manager 3 there were about 8 people occupying one room. Now we're moving to two floors in an office block, with enough seating space for well over 100 - scary!

I like the old location though, and will be sad to move, especially when it comes to lunch time... Farewell Afghan Kitchen! Farewell Giraffe! Farewell Gallipoli!

technorati tags:sportsinteractive, work, moving

MacBookPro dvd drive - discs get stuck?

2006-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

I've got a new 17" MBP, and within a couple of weeks it's already playing up - I've got a DVD stuck in the drive!

For a while, turning the machine upside before ejecting (yes, with it still running!) was enough to free discs, so I get the impression that the mechanism has shifted very slightly and something is catching.

Sadly, even that ungainly and somewhat scary action doesn’t work anymore. Searching the net, it appears that I’m not alone either. Looks like Apple’s quality control is slipping again…
technorati tags:macbookpro, dvd, cd

Pastafari

2006-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Caroline and I were returning home the other day when we were accosted by a fellow Pastafarian, who spotted my "Obey Your Noodly Master" t-shirt.

Nice to know that the word has spread as far as Herne Hill...

technorati tags:fsm, pastafarian, atheism

Tom's New Project

2006-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

I haven’t blogged for a while, so this news is a bit out of date… but anyway, Tom Smith has a neat new project which lets you search the internet by price.
technorati tags:web, shopping

Slight Change Of Plan...

2006-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

I've had an interesting time over the last year at Sony, but recently I started to realise that it wasn't really going in the direction that I wanted, and so I started to look around for alternatives.

As it turned out, my old friends at Sports Interactive were on the look out for a programmer. Things have moved on a lot at SI in the last couple of years, and to cut a long story short, I decided that I was very interested in going back there - and so, that's what I'm going to do.

The decision was made a while ago, but I've been keeping quiet about it until I actually left Sony, which happened this Tuesday. So on Monday, I'll be starting back at SI towers.

They say that you should never go back... but then they say all sorts of stupid stuff, so what do they know...

;)

Further developments at QPR

2006-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Soon after my post about QPR, they decided to relieve Gary Waddock of his role as manager, and appoint John Gregory instead.

I must admit to finding this a bit depressing - I've never been that keen on the idea of Gregory taking over, although it's been rumoured on and off for about the last three years, so someone at QPR obviously liked the idea.

Waddock does have a pretty appalling record, in terms of straight results, but I think that the style of play has improved this season, and on the whole he seems to be more decisive during the match, making substitutions earlier and doing less random tinkering.

Having said all that, the team certainly aren't performing as they should. Gregory may not be my first choice, but maybe he's what we need right now. I certainly wish him luck.

We've got a threadbare squad, but there's more than enough talent to stay in this division - let's hope we manage it.

The Mighty Rangers

2006-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

I realise that I haven't posted anything yet about QPR this season (despite the fact that I've been to every home game, and have been carrying around nine tenths of a completed, albeit slightly drunken, match report typed into my mobile phone for about three weeks...

We're amongst the favourites for the drop this season, and when you look at our situation on paper that's understandable - no money, no massive signings, lots of transfer listed players that nobody wants, finished last season with a 10 game losing streak and a manager on gardening leave...

When you add to this a fairly undistinguished start, and the fact that we're currently second from bottom, you'd think that I'd be suicidal by now... but weirdly, I'm not.

The main thing that has given me hope is that a number of younger players have started to come through from the youth team who actually look promising. This is in marked contrast to the recent couple of seasons, when the likes of Marcus Bean were being touted as the next great thing...

Baidoo, Bailey, Jones and Kanyuka - they all look like decent players, and what's best, they look strong and competitive, they can play a bit, and they don't seem phased by a place in the first team. They aren't the finished article for sure, and if they play a lot this season they are going to make mistakes, and we are going to lose games - but most of them deserve a place in the starting line up despite that, ahead of older and supposedly better players.

The second thing that has cheered me up is that not all of our purchases during the closed season have been completed turkeys. Now this might sound like damning with faint praise, but when you consider recent seasons (the likes of Georges Santos, Dean Sturridge, Marc Nygaard and Stefan Moore spring to mind), perhaps you can see where I'm coming from.

The best of the new bunch seem to be Dexter Blackstock, Zesh Rehman and Egutu Oliseh. Blackstock looks quick witted and dangerous up front - the kind of player who will annoy people and make goals even if he hasn't scored many yet. Rehman looks like a good reader of the game, solid in defence and decent in the air, if not quite as good as Shittu was. And Oliseh looks, well, flashy - he's defenitely got some tricks, although whether he know when to play a simple ball remains to be seen... on the evidence of the Birmingham game I'd say the jury is out still...

So, all of this is pretty good news. Add to that lot the fact that Rowlands looks great playing in a defensive midfield role, and that Bircham seems to have a renewed spring in his step, and I'd say that all is not yet lost.

It will be a tough season, and we might even go down, but if one or two of the youngsters achieve their potential, I think we could yet manage a respectable finish.

8 core macs...

2006-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

I spotted this story on Slashdot - someone has taken out the two dual core processors on a new Mac and replaced them with quad core ones.

I want one :)

technorati tags:apple, macosx

Cybergrot

2006-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Last week we escaped from the madness of London life, and spent a lovely few days in a couple of very nice cottages in Castle Cary, which is in Zummerzet. We came across them via a great site called The Little Domain, which specialises in small cottages for couples - I'd recommend it if you like that sort of thing!

It turns out that our landlady for that week is multi-talented, as she's also just created a fantastically weird online shop, called Cybergrot. It's just the right kind of odd for my liking :)

technorati tags:cybergrot, junkshop, holiday, cottages

Buntropy

2006-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Whilst on holiday, I discovered a new physical property, which I'm hoping may eventually lead to a nobel prize.

Buntropy

noun

bunâ€§troâ€§pyâ€‚ [bun-truh-pee]

1. The dispersal of energy throughout the body, as a result of patisserie intake; how much energy is spread out in a body, or how widely spread out it becomes, as the result of the ingestion of a specific number of buns.

Research into this property is ongoing, even as we speak. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it...

New Axe

2006-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Hey Tom Smith, look at my new toy (it's the one on the left). They were selling them at the Big Chill, and I couldn't resist.

You’re gonna have to teach me how to play the damn thing though…
technorati tags:ukelele, music, bigchill

Deja Vu Already

2006-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Hmmm... if you have deja vu about having deja vu, what's that then? Deja deja vu? Or Deja vu vu?

Hang on... haven't I already asked you this?

QPR calendar updated

2006-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve updated my QPR iCal calendar with the 2006-2007 fixtures.

After the disappointment of the World Cup, I’m really starting to look forward to the new season… now that’s a triumph of optimism over experience if ever there was one!

catholic catholic

2006-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

A post by Kevin Marks on antonyms and synonyms made me wonder… is “catholic Catholic” an oxymoron?

Neil's off to Germany

2006-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Neil's off to Germany for a whole month of World Cup fun - and I'm jealous.

He's set up a blog so that we can follow him on his travels.

"Returned Mail" spam

2006-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

All of a sudden, I seem to be getting an awful lot of spam bouncing back to me because my email address has been spoofed as the sender.

Is this a general trend that anyone else has noticed, or am I being targetted specifically by someone? I've certainly had it happen before, but not in anything like the volumes I'm seeing now.

Tom's written a book!

2006-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Tom Smith has written a book about the interesting times that he’s been living through recently.

Drupal upgrade

2006-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just upgraded this server to use the latest version of Drupal.

Please let me know if you notice any glitches!

Recording the process

2006-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Recently, I’ve been trying to convince my colleagues to make more use of wikis and forums, rather than writing word documents and having face to face convesions about them.

This, perhaps not surprisingly, has met with a range of reactions from amusement to confusion to derision!

Why the hell, people want to know, are you engaged in a heated debate (read flame war) on the forums, with the bloke who sits next to you?

Lest you get the wrong idea, let me say quite categorically that I’m all for face to face interaction - in fact I reckon we could do with a bit more of it on my current project.

The problem with face to face, though (at least until technology catches up with us) is that there is no permanent record of what was said. Making a decision is all very well in the here and now, but what happens in six months time when we are sitting round scratching our heads and asking ‘how the hell did we get here?’. What happens when I get run over by a bus and some other poor sod has to pick up where I left off?

Yes I can look at the design document (we do have such things!), but most of the time it represents the start of the discussion, not the end. The design usually sparks a conversation, or a gradual process of discovery, and that’s what I want to capture.

I really think that wikis and forums can help. Wikis, because they lower the barrier to revision of the design documents, so that there is more chance that the current design document reflects the reality of the project. Forums, because they record that all important discussion and the decisions that got us to where we are.

Yes using such systems can be a pain in the arse, and yes it can often be easier to have a one minute face-to-face convesation. It’s also easier to hack the code, not bother with design, and ignore the coding standards. Good coders, however, eventually learn the true value of such easy fixes!

Herding Cats

2006-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

There's an interesting tension in programming teams, between having too much management and not enough.

Anarchie doesn't really work when you are trying to build a complex system, and it takes an exceptionally talented and well balanced group of programmers to spontaneously form themselves into a productive, non hierarchical group. Not for nothing has managing programmers been likened to herding cats...

So ok, loath though we are to admit it, we do need to be managed. But hierarchy, in itself, isn't management. Standards, procedures, methodologies, are not management. Dictat from on high isn't management.

Sure, it helps to be organised. Of course, having a common approach is important. Certainly, splitting a big problem into smaller ones, a large team into smaller units, is a sensible approach in all walks of life.

The glue, however, the key ingredient, the thing that holds it all together, is communication. For me, promoting and enabling good communication is the true role of the manager. Helping to refine the different ideas, resolve conflicting ideas, and forge a common vision is important. Dissemenating that vision to the team, keeping it alive and evolving, is vital.

technorati tags: programming, management

Updating Applications

2006-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

One thing that really annoys me these days is applications which dont support automatic updating.

If you've written code to check for new versions (not exactly hard these day), not bothering to go the extra step and write the code that will download the new version for your user is just annoying. Even writing some extra code to optionally install the new version and restart it isn't exactly rocket science. Grrrr...

Testing

2006-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

I’m posting this with Flock, which looks like a rather interesting browser… I think I’ll make it my default for a while.

This is how it should work...

2006-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

It’s interesting working for a relatively big company - my new gang are a lot more organised than SI, and I’d say that on the whole the development team are more experienced and more open minded, which has a good effect on the overall quality of the coding.

I’ve got a way to go though before I reach nerdvana. This place, on the other hand, sounds a lot closer to the way I’d like to be doing things in an ideal world.

I’ve made a personal commitment to doing as much unit testing as I can on my code, regardless of what anyone else does. It’s pretty tricky to do pair programming though, which is what I’d really like, unless we all commit to it. I haven’t actually asked, but I think I can guess what the answer would be…

Windows Wishlist

2006-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Because I have to suffer the ignominy of using Windows every day at work, I’m starting to develop a wish list Mac features that are missing from Windows that would really, really make my life easier.

With the combination of my normal desktop pattern, Yahoo widgets (formerly Konfabulator), and Object Dock Plus to replace the task bar, I’ve now got something that looks and feels quite familiar.

But there are two things in particular that I really miss.

built in spell checking in all text fields
some sort of “default folder” style file history in “open” and “save” dialog boxes.

Tom Smith Wants To Know If Anyone Is Out There...

2006-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Hello Tom!

Palm Syncing

2006-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Recently I’ve started using my old Palm Pilot again - mostly because I don’t tend to take my laptop into work now that I’m doing console development, and having the palm around lets me jot the occasional note on the train. It’s also the best way I’ve come up with to sync my work and home address books… although the jury is definitely out on that one (ever used Lotus Notes? It’s the worst pile of crap I’ve ever had foisted on me in my entire working life).

Anyway, one of the reasons I stopped using my Palm in the first place, and something that still drives me absolutely nuts, is the fact that you can’t initiate a sync on the Palm from the desktop - you have to press a bloody button on the Palm.

What’s all that about? It’s the most stupid thing ever in the history of stupid things. If the Palm is in the dock, it should just sync regularly. Why require human intervention? It’s amazing how much time and money can go into a device, and one fatal design flaw can slip through entirely unnoticed.

Open Rights And Identity

2006-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

A couple of weeks ago I went along to a meeting of the Open Rights Group.

Cory Doctrow gave an interesting talk about some of the issues surrounding the debate over digital riglts management, in which he pointed out, amongst other things, the futility of trying to prevent the copying of bits - it is something that will only get easier with time. Cory is a good speaker, and it was an interesting talk, although as is so often the case with these events, there seemed to be a large element of preaching to the converted.

The second talk was on the campaign against identity cards, an issue that I think is more controversial. One of things that worries me about ORG is that it will attract people with certain views, and an orthodoxy will emerge to the exclusion of others - I suspect that the ID card debate might be a case in point.

It’s not that I’m particularly in favour of the government’s scheme, it’s just that i think that most of the debate about identity - tracking of information, dna databases, identity theft, civil liberties - is the wrong way round.

There are good analogies with the DRM debate. Just as it is futile to attempt to prevent the copying of digital information, it seems equally unrealistic to believe that we can prevent the storage and tracking of personal information.

We live in a digital age, and computerisation and automation in all walks of life is going to increase, not decrease.

That’s inevitably going to produce more data, and the ability to track and analyse it is already possessed, to a significant degree, by a number of organisations. Today, most of them are shady government bodies, either partially or wholly unaccountable to democratic scrutiny. Tomorrow, such abilities will increasingly become available to the rich and powerful, be they corporations or organised crime.

The knee-jerk response to all this is to attempt to curtail the collection of information - but not only is that not going to work, it’s actually going to harm us in as many ways as it helps, by preventing lots of the genuinely useful advances that technological integration could bring to our daily lives.

I would argue that the danger posed to our liberty by the collection information comes not so much from its existance, but the uses to which it is put. Therefore we should be concentrating, not on prevention, but on two other things: regulation and complete transparency.

Regulation to make it absolutely clear what uses the information can not be put to - such as discrimination on the basis of genetic data. That’s the easy bit.

The bit that’s harder to get one’s head around is the transparency. As with everything from freedom of information legislation to open source software, we need to recognise that protection from abuse is more likely to come from increased scrutiny, rather than secrecy. So instead of trying to keep the information locked up, we should go to the other extreme and open source it. The scary bit of having a unique identifier for a person comes when we ask ‘what happens when things go wrong?’. What if my unique id gets separated from my biometric data, and the world thinks that I am someone else? The way to protect ourselves against that is massive redundancy, distributing and duplicating the records all over the place and making sure that there are multiple, independantly verifiable sources, and that everyone has equal access to all the data.

As someone at the meeting pointed out - I don’t really care if someone can see my bank records, just so long as I can see Tony Blair’s in return.

Apple and UI, The Rise And Fall...

2006-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

A quote from a recent Apple job advert for an engineer to work on Mail:

We prefer to have engineers who can handle both the UI and lower level implementation details.

Hmm… well… that explains why the user interface stuff coming out of Apple has been steadily declining over the last few years.

I know that there are engineers who can handle both, but they are few and far between, and frankly I doubt that Apple has hired that many of them recently.

I don't wear ties, but if I did...

2006-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

I guess this would be the tie for me…

So Long Ollie?

2006-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

As various sources have reported, Ian Holloway seems to be on his way out of QPR.

Ollie has been an absolute star since he returned to QPR. Things have been a bit wobbly, though, in the last few weeks, and I was beginning to get the sense that the fans were turning against him.

So if he is off to Leicester, then in a strange way it gets everyone out of spot. He can move on to bigger and better things, and the fans can genuinely say “So long mate, thanks for everything you’ve done for the club, and good luck!”. That’s got to be better than an ignominious exit in a month or two.

As for what he leaves behind, the weird thing is that the main problem - the defence - seems to have had some sort of bizarre transfer-deadline swap-shop makeover. If it works, and Shittu returns to the sort of form that he apparently showed at Leeds on Saturday, then things may not be too bad for us.

The only scary bit is exactly who Paladinni decides to bring in as a replacement. The talk is of Jim Smith as a director of football. That’s all very well, but what we need is a coach (or two), not a wheeler-dealer.

The Right To Offend

2006-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

The idea that we have a right not to be offended by others, and in particular that people with a religious belief hold some sort of privileged position and should be treated differently, is a dangerous nonsense which needs to be refuted.

I’ve heard lots of sensible comment about the current “cartoon-gate”, mostly from liberal folks like myself who believe in the importance of free speech.

I’ve been surprised and worried though, by the number of them who have qualified or modified what they have said - adding something along the lines of “of course, we must respect religious people’s beliefs”.

Respect your beliefs? No, I don’t respect your beliefs. As it happens, I find many of your beliefs deeply offensive.

I respect your right to hold those beliefs, and even to express them to me, but that in no way obliges me to modify my behaviour to fit in with the way you think I should live my life.

Dawkins, Jacobson, Eno

2006-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Howard Jacobson wrote a irrational and ranting load of old cobblers in the Independent, in response to Richard Dawkins’ programs on religion.

He seemed to have completely missed the point. Luckily, Brian Eno appears to have spotted the many flaws in his argument too!

QPR 2 - Leicester City 3

2006-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Poor? Hmm… that doesn’t do it justice.

Piss poor? Getting there, but still lacking a certain something.

A piss poor travesty of a sham of a mockery of a shambles of a… oh dear.

You would have thought that five goals meant that it was, at least, an entertaining game. You would have been wrong.

At our best, with everyone playing well, we are a decent team, albeit a brittle one. Tonight, only Simon Royce was playing well, and of the outfield players only Ainsworth was playing with any sort of spirit. Everyone looked sluggish. Our reliable stalwarts, the likes of Shittu, Furlong and Bignot were off form - Shittu was particularly poor. Our less reliable, but occasionally inspired players - the likes of Cook, Langley, Nygaard, were in wimpish mode, all misplaced effort (or no effort at all in Langley’s case). Even Lomas, who I thought looked promisingly forceful last game, was nowhere to be seen.

And as for Santos. What can I say that I haven’t already said? It beggars belief that Ollie keeps picking him each week. I just don’t understand it, and frankly every time he plays I lose a little bit more respect for Ollie. Unfortunately I also lose a bit of respect each time we put in a tactically inept performance, and each time that he makes a bizarre substitution or tactical switch. I am running out of respect.

An classic example of what I’m talking about - today we were trailing 1-2 in the second half, looking badly in need of a substitution, and nothing happened… Then, more by luck than judgement, we grabbed a goal out of nowhere. All of a sudden, we make two attacking substitutions and go all gung-ho, only to let in an inevitable third goal. A naive gamble at best, downright daft at worst.

I honestly wish I’d stayed at home.

Goodbye To Trackbacks

2006-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve given up on Trackbacks - they don’t really add much to the site, and the amount of trackback spam around means that they are a pain in the arse to administer.

What I want now is a Technorati module to take their place, which automatically shows me when someone links to one of my blog articles…

Come with us now, on a journey through time and space...

2006-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Series two of the totally fantastic and utterly bonkers The Mighty Boosh starts tomorrow on BBC 2.

If you’ve never come across it before, I’d highly recommend it (especially you Maf). My favourite episode is probably The Priest And The Beast - a fantastic Santana piss-take.

Export Safari Bookmarks as OPML

2006-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

This is a feature which is strangely lacking from Safari.

Luckily, here’s a script which will do the job.

Slashdot: Good News / Bad News?

2006-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

UK Judge: Who needs software patents?

EU Software Patent Argument to Reopen?

Outrageous iPod Service Charges

2006-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Recently, my iPod has started flaking out on me. I can no longer connect to it via Firewire (although weirdly, it does charge when connected), and it is also losing charge rapidly.

Strangely, the USB connection does work - suggesting that there’s something more subtle going on that a broken connector port (although of course it might just be partially broken).

Anyway, these things happen, and I’ve had it for 2 years so I wasn’t overly distraught. It’s out of warranty, but Apple have a servicing service, so I thought I’d give that a go.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they were proposing to charge me nearly £170 to service a two year old 2nd generation iPod. I can get a new one for that!

I realise that they don’t want to hurt their sales of new kit, but there is such a thing as supporting and rewarding your loyal customers!

My response…!

Opens Rights Group Thoughts

2006-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Talking to Kevin Marks about the Open Rights Group, I realised that one of the things that concerns me is that they might be too focussed on the media.

One of the stated objectives is to connect journalists with experts and activists, which is all well and good. I want people to understand our technical and philosophical objections to certain ideas.

However, I think that ORG should also see a key part of their role as explaining the legal technicalities and the implications of things like EU directives and proposed legislation to concerned technical people like me.

I also think that there is a danger of the people running the group coming across as a small clique, very much wrapped up in their own agenda, rehearsing the same arguments to other members of the inner circle - in effect preaching to the converted.

There are a lot of intelligent, educated people out in the real world who agree with their aims instinctively, without necessarily having a deep understanding of all the issues. We (placing myself immodestly in that category for a moment) need help with this stuff - we need someone to be our agent, sifting and selecting the important news for us - just as much as we need someone explaining it to the media.

Intelligent Design as Philosophy Fails

2006-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

From Ars:

Any scientist hoping that the Dover verdict would keep the teaching of evolution out of controversy and courts for a little while has got to be disappointed with recent developments.

Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil

2006-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Grant pointed this out to me…

Some nutters have removed the fans from their computer and filled it with oil to keep it cool.

Bonkers.

Smart Headphones

2006-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a pair of headphones that knew if they were being worn, and paused your music when you took them off?

Open Rights Group

2006-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

The Open Rights Group is now open for business, and accepting donations.

Go and sign up now! Well, go and have a look round anyway, and see if it’s your thing.

I think it’s pretty important for all of us that we have plenty of people keeping an eye on our rights (both digital and otherwise), especially in the current political climate.

I’m not 100% convinced about the way ORG are planning to go about it, but I pledged to fund em, and so I shall for at least a year, and I wish them good luck during that time.

DRM Inquiry

2006-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

It’s taken me a while to get round to reading it, but Kevin Marks posted a good essay last month, addressing the questions posed by the APIG DRM Public Enquiry

The Root Of All Evil

2006-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Channel 4 last night showed the first episode of The Root Of All Evil?, a new series by Richard Dawkins.

Hurrah for Richard, and for Channel 4, for having the courage to broadcast it and help to combat the pro-religion bias in today’s media. I’d thoroughly recommend watching it, whatever your beliefs. Who knows, if you’re a religious type, it might even make you think…

Dover becomes intelligent design's Waterloo

2006-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Ars Technica has coverage of the Intelligent Design verdict.

Phew! Thank Darwin for that is what I say… oh yeah, and “obey your noodly master!”.

stream your music collection to your PSP

2005-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

This script looks damn handy.

As luck would have it, my PSP turned up today, so I think I’m going to give it a try…

George Best: Nice piece in the guardian...

2005-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,10260,1653813,00.html

I like the quote about Stan Bowles:

“Bowles is a gambler (his mother once said that if he invested in a cemetery people would stop dying).”

Holographic Storage

2005-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

I want it now!

Drupal "Blog this" bookmarklet

2005-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

At work, sadly, I’m working on a PC so don’t have access to MarsEdit, which is one reason why I haven’t been posting much recently.

Finally, today, I got round to looking for a bookmarklet which allows me to easily post a Drupal blog entry from Firefox. I found this one, which seems to work quite nicely (I used it for this post).

QPR 0 - Preston 2

2005-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Sigh.

This was bad. Apparently we have an injury crisis. We certainly have some sort of crisis, although I fear that it may be more to do with the players’ spirit.

My theory is that none of the players understand why George Santos is played for every game when he is fit, and that they are understandably pissed off about it. He started on the bench this time, but ended up on the pitch by the end, up front. Why oh why?

It must be an absolute kick in the teeth for the likes of Stefan Moore to see Santos picked before him up front, and then to be brought on and played out of position on the wing.

I really don’t mind watching us lose (although of course I’d rather watch us win), but I do mind when we look tactically inept, as if Holloway is just trying random throws of the dice to see what will happen.

The unrest in the terraces is rising, and I’ve a nasty feeling that Holloway’s job will be under pressure soon.

Don't Go To The Royal Albert Hall

2005-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Having had the (somewhat dubious) pleasure of seeing Blondie at the Royal Albert Hall, I have to add it to my list of venues that shall not be visited again (currently topped by Wembley Arena).

The sound might have been great down on the floor in front of the stage, but it was awful up in the gods - no top end at all, leaving everything sounding like it was being played underwater. The drums sounded particularly bad.

Oh dear. It really isn’t a rock venue - too big, no atmosphere, and outrageously priced food and drink, even by london venue standards.

Blondie themselves were patchy - although the aforementioned sound problems made it hard to give a fair assessment. Debbie Harry still has a fantastic voice, but there was far too much nostalgia wafting around, and most of the crowd looked like this was the first gig they’d been to since about 1985!

Supporting Blondie was Hugh Cornwall, he of the Stranglers fame. Again, I still like his voice, but overall he sounded like a bad pub covers-band version of himself!

Tom in new-age-hippy shock!

2005-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

It looks like Tom Smith is going all new-age on me. Scary ;)

Clouds and Linings

2005-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Every cloud has a silver lining apparently.

Certainly, the demise of (or failure to materialise in the first place) of my Dublin job was a blow at the time, but I can take a couple of positives out of it.

Most immediately, it meant I ended up at SCEE, where I am having a great time.

Secondly, it allows me to approach my authoring tools project in a completely different way.

I haven’t given up - far from it - but it’s a spare time only project now (given the amount of spare time I usually have, that means it could easily take ten years). Without time pressures, or anyone else’s agenda, I can do it the way I really want to. Primarily, this means doing it in Dylan.

In fact, I’ve come to the decision that all code that I write in my spare time will now be in Dylan (or Dylan related). That’s quite a bold statement at this stage, and I may live to regret it! Dylan can do anything that any other language can do, but the tools are limited, and a lot of the spare-time coding I do tends to be writing hacks and plugins for other systems, such as Drupal.

Switching to Dylan for everything means I’m going to have to move back ten steps for every one step forward. Instead of writing a new plugin for Drupal, I will first have to write a new Drupal in Dylan :)

At this point you’re probably thinking that I’ve totally lost my marbles. That may be true, but from my point of view there are lots of compelling reasons to go down that route:

I get to write in my favourite language
Everything I do (hopefully) moves the Dylan project forward a little bit
Dylan needs tools… funnily enough, that’s what I want to create anyway
Every programmer wants to re-invent the wheel. Dylan already has a lot of wheels, but quite a few of them aren’t very round yet! There are many many gaps to be filled - web applications and content management being a big one that springs to mind straight away. It’s going to take me a long time - but what’s the hurry?
I love learning about new stuff, and I’m sure I won’t stop any time soon, but it is getting damn confusing trying to figure out what to code in… Obj-C? Ruby? Python? C#? D? etc etc etc. Now I don’t have to worry anymore!

QPR 3 - Norwich 0

2005-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Blimey. When I looked at the Norwich team sheet, I thought that we were going to be ripped to shreds. As it turned out, the most surprising thing was how absolutely, utterly spineless Norwich turned out to be.

Maybe they had a massive row on the coach (or with the coach?), or all got out of their respective beds on the wrong side that morning, but with the honourable exception of Dean Ashton, nobody in yellow and green looked remotely interested in winning this game. Ashton was combative, and within twenty minutes or so sported a Terry Butcher style bandage to prove it, but on his own he couldn’t do enough.

QPR played well, but not, to be honest, that well. We didn’t look as fluid as we had against Plymouth, but somehow by half time we found ourselves three goals to the good. Nygaard grabbed the opener with a header, then Furlong nicked the second from a Lee Cook free kick.

At that point, Bircham went off with a knock, on came George Santos, and my heart sank (along with a substantial number of Rangers fans who booed in response to his arrival). Here we go, I thought, time to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - but no! Play continued for a minute or two, a cross came in, the ball popped out of the box to be met by an on-rushing Santos. Normally George’s idea of a gentle weighted pass ends up in row Z, so I didn’t have much hope - but miracle of miracles he hit it well, kept it low, and it thundered through a group of players and defected into the goal.

Forty two minutes gone… 3-0 up, am I dreaming?

The second half was bound to be tough. Norwich were bound to come out with all guns blazing. Nope. They made a couple of changes, but put in the same tepid performance. We didn’t really look like conceding, or scoring again, and the game played itself out.

All in all, a good performance. I have a few quibbles, but it would be churlish to complain. My only concern? That Santos’ goal might somehow get him back in the team!

QPR 1 - Plymouth 1

2005-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Bit late this report…

All the details can be found here.

This was one of those funny games where we played some really nice football, created countless chances, and scored only once. Meanwhile Plymouth had one shot, scored one goal. Arse :)

From a Rangers point of view there were some promising signs. The team looked more balanced at the back, with Evatt and Shittu paired in the middle, and no sign of Mr Santos. Gallen played on the right, which was a little weird with both Ainsworth and Langley warming the bench, but overall it seemed to work. It looked like we’d been working on some specific things in training, with Royce passing the ball short quite a bit. We were keeping the ball on the ground well, playing it around patiently in midfield, and then putting some telling diagonal crosses in for the towering Nygaard to knock down. Unfortunately we just couldn’t convert enough opportunities into goals.

Spectacular Crapness

2005-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Truly, Lotus Notes is the worst email program I have ever had the misfortune to use in my entire life.

I can’t believe it’s so big, and yet so bad.

The only explanation that I can see is that it exists purely to make life easier for MIS departments, and the fact that it’s a heap of festering turds to use is entirely irrelevant!

New Job

2005-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Last week I started work at Sony London, as a senior programmer, working on… well I’m not sure if I am allowed to say, so I’d better not risk it.

So far I’m enjoying every minute of it, although getting into the office at 9am every morning is a bit of a shock to my system!

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

2005-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Caroline pointed out this little tidbit from the New Scientist.

THE board for Beebe School District in Arkansas voted on 12 July to remove from textbooks stickers promoting an “intelligent designer” over evolution. Feedback wonders if they were influenced by an open letter to the State Board of Education in neighbouring Kansas circulated by Bobby Henderson, a “concerned citizen”.

“Let us remember that there are multiple theories of intelligent design,” is its crux. “I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Henderson affirms. </cite>

Actually Caroline was pointing me at the story about Microsoft and Apple on the same page, but it was the Flying Spaghetti Monster that caught my eye.

So Long And Thanks For All The Smoothies

2005-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just finished a spell of contracting back at Sports Interactive, and I’d just like to say cheers to everyone there for making me very welcome once again.

It was scary how easily I fitted back in (and even scarier that I’m sure there were things in the fridge that have been there since I left last year).

The place is still completely bonkers in many ways, and I could feel myself getting dragged back into the arguments about coding that caused me to resign in the first place, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it - hard not to with such a nice bunch of people.

Football Manager 2006 is looking good too…

Next week I start The New Job(TM). Call me superstitious, but after the Dublin experience I think I’ll wait until I’m actually there before saying anything more…

Isn't It Reassuring...

2005-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

… to know that the internet contains everything you could ever need in the way of useless trivia.

I was recently browsing the International Hero website (as you do), and I discovered that Hong Kong Phooey’s real name was actually Penry, when all this time I thought it was Henry.

Oh what a fool I’ve been…

QPR 1 - Crystal Palace 3

2005-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Not much fun to be had once again at Loftus Road on Monday night.

Ainsworth looked up for it - including the outrageous hand ball in the second half which he was very lucky to get away with!

I thought Dyer looked quite good, but unfortunately there were times when Palace just ripped the defence to shreds. Big Dan had a bad game, Santos was rubbish as usual, and even Bignot had trouble, particularly after set pieces that we had in their half where we lost possession and they hoofed the ball up for Morrisson to chase after.

Birch was bustling, but still strangely ineffectual compared to a couple of seasons ago, and Doherty was disappointingly quiet. Cook had a few good runs, and interchanged well with Dyer at times, but also had plenty of times where he didn’t release the ball quickly enough, and we lost possession as a result.

Up front, Furlong was excellent but frustrated by lack of service, whilst Moore was anonymous. Langley and Baidoo came on late in the day, but neither of them imposed themselves in any way.

On balance, I thought Palace thoroughly deserved the win.

Not much fun for me having to travel back to West Dulwich (hint: that’s West Dulwich, within walking distance of Crystal Palace).

Aliases? What they?

2005-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

This is a bit of a scary post if you’re an Apple developer… although it explains a few things that have been coming out of Cupertino recently.

QPR 1 - Luton Town 0

2005-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Nice to get back to winning ways again, after a spate of performances running the full gamut from bad to awful!

I was at the Sheffield Wednesday game, but found it so uninspiring that I didn’t get round to writing it up. Three days later I sat and watched in a pub as we received a bit of a drubbing at the hands of a pretty decent looking Wolves side. The curse of Sky in full effect once more.

Tonight’s match was less than convincing, with a poor first half, and a slightly better second, partially redeemed by a nice free kick from Lee Cook. We won though…

A few common threads ran through these games.

Tactical ineptitude was one of them, less in evidence tonight perhaps, but woefully apparent in the previous two games. I love Ollie as a character, but I do wonder sometimes about his choices. Bignot at right midfield… hmm, ok, I can just about buy that, although it’s strange with Ainsworth warming the bench. Evatt at right back… erm… why not Bignot, oh yeah, cos he’s in midfield? Moore on the left wing, umm… ok, what exactly is Brown doing in the subs? That was the Sheffield game, but we had an equally bizarre line up against Wolves at times. Today things looked a bit more balanced. Cook doesn’t look totally fit, but at least he’s there, running at people and causing a little bit of mayhem. Ainsworth started on the right, replaced in the second half by Langley (hurrah!) - so at least we had wingers playing on the wings… a plan so cunning that I’m sure Baldrick would approve.

Defensive frailty is another common thread. Bignot and Shittu both look a little bit out of sorts. Milanese looks solid, but prone to the occasional error. Santos… well people who have read my blog will know my opinion of Santos. It speaks volumes to me that his team mates tend to avoid passing the ball to him whenever possible. In recent games his tackling has been pretty solid, but today it was flimsy, and he kept getting beaten in the air, turned around, and generally outsmarted. It does make me wonder why we bought two more midfielders, and didn’t strengthen the defence.

Lack of commitment would be my final common theme. Certain people don’t look like they really care. This was a big problem last season, with the likes of Rowlands and Edgehill, to name but two, regularly turning out for a leisurely stroll around the pitch. Today, the main offender seemed to be Moore. I hear good things about him, and I’m sure he’s full of potential, but so often he just doesn’t really look like he cares. He should just look at Furlong and try to copy him. Chase hopeless causes occasionally Stefan! Hassle people. Move around a bit. Look like you mean it!

Ah well… enough moaning for tonight. I’ll end on a few positives.

Doherty. He’s great. He got sent off tonight (a straight red, I’m not quite sure what for). I don’t even care. Well, I care, but mostly because he’ll be out for three games. The fact is, he’s as tenacious as Birch, and he’s got a better touch, makes great decisions most of the time, and definitely adds something.

Lomas. I only saw him for a few minutes, but I always liked him at West Ham, and straight away tonight he was bossing, shouting, and generally acting like a leader. I imagine he will provide cover for Birch and Doherty during their inevitable spells of suspension. Right now that sounds fine by me.

Langley. Despite getting a few boos, his reception was generally warm. Apparently he regrets going away, and has grown up a bit in the meantime. I really hope that’s true. We need a bit of creativity, especially if it comes with some genuine commitment to the cause. I have my fingers crossed.

PS. I lied about stopping the moaning. The referee tonight… oh dear… did I not like that…

New iTunes look

2005-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Apple have updated iTunes so that it looks more like Mail.

Is it me, or do they both look pig ugly? Brushed metal is bad enough, but this thing is just a horrible mish-mash of styles.

I Am Still Here, Honest...

2005-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Things have been a bit quiet at Chaos towers recently.

This is mostly due to the fact that I’ve been back at Sports Interactive doing some contracting - basically helping them to hammer out a few bugs for the next version of Football Manager.

I’ll be there for a few more weeks, and then off on another exciting adventure… more details to follow shortly.

Complete Zappa catalog available on the iTMS

2005-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Oh dear. According to Ars Technica, the complete Zappa catalog is now available on the iTunes music store.

My bank balance is doomed…

QPR 2 - Ipswich 1 + QPR 2 - Sheffield Utd 1

2005-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Two home games, and two good wins! Ah, it’s good to be back. Of course being in second place at this stage is fairly meaningless, but it’s a lot nicer to be able to say that than having to say “well, being at the bottom of the table doesn’t mean anything at this stage”.

On the whole I like the look of the side now. Doherty in particular is a great addition, so it was a bit worrying seeing him limping off on Saturday.

I also like the fact that we’ve had 4 different goal scorers over the two games (and a disallowed goal from Furs). Having Rowlands, Gallen, Birch and Moore get goals early in the season has to be good for their confidence, and it would be great not to have to rely too much on Furlong, as realistically we’ll be very lucky if he manages to repeat last season’s tally.

I still worry about Santos’ distribution (eyes to the ground, and kick the ball as hard as you can), and his moments of madness, but he put in some pretty solid tackles on Saturday and looked not too bad for a change. On the other hand, he was responsible for the Ipswich goal on Tuesday! I’m looking forward to Evatt being fit…

Possibly the dodgiest performer on Saturday was Rose, who looked like his mind was elsewhere most of the time. He doesn’t really convince as a left-back, and again, I am looking forward to seeing Milanese, who presumably is lacking a bit of fitness at the moment. For some reason he’s not in the squad list yet, so I hope there’s not some dodgy business going on there.

Of the new boys, Nygaard really didn’t impress me against Ipswich, and I’m still making my mind up about Moore. He looks a little bit lazier than Furlong when it comes to chasing hopeless causes, and doesn’t have the pace that I was expecting, but perhaps he’s not quite fit yet, and he took his goal quite nicely thank you. It always annoys me when players give up on things too easily, which a few were doing on Saturday. One of the many great attributes of Furlong is that he’s as likely to be closing down the keeper in the 89th minute as he is in the 5th, and when he does so, he always looks like he means it. Moore only came on in half way through the game, but he still looked half-hearted at best in those sorts of situations. Maybe it’s just his style, but realistically we probably need chasers and hard workers, not prima donnas (unless he turns out to be really really good and scores 30 goals, in which case he can hang around the opposition half smoking a fag for all I care…).

There were still a few niggles left over from last season, like Birch still missing a little something, and Rowlands blowing hot & cold - one minute really up for it, the next minute not bothering to run into position or ask for the ball. But there were also some positives, like Gallen looking a bit sharper than he did last season, and Ainsworth being fit again. Even Bean looked a bit better for the minute or two that he was on the pitch…

Overall, my expectations for the season are still modest, but I must admit that I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

Paladini Conspiracy Theories

2005-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Bizarrely, QPR director Gianna Paladini was allegedly held up at gun point on Saturday, apparently in an attempt by another board member to force him to resign from the board of the club. It sounds like a terrible ordeal, and I hope he’s ok.

This isn’t the first dodgy incident involving our recent board members. Predictably, given the nature of football fans in general, and QPR fans in particular, this has spawned a certain amount of irreverent speculation…

Back In The Job Market?

2005-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

As some of you may know, I was supposed to be starting a great new job at Learn3k, in Dublin.

Right now, Learn3k seems to exist on paper, but that’s about it, and my job certainly hasn’t got as far as a draft of a contract, let alone anything that involves me getting paid!

It wouldn’t be productive or appropriate to speculate about the reasons for all of this, but the long and the short of it is that I’m tired of waiting, so I seem to be in the job market once again!

In an ideal world, I am looking for a short term Mac or Games programming contract, which will keep me nicely occupied until the Dublin job comes through. Realistically though, beggars can’t be choosers, so if a good, permanent opportunity comes up, then I’m interested.

If you know of such an opportunity, please let me know! There are only so many months that one can put up with waiting for a contract so that one can buy a bed or a sofa for the new flat…

Site Update

2005-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Following my site being hacked, I’ve finally been spurred into updating to the latest version of Drupal. Please let me know if you spot any problems.

I suspect that the reason that I was hacked was that I was still running a version of 4.5 which had a security hole in it. This in turn was because I had been putting off the upgrade as it wasn’t reversible and looked like it might require performing some SQL updates. I think that the difficulty of installing and upgrading Drupal are one of its major weaknesses. It often involves backing up, manually downloading items, running scripts, issuing SQL commands, moving files around, all of which can be quite daunting. I’m very capable of doing such things, but the more steps there are, the more it looks like something might go wrong - so you start thinking that you will have to have enough time available to recover from any catastrophic cock-ups, and hence you put it off for another day…

It should be possible to automate most if not all of this process. Installation really ought to be a case of clicking one icon or running one shell script. Creation of databases could and should be automatic, or performed in a wizard on the actual site that it being installed.

New versions of Drupal ought to be detected automatically, and there ought to be an option on the admin page of a site to allow you to perform an update. This update should be performed safely - making a complete backup of all data first - without the administrator having to perform a backup themselves.

Installing updates and custom modules ought to be possible from within Drupal itself, in the same way that Eclipse - for example - has a built in update mechanism. The admin page ought to display a list of all of the items that are available on drupal.org, and there should be support for downloading and installing them from within Drupal. When a new module is enabled, it ought to perform any SQL creation/updating that it needs to do, without the user having to do anything themselves.

All of this wouldn’t be rocket science - the technology mostly exists already, it’s just a question of people taking the time to package things up nicely.

Hacked

2005-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Whilst I was in Poland, it seems that some morons hacked my server, leaving the web site showing the banner “spykids ownz your server”.

It looks like they got in via a Drupal exploit, from a dial up account in Brasil.

God only knows what else they did - the machine looks intact but I’ll have to regard it as compromised as I’m never likely to be able to prove otherwise.

Luckily for me there isn’t anything of value on it, but it’s a massive pain in the arse. I’d love to hear from anyone else who has had this experience, or has any advice on what to do now!

In the meantime I will soldier on with this server, as I don’t really have any alternative. Ultimately I guess a complete re-install is called for.

QPR 0 - Charlton 3

2005-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

Hmm…

Not a lot of good things to read into this score line, but then again I don’t think we should worry too much. We looked a bit shambolic in defence for all of the goals, but I guess they haven’t quite got the first team sussed yet, and there weren’t an awful lot of wise old heads at the back tonight.

My main concern is how toothless we looked up front. Mind you, starting with Santos playing up there doesn’t help, and switching to 4-5-1 after half time didn’t help either!

It was my first chance to see quite a few of the new boys. Mixed impressions:

Shimmin: looked confident and calm (maybe a bit too cocky), took the ball down nicely on his chest in situations where others might have hoofed it. Not too hot in the air though, which is a bit of a worry for a centre-back.

Hislop: not sure - quite nippy but looked a bit inexperienced, and knackered by the end.

Brown: not much in the way of attacking play - a bit anonymous a lot of the time.

Nygaard: I think he’s going to come in for a bit of stick, and he didn’t really do much to impress, although he didn’t get given much of a chance by Ollie. Managed to get beaten in the air quite a few times which takes some doing when you’re a 6’5” striker!

Doherty: I think he may be the new Birch - which is good, since Birch looks like he’s still struggling in some way, maybe his mystery virus is back? My only worry with Doherty is that I think he’ll be getting a few red cards this season, which could cost us.

Ukah: like Shimmin, looked quite composed, and a decent player, but Bignot was close to Furlong for my player of the year vote last season, and but for my money Ukah isn’t yet as good.

It was disappointing not to see Sturridge, Evatt or Moore - presumably they are injured?

Also annoying that Ollie is still messing around playing people in weird positions. Put your best players in their best positions mate, then make do with whoever’s left in the problem places!

Best moment in the game: Dan Shittu’s pile driver, hit from way out, which rocketed off the crossbar. It deserved to go in, and if it had it would have been the best goal he scored in his whole career. From then on, every touch he got was accompanied by cries of “Shoot! Shoot!”.

Yahoo Purchases Konfabulator

2005-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

According to Slashdot, Yahoo have bought Konfabulator, and are going to give it away for free.

Sounds like good news - Konfabulator is great. As things stand at the moment, I much prefer the combination of Konfabulator and Quicksilver to the Tiger alternative of Dashboard and Spotlight.

Spam haters given right of reply

2005-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago I posted a rant about spam and how I’d quite enjoy the irony if a bunch of “good hackers” decided to take down the sites of some of the spammers.

According to the BBC, it looks like it’s already happening.

I’m not sure what I feel about this sort of vigilante action.

On the one hand, it seems like it might be setting a dangerous precedent. On the other hand, people who send spam are moronic fuckers who are ruining mot people’s enjoyment of the internet for their own personal gain, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for them.

Funk Me I'm Knackered

2005-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

We went to see the legendary George Clinton on Saturday, but it’s taken me this long to recover and post about it.

What a gig! After the first song, there were so many people on stage I thought it was the encore. After about the third song, they’d been going over an hour, and I suddenly realised that the drummer had changed. Hypnotic stuff. To quote the band, “Two thousand zero zero party over, oops out of time. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1979”.

My only criticism is that they kind of lost their way after about the third hour! Quite a few of the band seemed to have left by then, and it degenerated into the worst kind of 12-bar, rock & roll medley jam thing.

Still, I was so glad that I went, and I’ve still got one of the tracks going round and round…

Digital Freedom in the UK

2005-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Kevin Marks pointed out Danny O’Brien’s pledge over at PledgeBank, to create a British equivalent of the EFF.

This sounds like a sensible idea to me, particularly with the current political climate. Sign up please!

In the name of God

2005-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

An essay from Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian.

A couple of excerpts:

Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public life.

and

It is time now to get serious about religion - all religion - and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals. But never was it more important to separate the state from all faiths and relegate all religion to the private - but well-regulated - sphere.

Joseph Arthur

2005-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

I went to another great gig last night, Joseph Arthur at 93 Feet East.

If you don’t know Joe’s work, and you like singer songwriters, I’d seriously recommend checking him out.

I first came across him when I was working at Real World - Joe was then signed to Real World records and seemed to be permanently hanging out around the studio, working on new material. I even had dinner with him once in the studio, but of course was far too shy to introduce myself and tell him how much I liked his music.

Anyway, he did a great solo set - mostly guitar and vocals, making excellent use of live sampling and a harmoniser of some sort to create a really big (and at times eery) sound. He also, in a strangely Rolf Harris moment, painted a picture on stage.

James Doohan: R.I.P

2005-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

I wouldn’t consider myself a Trekky, but as a card carrying member of the geek’s union, and a sci-fi fan to boot, I ought to mention the sad demise of James Doohan, otherwise known as Scotty.

Cron & Searching

2005-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just realised that the cron task hasn’t been running on my Drupal server, which means the site hasn’t been getting indexed, and the search facility wasn’t working properly.

It turns out that the notify module I installed had broken the cron.php script in some way. I’ve turned notify off for now, so cron.php is running properly and you can actually search the site.

QPR fixtures

2005-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

For any QPR fans out there who use a mac, I’ve updated my iCal QPR diary with the fixtures for next season.

You can subscribe to the calendar at: webcal://ical.mac.com/samdeane/qpr.ics

Hopefully the dates, start times and obviously the opposition should be correct. Cup games aren’t in there yet.

Let me know if you spot any errors…

Ashton Court

2005-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Had a great weekend in Bristol with Caroline, which is where we both went to college (and hence where we met, many moons ago!).

As well as wandering around our old haunts, we went to the very chilled out Ashton Court Festival - which is highly recommended, especially as it’s only £6!

My personal highlights included Figment, Ivory Springer, Steve Harley, and a great band whose name I’ve forgotten, but they reminded me a bit of the Shoogleniftys - I think they might have been called Sheelanagig.

Thatcher The Ice Cream Maker

2005-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

This one is for Jean-Marie, who didn’t believe me…

The relevant paragraph in the Telegraph article is:

One of the first jobs undertaken by a young Margaret Thatcher was to discover ways to "inflate" ice cream with air and boost its value - to some, a neat analogy for her later activities.

See also the Wikipedia entries on ice cream, and Thatcher.

iChat plugins please

2005-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

The latest version of iChat has added support for Jabber, and it already supports rendezvous (now called bonjour, which is the worst name I’ve heard for a very long time) and AIM.

iChat also supports non-standard, proprietary audio and video chat with other iChat users.

I like iChat, its got a clean and simple interface, and generally seems to work very well. But I live in the real world, which means that not all of my friends own a mac, and not all of the Windoze users use AIM.

There are already plenty of open source multi-protocol clients out there (Fire is the best Mac one I’ve found so far), but I don’t want to give up the iChat interface, or the audio and video conferencing (I’ve got an iSight and I’m damn well going to use it).

It seems to me that if the developers of iChat have half a brain-cell between them, then they will have implemented some sort of plug in mechanism for supporting different chat protocols, just for their own sanity.

I’d really like to see this mechanism being made public, so that third parties can implement plugins to support some of the other popular protocols. And if it doesn’t exist yet, then it really ought to… so get cracking please Apple.

Fancy A Pint And A Ruby?

2005-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Tom Smith has been looking at Ruby, and having some hassle.

I spent one very superficial session of a few hours looking at it, and I mean to go back. I must admit though that Tom’s post chimed with my impressions, particularly the stuff about syntax:

As syntaxes go, it's not C... but I don't like having to add "end", I really don't like the pipe chars in "friends.each do |friend|", nor the "@" character in object variables, as much as adding ";" in other languages, they all become noise and just another niggly thing to forget or make reading and writing the code more effort. Oh and I've never liked "==" rather than "=". I think that I really want my own pidgeon Ruby that borrows from Python and HyperTalk.

Why is it that there’s always something nasty in a language that otherwise looks quite clean? I don’t agree with all of Tom’s specific gripes, but I can’t stand naming conventions that involve putting graphical characters at the beginning or end of words to distinguish their type. I don’t find it necessary, and to me it just adds visual noise and makes everything look messy. Even Dylan (which as most people know is as near as I’ve got to my perfect language) has a hideous and totally arbitrary naming convention which goes a long way towards spoiling a beautiful language.

My superficial impression of Ruby was: oh bloody hell, it’s a more object oriented Perl. That’s probably grossly unfair, but there was something about the tutorial that I was reading that reminded me of that kind of syntactic “look, aren’t we clever, we can do all this in just five characters” which really puts me off. Yes it may be powerful, but I don’t find terseness particularly attractive in computer languages. It’s surely not that much effort to type a few more characters is it?

My take with Perl was always: “it’s fun at the time, but I always end up feeling slightly dirty in the morning”. I am going to give Ruby another chance, but I’m a bit worried that it might be similar.

By the way Tom, don’t worry about the syntax barrier. Not being able to remember which language you’re in is the sign of a true programmer… so stop denying it and get on with your coding!

Old Stuff

2005-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Looking at my logs, I noticed that I was getting quite a lot of people looking for old links, particularly for Last Exit to Hypercard.

As a result, I’ve put up most of my old site at http://old.elegantchaos.com.

Drupal Spam

2005-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Jonathan has been having trouble with spam in Drupal, and so have I.

I have a nasty feeling that some of the spambots use exploits in Drupal code to circumvent the verification process completely, which might explain how they got round Jonathan’s sneaky Captcha system.

I’ve just been spammed about 50 times by some bloody online poker site. I have comment moderation turned on so they didn’t get posted to the site, but I now have to plod through deleting the things one at a time.

The people that run these spamming operations are total scum, on a par with the touts I saw outside Hyde Park trying to flog Live8 tickets.

Far be it from me to encourage any naughtiness, but wouldn’t it be nice to see some sort of coalition of good hackers dedicated to searching out the spammers and taking down their sites. Give em a dose of their own medicine…

Update: due to a flurry of spam, I’ve now turned off anonymous comments again. If you wish to leave a comment, please either register for an account, or use trackback.

Kinky shopper KOed by vibrating knickers

2005-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not quite sure how I managed to miss this gem the first time round.

Thanks, as always, to The Register.

The Obligatory Live8 Post

2005-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

We managed to get hold of some tickets for the big screens in Hyde Park (thanks Jane and Tim), so went along.

I can’t say that much of the music interested me, but there were a few notable exceptions. Annie Lennox did a good arrangement of Sweet Dreams, Robbie did a great turn, and the Floyd were excellent (I saw them at Wembley in 1987, sans Waters, but I never thought I’d get the chance to see all four of them on the same stage at the same time).

I saw a great banner: “Pink Floyd Reunited - Pigs Have Flown!”.

Overall I thought that the atmosphere was a bit muted - it certainly didn’t have the buzz that the TV coverage was implying, but then they probably had a plentiful supply of drink and drugs inside the celebrity enclosure, whilst we were restricted to sneaking in vodka disguised as mineral water!

I can’t say that it felt like many people were there to make any kind of political statement - which is not surprising I guess, given the lottery-like nature of the ticket distribution, and the general level of political consciousness in this country.

It seems to me that it has served its purpose as a way of raising awareness, but it feels more like a media frenzy to me than a genuine groundswell of popular opinion.

Still, there’s no way that the G8 leaders can claim that they haven’t heard. The question is - what happens if they ignore the message?

It would be nice to think that if the summit doesn’t deliver, all those people who are now claiming to be right behind the cause will remember June 2nd 2005 in two or three years time when their national elections come round, and will act accordingly.

Call me a cynic, but I ain’t holding my breath…

Another Little Drupal Module

2005-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

The login block in Drupal has been annoying me, as it’s a bit big and clunky for a site like this one, where the expectation is that most users won’t have an account and will not want to login.

I figured that it ought to be possible to make some smart menu login and register items in the navigation block which changed depending on whether or not someone was already logged in.

For various technical reasons this seems to be tricky (probably I just haven’t figured out how to do it), so I came up with an alternative.

The Smaller Login module implements a much smaller login block, which just contains a single line containing login and register links. If a user is already logged in, the whole block goes away (you can enable the log out block in the navigation menu to allow people to log out once they have logged in).

You can see the module in action on this site (if you’re not logged in, it should be visible at the top of the right-hand sidebar).

Now Is As Good A Time As Any To Buy A New Mac

2005-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Quite a lot of my Mac programming friends having been jabbering on about the Osbourne effect, and saying things like: “well I was going to buy some new hardware, but now I’m going to wait”.

I don’t really get it to be honest.

Sure, if the Osbourne effect kicks in then it will hurt Apple, but there’s not much reason for it to kick in, other than a bunch of hand-wringing Mac developers creating a self-fullfilling prophesy.

When you look at what Apple have actually said, it’s just that at some point next year they will be releasing some products using Intel processors. They haven’t said when, and they haven’t said what.

They have said that they definitely won’t instantly be replacing their whole product line. By definition then they will continue to support PowerPC for a good while, and since the trend is towards processor independence, not away from it, it is unlikely that they are going to do something in the future which stops OS X from working on PowerPC.

So by buying a PowerPC machine now, you aren’t going to be left out in the cold in a year. Sure your machine will be a year older than next year’s model, and perhaps a little slower, but that would be equally true if next year’s model was PowerPC based. That’s always true, and one always has the dilemma of whether to wait a while or not, but I see nothing in this situation to make matters worse.

The Osbourne effect is based on the idea that the new product is going to be so vastly superior that there is absolutely no point buying the old one. Apple haven’t said that. One imagines that the machine will be a bit faster, but the real reason (at least the reason that Apple have stated publicly) for switching to Intel is that their long term roadmap is better, not that the current crop of chips totally blow away PowerPC chips.

For all we know, Apple’s first Intel based hardware might be a tablet, or a handheld, or something else that they don’t even make right now!

So what’s all the fuss about? If you need a new mac now, because your current one is too old/slow/noisy, then go out and buy one. If you don’t need one, then wait until you do.

As our Californian cousins might say: “like, duh…”.

Not California

2005-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Kevin Marks keeps posting about interesting meetings that I want to attend, or wish I had attended*.

I am jealous. Every now and then, it’s just a little bit irritating to find onesself nowhere near California!

Hey Kevin, fancy a technorati European tour? We could probably host you in Dublin at Learn3k… once they finish building our office anyway :)

(*your definition of interesting may vary)

Mental Images

2005-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

No really, these are completely mental images

Tom Wants To Replace Word

2005-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

Tom Smith has been having painful experiences with Word. No surprises there then.

I actually quite like Word (oops, did I really admit that in public?), but these days I find myself more and more tempted to use html + css for writing documents - either as a blog entry, or on an internal project Wiki if it’s not a public document, or even if worst comes to worst as a standalone html page.

Admittedly writing web content can be painful, and most tools are either shit or totally over-engineered for writing simple documents, but generally it isn’t too bad if you’ve got some sort of simple mark up add-on installed (e.g. Markdown).

Sorting out the basics - headings, images, lists, text styles - is easy, and I often find that the constraints imposed on me have a positive effect, leading to a simple layout, or a well structured group of pages.

What I’d love to see is for someone to do a Wiki tool which had a good client-side authoring component that ran as a standalone application.

What it should do is:

let you author offline, using basic word processor-like wysiwyg editing
upload your changes to the wiki later, resolving conflicts
let you package up a group of pages as a standalone document and distribute them as a pdf so that others can read them offline
be as fun as OmniGraffle to use :)

Snoretastic Summit Sessions

2005-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

I attended the (rather grandly titled) ELSPA International Games Summit yesterday, with Stephen Heppell, who was there talking about links between the learning and games communities in the UK.

There were a few interesting sessions, but also some mind bogglingly turgid and boring ones (the speakers shall remain anonymous).

At times I was reminded of the worst of my undergraduate lectures, and felt that we would have been better off if everyone had just gone to the pub for a chat!

The idea of these days is presumably to share information, but often the presentations were too long, going into too much detail, when what was really needed was a brief overview and a discussion.

There’s got to be a better way!

I’d love to see events like these organised differently, so that we got short (15 min) presentations to provide key facts, talking points and perhaps a bit of provocation from an expert.

Each presentation could then be followed by a moderated discussion (the panel events yesterday were the best ones) in which the audience ask questions or make suggestions, depending on the topic under discussion.

What would be really nice would be if these Q&As were actually recorded and minuted, then written up by someone during the day, and presented later as a summary and/or the start of a further discussion.

That way it really would start feeling like the best kind of brainstorming sessions in the pub, but with the added advantage that someone was actually writing down all those great ideas, and you’d also get the minutes and summaries to take away at the end of it, instead of your own scrappy notes!

Games And Learning

2005-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

For a long time now, educationalists have been keen to harness the attraction that computer games hold for many of us. “People spend hours and hours of their own time playing games!”, say teachers, “If only they showed that sort of interest in my lessons!”.

Off the shelf games are already being used, in an ad hoc fashion, in many classrooms, to support existing teaching, and provide background, motivation, and opportunities for debate. Using an existing game as a tool is a great solution, no different from using any other physical object or fun activity as part of learning.

However, there have also been many attempts to create “educational” games. Most of these have been misguided in my opinion, and when I hear people from the educational world getting excited about games, I start worrying that it’s the precursor to another attempt to make a great educational game. My response to this would be: “No! Don’t do it!”.

The idea that one can harness the power of games as some sort of magic bullet to encourage learning is just as valid (and invalid) as the idea of using anything else that people love; music, say, or sport, or chocolate!

One might well be able to base a lesson plan around eating chocolate - it would have a certain novelty value and it would probably be pretty popular with the students, but only if it was nice chocolate! The same is true with games - the key, always, is that you must start with a compelling experience - something that people want to do.

Making a good game is a process with just as many nebulous, uncertain variables as writing a novel or writing a symphony. To make a great game you need a good idea, some great hooks, a slice of luck, and a team of expert programmers, designers, musicians and artists who are focussed on making something cool.

I don’t believe that many developers of successful games think in terms of their “audience”. Most will be in their twenties and thirties, but they are still likely to share the same taste in games as their users (who are probably a lot younger). The developers are just trying to create the game that they want to play.

By adding an extra educational objective to a game, the link between developer and consumer is often lost. Instead of asking themselves, “what would be cool here”, a developer is suddenly forced to ask “how do I make latin verbs fun?”, or some other equally inappropriate question.

The process of development changes from something driven by gut instinct, emotional responses and the subconscious, into something conscious and intellectual. The motivation is almost inevitably weakened as a result, and the game suffers.

I’m not saying that a good educational game is impossible, simply that the barriers to making an engaging game are already high. To make a good game is hard enough already, and adding a set of educational objectives make things worse not better.

Immersive, engaging, fun educational software is certainly being written, and sometimes it provides an experience hard to distinguish from a game. Crucially though, the stuff that works best is generally designed first and foremost to be good educational software, and not a leading edge game.

I absolutely agree that the games and learning industries should be talking to each other, but hiring game developers and asking them to make something educational is probably misguided.

Instead, we should be encouraging developers to just keep making great games, but to make them more adaptable, scriptable, and extensible. They should be encouraged to build their games as frameworks and shells that can be taken by educators and re-used in different contexts.

Good developers do this anyway, as it has a number of advantages, usually improving the robustness of the code, increases the speed with which the developer can generate their own content, and helps to promote a whole community of add-ons and customisation around the game which extend its life.

Not all game developers are great engineers though, and even the good ones have to move fast, and meet deadlines. As a result their tools aren’t always up to scratch, and are almost always not ready for release to the wider world.

If there is any government money available for “games and learning”, then this is where I think it should be focussed. We should pick a few great games which are already designed with extensibility in mind, and spend some resource helping to clean up and document their tools for use by educators. This would allow the educational community to benefit from games technology without having to try to recreate it, and it would offer a clear benefit to the developers too, who would find a way to spend the time on their tools that they know they ought to, and often want to, but generally can’t justify.

O'Reilly CodeZoo

2005-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

I was talking to Josh Portway about Koders, and he pointed out O’Reilly CodeZoo to me.

It’s similar, but a bit higher level - more of a catalogue of components and libraries. Nice because people can rate things, and leave hints and tips, so you get some sense of why it might be a good idea to use one jpeg rendering library as opposed to any other.

F1 USA: What A Farce

2005-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

I am currently watching an F1 race with only six cars, which is a total farce.

On a simplistic level, it’s obviously the fault of Michelin, who had a problem with their tires and advised the 14 drivers using them that it wasn’t safe to enter the race unless the track was modified.

I have to wonder, however, about the six drivers who are currently circling the track, who happen to be using Bridgestone tires and therefore don’t have a problem.

Fourteen of their colleagues have been given an unambigous instruction that they must not drive the race, because it’s not safe. Those drivers wanted to race, but it would have been suicide to go out without a modified track.

An optimist might think that there was still some vestige of honour in the sport of motor racing, and some solidarity amongst drivers, regardless of their team affiliations.

A romantic might assume that, seeing that this was an issue of safety, and not of team rivalry, the unaffected drivers might have shown solidarity with the Michelin runners, and told their own teams that they also would not drive the race unless the track was modified. In the face of a united front from the drivers, there is no doubt that the track would have been altered, and a proper race would have resulted.

The realists only have to point to the race unfolding before me to show the true state of affairs. The fans don’t matter. The safety of other drivers doesn’t matter. A phyrric victory in a field of six doesn’t matter. If we can win, we’ll win, fuck the cost.

Very very sad.

Together We Can Rule the Galaxy

2005-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Daring Fireball have a nice piece of comment on the whole Apple-Intel saga, entitled Together We Can Rule the Galaxy

Worth a read.

Open Source Licensing

2005-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Recently I’ve been working on some odds and ends that I wanted to Open Source, so I had to ponder which license to release them under.

This is a surprisingly gnarly question, and I’m not sure if I’ve got the final answer but right now I’ve gone for the GPL, although I did have some concerns about it.

Apple UI Nostalgia

2005-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

I take Jack’s point in Stolen Sheep about people getting all misty eyed about the consistency of the user interface on previous versions of MacOS.

I think he missed the mark slightly though, particularly by mentioning OS 9. I don’t know anything about Jack, so maybe he had an original Mac 128k, but I would never hold up OS 9 as a paragon of consistency, and people who do have obviously not been around that long!

The rot set in a lot earlier than that - for me it was around the time of Powertalk and Apple Guide. I would say that system 7 was pretty consistent though, and system 6 even more so.

Sheer complexity of the system is part of the problem I’m sure, but as I mentioned in Bring Back The User Interface Police I do think that Apple should keep a tighter overview, and at least conform to its own standards.

Apple + Intel = ?

2005-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Blimey. The rumours were true then.

Learn3k Website

2005-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just noticed that the Learn3k website has sort of stuttered into life!

There’s a tiny bit more information on there now anyway :)

Open Source Bounties

2005-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Michael McCracken mentions a nice idea for a foundation dedicated to soliciting and publicising open source bounties, originally proposed here by Nat Friedman.

The idea is to connect up people who are offering money for enhancements to open source software with programmers who have the time and the skills to do the work.

Nice idea - I’m quite tempted to try to set a rough version of the site using a wiki or cms and see how it evolves. The big problem that I can see is how to handle disputes. I can imagine at least 3:

someone claims a bounty but there is a dispute about whether it is completed
someone pledges, concedes that the task has been completed, but then fails to pay
two or more people claim the bounty for different solutions

Here are the rules that Nat used for the bounty scheme that he organised.

More Madness From The Register

2005-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

BOFH: Blocking the chutney ferret

Microsoft adopts XML for Office formats

2005-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Apparently the new Office file format will be an open XML standard.

Sounds good, but I’m not quite sure where it leaves the Open Document standard, which as I understand it is the same, only different.

Take two open, universal document standards into the shower?

I’m not sure how extensible either of these formats is, but if we can standardise on one of them, and if it allows some way to embed new content types into the document, then we might end up getting back to something like OpenDoc by the back door. Obviously OpenDoc was a lot more than a document format, but having a standard for that is certainly a good start…

Scrobbling

2005-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, I’ve become an audioscrobbler.

You can see what’s playing right now on the “now playing” section of this site (which is driven by some custom scripts that I wrote), but for a more complete list of what I’ve been playing recently, you can now visit my audioscrobbler page.

Robots compete in football league

2005-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Robot dogs playing football?

You’re ‘avin a laugh…

I wonder how many of these Ian Holloway has tried to sign for QPR…

Bring Back The User Interface Thought Police (All Is Forgiven)

2005-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Brent Simmons has been posting a number of articles recently on inconsistencies in the latest Tiger UI. Here’s an example.

He makes some good points.

I’m all for innovation, but I do think that Apple’s UI design has been getting more than a little flaky recently.

It’s not that it’s all bad, just that it seems to lack any kind of intellectual rigour. For every great new idea, there seem to be five inexplicable changes which make things less consistent, or harder to use.

I’d like to see some sort of internal review process within Apple which caught a lot of the inconsistencies a bit sooner (e.g. at the beta stage). I find it hard to believe that such a process doesn’t exist already, but if so then it’s clearly broken!

Oh dear...

2005-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Took a photo of myself looking stupid with a pair of shades on…

Named it (with a certain amount of irony) “dude”.

The computer had other ideas though, and decided to miss out the “e”.

Oh dear.

Bored with Swimming?

2005-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

This could be the answer….

More Learn3K stuff

2005-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Here’s another article with a bit more blurb in it.

I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I read:

"one of the best-known computer games programmers in the UK"

Crossed wires somewhere I suspect - certainly not a claim I would have made. Nice to get a name check though.

Job News

2005-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’m delighted to be able to announce that I’ve been invited to join the new Learn3K research centre, based at the National College of Ireland in Dublin, and headed up by Professor Stephen Heppell.

To quote a press release on the NCI website,

The new Learn3K Research Centre in the National College of Ireland has been established to locate Ireland at the heart of a renaissance in global learning. The Learn3K Research Centre is in a unique position to bring together international best practice, industry, educationalists and policy makers to engage in a series of high impact practical implementation projects, both local, national and worldwide.

Exciting stuff. The exact details of my project are yet to be thrashed out, so I’ll post more when I can, but I’m likely to be working on authoring tools, with the emphasis on mobile devices.

Tag Hierarchies

2005-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

A came across a Jeffrey Zeldman post about tag clouds (via something that was via Kevin Marks).

I agree with many of the comments that others have left, the gist of which being that Jeffrey is wrong to assert that tag clouds are supposed to replace taxonomies.

I do also agree with Jeffrey though that the tags aren’t nearly as interesting in isolation as they would be if some sort of taxonomy of tags could be created.

Since tags are user defined, the taxonomy would also have to evolve on its own.

I wonder if it might be possible to do this by looking at two things.

1) the relationship between one tagged item, and another linked tagged item

2) items which have multiple tags

Both of these situations suggest some kind of linkage between tags. I’m not quite sure whether it’s enough, but it would be interesting to see what could be done by looking at these linkages.

Reminds me of an article I read in Scientific American about using google searches as a way of inferring the semantic ‘connectedness’ of words.

I wonder whether it would also be possible to look at the relationships between the people who use tags, the tags that they commonly use. Perhaps people who are at the centre of hot topics of conversation would somehow allow some of that heat to rub off on other tags that they use.

That might be a way to combat the problem of obscure tags withering and dying. The analogy would be - “well, that’s an obscure topic, but Ms X is talking about it and I like what she normally says so maybe I should take a look”.

Toilet Seat Wars

2005-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Tom Smith had a link about An End To The Toilet Seat War, which reminded me of something…

Bizarrely, I managed to prove to Caroline once that if we both leave the seat where we needed it to be, then she’s more likely to find the seat down when coming to it next time, so she actually gets the better deal.

The maths really works too :)

I suspect that this should have some sort of fancy mathematical name with the words “Sam’s” and “Theorem” in there somewhere. Any suggestions?

QPR 2 - Forest 1

2005-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Yet another late match report… get your finger out Deane!

You can get the BBC summary here, which I won’t bother rehashing…

We played well in the first half, and I was particularly impressed with Rossi’s distribution - often rolling the ball out to the full backs or giving a quick throw to the wings rather than the aimless punt up field which has been the norm this season.

Thorpe started well, looking lively, but faded as the game progressed. As he’s now been released, I guess that was his last chance and he blew it. Possibly a bit harsh given his bad luck with injuries.

It was great to see Birch scoring. I hope that he has a good rest and comes back rejuvenated next season.

Overall, the season ended with a whimper rather than a bang, but in a weird way it was nice to have nothing immediate to worry about.

I say nothing immediate, because there’s plenty to worry about next season… like, for example, will we have any new players, or even enough of our existing ones?

On a positive note though, I’ve felt that for most of the season, a lot of our key players haven’t been doing half what I know they are capable of. Whilst that’s not a good thing, it does open the possibility that we could really get going next season if a few people come back firing on all cylinders.

Time to cross my fingers and renew the season ticket… O we’re the R block we’re the R block we’re the R block Shepherds bush…

Tiger, Spotlight, Meta-Data

2005-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

John Siracusa has posted a nice write up of some of the more interesting technical implications of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, including lots of interesting comment on the continuing meta-data saga.

Well worth a read.

Ollie's At It Again

2005-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Boah pointed out Mr Holloway’s ramblings in the BBC Quotes of the week.

Priceless.

DragThing

2005-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

James Thompson’s DragThing is ten years old.

To celebrate, he’s put up a page containing A Short History of DragThing

QPR 1 - Leeds 1

2005-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, I did go to this one, but I’ve been away… and now I can’t remember much about it :)

We were poor, but they were worse!

That's The Way To Do It...

2005-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

JEF RASKIN, who died recently aged 61, was best known for his early work on the Apple Macintosh computer, but he had a wide variety of interests including art and music, as well as an independent streak. We have just come across his account of how he left his faculty post at the University of California, San Diego. He wrote: “When I resigned I got into a hot air balloon in the middle of Revelle Plaza and flew over the Chancellor’s residence playing my sopranino recorder so that he would hear the sound. He came out and I yelled down that I was resigning and floated off. I was an art professor at the time and it seemed arty to leave that way.”

Makes my resignation from SI seem utterly boring in comparison…

Oh No!

2005-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

You can now play the hitchhikers text adventure online.

I had no idea. Bang goes my life again…

Hitchhikers

2005-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

With all the frenzy surrounding the new film, I enjoyed reading this interview with the guy who worked on the Infocom adventure game with Douglas. Brought back happy memories, and made me wonder where my Amstrad version got to!

Stephen Heppell has moved

2005-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

As the Guardian reports, my old boss Stephen Heppell has been appointed director of the new e-learning research centre at the National College of Ireland in Dublin.

Nice one Stephen!

Puckman

2005-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

I came across this on the Puckman site - made me laugh:

Clubbing anyone?

Computer games do not affect kids! If puckman had affected us as kids then we would now be running around in darkened rooms dancing to repetitive music and munching pills.

QPR 1 - Gillingham 1

2005-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

The BBC report is here.

Disappointing game this - we looked jaded in the first half, with Dan Shittu and Matthew Rose both looking particularly shaky, and leaving Davies exposed quite a few times.

We badly missed some of the injured players, particularly Ainsworth and Rowlands. Miller started on the right, and although I like the look of him, I thought that he was a bit out of his depth there at times, and perhaps could have been better positionally. He had a few good efforts though - and his touch and passing are generally excellent. I’d like to see him playing in the middle some time.

The second half was better, but still not great, despite Holloway saying that he thought we “played really well”! I’m getting that which-game-was-he-watching feeling again…

Santos was chucked up front for some reason. To be fair, I think he caused less damage to us that way, but is must be pretty depressing if you are Cureton or Baidoo sitting on the bench and you see the boss prefer Santos up front.

We somehow got a goal back, although it was blatantly offside, and we could have had a winner but for a great save from Brown.

To cap it all, Furlong had to hobble off. It looked like a knee problem, so I hope it’s not serious. Jamie Cureton replaced him, but didn’t manage much.

Bizarrely, Holloway chose the 90th minute to waste some time by putting Baidoo on, even though we were the ones looking like we might nick the game. I’m all for putting the youngsters on the bench, but if we’re going to do that we might as well at least give them 10 minutes; Baidoo didn’t even get a kick of the ball before the game finished, which can’t have been the most inspiring of debuts.

All in all, a draw was fair. They were poor, we were poor, and I think that our hopes of making the play-offs are gone.

The thing to bear in mind though is how far we’ve come. At the beginning of the season I would have happily settled for finishing one place above the relegation zone, as would most realistic QPR fans. What Ollie and the players have achieved with no money is magnificent, and they deserve credit. To move forward next season though, we need a bit more quality - and there are players in the current squad who just aren’t good enough.

QPR 1 - Sunderland 3

2005-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

A good first half performance from us - we pressed them really hard, scored one, and could have had a few more. Delivery into the box was good for a change, but too often there was nobody on the end, or nobody following up when the ball bobbled back out.

On the plus side, Rowlands looked really fired up, which partially made up for the fact that Santos was playing in midfield and being inept as always. Why does Santos get picked every week?

Unfortunately, Rowlands got injured and had to be replaced, and the tide turned. Sturridge came on to replace him, with Gallen dropping back into midfield, which isn’t his best position.

The second half saw a further reorganisation of our formation, with Bircham playing on the right and Gallen in the middle. We looked a bit muddled, Birch lost his man who went on to score, and within a minute of the restart we were back to 1-1. Sturridge then got injured and had to limp out of his home debut, to be replaced by Cureton. Our organisation hadn’t really recovered from the first substitution, and after the second it was just a bit of a mess.

Mick McCarthy also made a couple of good tactical changes, putting on some very large players to test us physically.

Maybe it was that, maybe it was our own tactical muddle after the injuries, or maybe it was simply that we’d been pressing so hard in the first half that we ran out of steam; whatever the reason, Sunderland went on to score again, and we lost all momentum.

In the end, I think that 3-1 flattered them. They scored from pretty much every chance they had. If we’d converted half of ours, we would have beaten them 5-3!

Still, they are top of the table for a reason, and I can’t really complain.

Elderly Man Dies: Shock

2005-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

In recent news, an elderly man who has been ill for some time has apparently passed away. Our sympathies go to his friends and family.

Now will everyone please stop talking about it…

UK street scum face wrath of shouting lamppost UK street scum face wrath of shouting lamppost | The Register

2005-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

I just love The Register.

QPR 3 - Watford 1

2005-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Nice to be able to be positive for a change.

For the first 70 minutes it was a really good performance. After that a few weird substitutions caused a wobble or two, but it’s hard to knock the team on a day when they could easily have won by six or seven.

Gallen missed a penalty, but made up for it with a couple of good goals.

Rowlands looked positive in central midfield, and I was glad to see Ainsworth given the start he deserved on the right. Lee Cook looked up for it against his old team, and Birch had a bit more steel back again.

Furlong was tireless, and got a deserved goal. When he went off, the crowd sang “36? You’re having a laugh…” which sums it up. He’s neck and neck with Marcus Bignot for my player of the season.

All in all, we looked like we cared, which is something that has been missing for a few matches.

QPR 0 - Reading 0

2005-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

A pretty poor game this, with few chances from either side.

We looked a bit shaky at the back, particularly in the first half, with Edgehill again looking nervous, and Rose making a number of errors - luckily Reading failed to capitalise. I’m glad to hear that we’ve signed a left back this week, as I don’t really understand why we’ve got Edgehill playing there (what’s wrong with Gino?).

I am beginning to sound like a stuck record, but again there was a big hole in midfield. Cook was ok on the left, but Rowlands was anonymous again on the right - I don’t understand why Ainsworth didn’t start as he looked much brighter than Rowlands when he finally came on.

Bircham was better but still not his old self. Santos was like a pinball machine, with the ball pinging off him in random directions. We completely failed to keep possession, and our distribution was poor, which left the front pair pretty damn isolated. We are badly in need of a play maker, and could also do with a backup ‘terrier’ until the real Birch returns.

Ollie obviously read my last post, because shock-horror he made a change reasonably early in the second half. Thorpe, Ainsworth and Cureton arrived in fairly quick succession, and for five minutes or so the sheer energy of these three looked like it might have turned the tide. Unfortunately it soon became apparent that nobody now knew where they were playing - with Santos dropping back into defense, Cureton on the left (I think), Ainsworth on the right, Gallen now in midfield presumably, and Thorpe up front with Furlong.

I wish that Ollie wasn’t so keen to play people out of position - it always seems like a waste to me - making average players look bad, and wasting the talents of good players. It can’t be great for the confidence of someone like Cureton that almost all of the starts he has made for the club haven’t been in his favoured position.

Oh well, I think that the season is probably over in terms of making the playoffs, but it could have been worse on the day, and I’ll take a mid-table finish quite happily since I thought we were going to struggle to stay up.

The summer is going to be very interesting… lots of players out of contract, and one wonders where the hell we’re going to find the money to replace them with equal quality, let alone improve.

AirPort Express Streaming Audio From Any Program

2005-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

According to a Slashdot article, someone has written an application that lets you stream any audio to your AirPort Express.

As Craig from Sports Interactive would say: Yass!

Bluejacked

2005-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Some sneaky bugger Bluejacked my phone the other day - gave me a bit of a shock.

It took me a while to work out what was going on, and that it was basically harmless (I think).

New Labour could arrest self under new terror law

2005-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Register is running a nice piece about the Anti Terrorist Bill currently being rushed through parliament.

Seems like it might be a bit of a bodged job. I’m shocked! That’s never happened before…

Jef Raskin

2005-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Jef Raskin, GUI pioneer, interface expert, Apple employee #31, and the man most credited with the creation of the Apple Macintosh, died of cancer on Saturday February 26, 2005.

(Via Slashdot).

Subversion: Pros & Cons

2005-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Boah pointed this article out to me. It’s a good summary of some pros & cons, from the point of view of a Perforce user.

I love Perforce, and it’s the benchmark against which I would judge other systems, but it is expensive if you are an independent developer and want to work on collaborative projects.

So far I’ve been really happy with subversion, but I must admit that I hadn’t really taken on board some of it’s limitations, particularly with respect to merging and branching.

Food for thought…

QPR 1 - Wolves 1

2005-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Another disappointing performance, and not what I wanted to see whilst running the risk of hypothermia in block R, what with the snow showers and the sub-zero temperature!

The BBC write-up is brief but pretty fair. We started brightly enough, with a nice goal from Gallen, but they also had a few chances, with some good crosses whipped in, and we were lucky to get away without conceding. After that the game seemed to fizzle out, probably in part to do with the temperature. Overall we were in charge, but the final ball was too often lacking.

The second half was more of the same, and somehow one always felt that Wolves were likely to score. Adam Miller started warming up after about 60 minutes, and the time felt right for a change, but once again Ollie delayed and delayed and by the time he came on it was too late again.

Once again there were no outstanding performances.

It was good to see Bircham and Bignot starting, but Birch is still a shadow of his former self, and gave away the ball quite a few times which was worrying.

Rowlands started on the right, and once more it was hard to tell that he was there a lot of the time. He didn’t do much, and he seemed to lack energy or commitment, although to be fair I don’t think he made any massive blunders.

Gallen started up front, which was a relief in a way as I don’t like him in midfield. Actually, he seemed to be quite fired up, and even had a burst or two of pace! I do wish that Ollie had the guts to drop him though. It’s not that he’s bad, simply that I think other people have a decent claim on all of the roles that he finds himself playing.

Santos, as usual, was a complete dufus. I seem to remember screaming “Santos you donkey!” at one point, which is fairly drastic for me considering I normally sit there quietly like the poncy middle class intellectual that I am.

I really don’t understand what Ollie sees in Santos, and I’m still sure that he must have a contract which stipulates that he must start every game, and cannot be substituted. He wasted possession more times than I can remember, and was equally ineffectual in the midfield (where he started), and up front (where he ended up).

Furlong was tireless as usual, chased down the ball well, and nearly nicked a goal off their defenders on more than one occasion.

Edgehill, playing at left back today, looked poor. Clearly he used to be good, but he doesn’t look confident, his distribution is really negative, and he’s another player who often seems not to really care. Gino has looked a bit dodgy this season, but I don’t think he’s worse than Edgehill, so I can’t figure out why he didn’t start.

Lee Cook? He does show occasional flashes of brilliance, but he is muscled off the ball so easily that you worry he might blow away with a sudden gust of wind. The word “wuss” springs to mind. I think someone needs to introduce him to the weights in the gym - or maybe just get some pies down him ;)

QPR 1 - Preston 2

2005-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

The phrase “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” springs to mind.

I don’t remember much about this one (I’ve been moving house, so I got a bit distracted and didn’t write it up whilst it was fresh!), but I do remember that we really should have won it - they weren’t at all good and we just drifted off to sleep somehow in the second half.

It’s weird, but sometimes you can feel a goal coming, and it seemed obvious to me and Neil that we needed a change quickly because Preston were going to score. Instead of that Ollie waited and waited, as he often seems to do, and by the time he finally got round to it we’d gone from 1-0 up to 2-1 down. After the game he did admit that maybe he waited too long.

The only positive was seeing Bircham, Bignot and Rowlands come on - although with only 15 minutes remaining they didn’t have much time to make an impact.

Mysteriously, Santos stayed on even after this triple substitution, and ended up playing as a striker if my memory serves. What’s all that about then? We’ve got Gallen, Furlong and Cureton on the pitch, but we end up taking Cureton off for Bircham and putting Santos up front. Huh? Surely better to swap Santos for Bircham and then juggle some combination of Cureton/Gallen/Rowlands/Ainsworth in the centre-mid/right wing/right sided striker roles. Very odd.

Web Disruption

2005-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Phase 2 of the great Elegant Chaos relocation is about to get underway.

As a result, the web site may be down for the next week or so. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…

England 0 - Holland 0

2005-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

“This is Dyer” said the commentator at some point during the second half. He wasn’t wrong - it was dire.

Obviously I’m just a stupid computer programmer, but I don’t really understand what Sven was up to. We seemed to be trying a weird formation, that I really couldn’t make head or tail of. Funnily enough, the players didn’t seem to be making much sense of it either. Was it a 4-3-3? More like a 4-6, with the 6 being a random assortment of players milling around in the last two thirds of the pitch. Rooney on the wing? You’re ‘avin a laugh.

It was nice to see Wright - Phillips given a try, but again the formation didn’t really do him any favours, and I didn’t really see the point of giving Downing and Johnson just 30 minutes at the end, or playing Johnson out of position.

What I’d like to see in these sort of games is:

start with the experimental side not the ‘stable’ one
play the new players in their correct positions
if necessary, ‘rest’ established players in order to try new ones
if there’s a choice, ‘rest’ players who are not performing
give the new players a long enough time on the pitch
if you want to bring on some crowd pleasers, do it in the last 30 minutes when the opposition are knackered, and watch them please the crowd by scoring :)

Working on this logic, I would have started with Johnson up front with Rooney, and rested Owen who isn’t really performing right now. Whether or not you think Owen should be being picked for England, I don’t really see much point picking him for a friendly - it’s not like you’re going to learn something new. Fair enough maybe try him with another strike partner, but for that to work there has to actually be a formation where he has a strike partner. If things weren’t going well at half time, I’d have swapped one of the two for DeFoe.

Again following my logic, I would have started with Downing on the left, Wright-Phillips on the right, and I would have left Beckham on the bench. Beckham doesn’t have to take this as a snub to the player, but if he chooses to, and it gives him a kick up the arse, then what’s the harm in that?

Personally I think that Lampard and Gerrard are our best players, and one of them should be the captain. It’s such a rare pleasure to see them both fit in the same team that I’d have picked them both. But if we were going to try out Hargreaves again, why not start with him, and let Lampard and Gerrard play a half each?

I reckon a side lining up like that would have looked a lot more balanced. I think that having the new players on at the beginning would give them more confidence, and the team as a whole would feel like it had something to prove.

One final thought. If Downing isn’t ready, and we have to play a right-footer out of position on the left, I have the perfect candidate. It’s criminal to play Gerrard or Lampard out of position, and everyone is clamouring to see Wright-Phillips start. Who does that leave? A certain Mr Beckham. I know he’s not suddenly become a shit player, but he isn’t exactly setting the world on fire at the moment is he? Playing him on the left would give us the benefit of his hard work and tracking back, allow him to stay captain (which I don’t think he should be, but that’s another story), and it would mean that he was on the pitch for set pieces. Perfect…

Anonymous Comments

2005-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve had to turn off anonymous comments, as the site was getting comment-Spam. So if you want to leave a comment, you’ll have to register.

Please don’t let this put you off! It’ll only take a minute, I’m not going to do anything evil with the information you enter (you only need a name and password anyway), and it will have the added advantage that you can set up some preferences for how you view the site.

King Kong | boah.us - the lunacy within

2005-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Oh dear… Boah has been at it again.

Food From Hell?

2005-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Josh Portway pointed this out to me - we wonder if James Dolan has had any yet?

Don’t do it James!

Dos Dedos Mis Amigos

2005-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Went to see Pop Will Eat Itself yesterday - and a great gig it was too. I came to them pretty late, so only really know the stuff from Dos Dedos, but enjoyed quite a lot of the rest.

Well worth a listen if you get the chance to see em…

Firefox Build Process - Mind Boggling...

2005-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been building Firefox on a PC recently.

Not what you’d call a laugh-a-minute, but it’s a tough job and I seem to be the mug who has to do it.

I have found my mind quite boggled by the hoops that one has to go through to get this bugger to compile! It’s bad enough on the Mac, but compiling it on windows is truly a Herculean task.

But more boggling still is that nobody seems to be maintaining a Visual Studio solution file for the project. I don’t get it. I can see that configuring the build may have to be done from the command line, and even actually doing the build may have to happen on the command line, but surely it ought to be possible to have a solution file for easy browsing and/or debugging of the code?

Maybe I’ve missed one out there somewhere. If you’ve got one, please let me know!

London menaced by flaming DVD players

2005-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

I think that those chaps atThe Register may have had a bit too much coffee…

Read This!

2005-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World, by Francis Wheen.

“From UFO scares to dotcom mania, Francis Wheen’s hilarious and gloriously impassioned polemic describes a period in the world’s history when everything began to stop making sense”.

Caroline gave it to me for Christmas, and I can thoroughly recommend it.

QPR 0 - 3 Nottm Forest

2005-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Oh dear. To call our performance poor would be an insult to poor teams everywhere.

According to the BBC, Ian Holloway said: “I think we lacked quality in the final third. Even with all the injuries and suspensions we had, I still expected those out there to show more quality and purpose.”

I do sometimes wonder which game Ollie is watching. Maybe there’s another one going on each Saturday round the back of Loftus Road that I don’t know about? Or did I go to Reading by accident (like Sir Les did presumably)?

Yes, we lacked some quality in the final third, but we lacked a damn site more elsewhere. Admittedly we had about seven first team players missing, and a totally makeshift defence, but even so.

Once again it’s the midfield that worries me most. Basically, there’s a big hole where it should be. Marcus Bean isn’t so much hopeless, as just ineffectual. He doesn’t seem to read the game at all, and is really anonymous, which is a bit of a flaw in a central midfielder if you ask me.

Martin Rowlands played alongside him today (which I was hoping might happen), but unfortunately it didn’t do him (or us) much good. He looked good for about the first ten minutes, then seemed to get bored, and reverted to the sort of listless drifting around the pitch which seems to be his forte currently.

Ainsworth was all energy again on the right, but didn’t have much joy. Cook showed flashes of skill interspersed with long periods of lightweight hopelessness.

McCleod wasn’t too clever sometimes at left back, but at least he got forward, didn’t shy away from the challenges, and looked like he cared.

My ratings: Day: 5 no blunders, but doesn’t look commanding Branco: 3 right back? I think not Shittu: 6 did ok, but didn’t look happy Edgehill: 4 doesn’t look half the player I thought he was going to be McCleod: 6 considering he’s a striker, did ok at leftback Ainsworth: 7 full marks for effort Bean: 3 oh? did he play? must have missed him Rowlands: 4 lacked composure Cook: 5 still not the complete article by a long stretch Gallen: 6 the ref gave him no help, but he soldiered away Cureton: 6 likewise really, a bit anonymous, but no real support

Subs: Padula: 5 wasn’t on long, did nothing wrong, why didn’t he start? Thorpe: 5 nice to see him back, shame he didn’t get more time

Ultralab Christmas Party 2004

2005-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Jonathan Furness posted some good photos from the ULTRALAB christmas party.

Project Writeups

2005-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been writing up little biogs of some of the projects that I worked on - for no particular good reason that I can think of.

Haven’t done them all yet, but the stories behind [Black And White], [Championship Manager] and [Football Manager] are all fairly complete.

Chocolate mathematics

2005-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

A great picture, which Tom Smith pointed out to me. I haven’t a clue about the maths, but I bet that Kevin Marks would know…

(via the other blog)

QPR 0 - Brighton 0

2005-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Not the greatest game this one, but at least we didn’t lose.

Bircham didn’t play for some reason - there hasn’t been any mention of injury on the QPR website but he was holding his knee when he warmed up at half-time, which was a bit worrying.

Without Bircham playing at his best, we really look poor in midfield. Marcus Bean just isn’t up to the task at the moment - he clearly has energy but he doesn’t offer himself in the way Bircham does, he rarely seems to be in the right place at the right time, and when you notice him at all it’s because he’s just given the ball away. And let’s face it, Kevin Gallen isn’t a midfielder is he? He has been a great servant of the club, and is a hero to all QPR fans, but I think it might be time for him to start bowing out gracefully. By making him club captain I think Ollie might have made it a bit hard to drop him, but when our other strikers are fit I can’t see that Gallen should play ahead of them, and personally I’d like to see a midfield of Ainsworth and Cook on the wings, Bircham as the holding midfielder, and Rowlands with a more attacking central role.

Speaking of Rowlands, he played on the left against Brighton, and Lee Cook didn’t even make the sub’s bench, which is no great surprise given how poorly he played against Crewe. I don’t really understand what’s happened to Rowlands. Reading his interview in the programme it almost sounds as though he himself feels that last year was a fluke, and that he isn’t really that good. It’s weird - time to give the sports psychologist a ring I think! On the pitch, the thing that frustrates me about him at the moment is that, like Bean, he doesn’t look like he wants the ball half the time.

Not sure about the Furlong sending off - we were on the wrong side of the pitch to see what happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did have a little dig; he was getting no joy from the ref all day (normal story), and Hinshelwood was all over him at the time that the incident took place.

The only good thing to come out of the Brighton game was how fired up Gareth Ainsworth was. He had the kind of intensity that Birchham usually shows, and it was nice to see that at least one player still has some passion - everyone else looks distinctly flat at the moment.

RAD Skater

2004-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Dominic Robinson pointed the Skate project out to me. It’s an attempt to recreate SK8, which was a Lisp based RAD development environment developed by Ruben Kleiman at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group - very cool.

Another friend, Royston Sellman, worked on this whilst he was at ATG, and it’s something that I had access to whilst at ULTRALAB. Given my long standing interest in developing a new authoring environment, I’m pretty keen to follow this project’s progress, and maybe even try to get involved.

Not sure about making it Lisp based though - I’d much prefer Dylan myself (stop groaning in the back there).

Tom In Town

2004-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

Tom Smith and I went to the ULTRALAB Christmas party last week, which was also Stephen Heppell’s leaving do.

A good night was had by all, and it was fun for me to catch up with all the old gang from my time at the lab.

Tom & I stayed at the same hotel (the event was in deepest, darkest Essex), and as we both at a loose end the next day we wandered into town together, had fun getting slightly lost in the Tate modern, and inevitably ended up in a pub bouncing ideas off each other.

The weather was horrible, Tom’s back was giving him grief, and the day felt strangely subdued (possibly due to excess alcohol consumption the previous night), but I had a really nice time.

It reminded me how much I miss our conversations at the lab, or over a pint after a band practice. Must do it more often Tom!

Big Brother Isn't Watching Me

2004-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

Hmm…

I’ve just received an email from TfL about the Piccadilly Line. It looks like the Tufnell Park email was just an enormous coincidence!

It’s a shame really, as I’d actually be quite grateful for a service which emailed me speculatively about disruption on services that I use a lot.

Solio - Plug into the sun

2004-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

I want one :)

http://blog.delaranja.com/index.php?p=243 (Via delaranja.)

Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story

2004-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

This is another great mac development story - about the Graphing Calculator: "It's midnight. I've been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I'm not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation."

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/22/0146243&from=rss (Via Slashdot: Apple.)

Big Brother Is Watching Me

2004-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

I just got a mail from Transport for London:

“Dear Mr Deane,

Please note Tufnell Park station will be closed all day 27 December until 19:00 on 31 December 2004.”

This is presumably based on them noticing that my Oystercard has been used at Tufnell Park quite a lot recently. I haven’t told them that I’ve moved to Tufnell Park, so there’s no other way that they could know - I think!

Interesting… and in this particular case I must say bloody useful to know that my local station will be closed.

The Sparrow Has Landed

2004-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Somehow I don’t think we rate Eagle status…

We’ve moved anyway. Only temporary (looking after a house & cat), so most of our stuff is piled into an 100 square feet storage unit!

Very zen (not the storage unit, but life without it’s contents). Or it would be, if this house wasn’t full of pictures of cats, statues of cats, rugs with cats on, cat shaped soap, cat mugs, cat… well you get the picture. Still, after this I plan to move to a cave somewhere and become a hermit (as long as the cave has broadband).

The house is great anyway (thanks Ellen!), but the best I can say about the process of moving is that we’re still alive, mostly due to the sterling efforts of Svein, Cate, Chris, Danny and our mums! A big thank you one and all.

Dylan, Self, Language Taxonomy

2004-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

I was just reading some old papers about Self, and was wondering about the relationship between Self and Dylan (my favourite language).

This lead me (via Google of course) to The Encyclopedia of Computer Languages, within which I discovered this utterly crazy pdf document: which is a language family tree!

I’d quite like to print it out and put it on my wall, but I don’t think I’ve got a large enough wall…

Progressive My Arse

2004-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

I recently visited the site for the Institute for Public Policy Research.

What is the first thing I see?

“ippr is the UK’s leading progressive think tank”

Oh dear. If there’s one thing I can’t stand (and believe me, there are many more than one) it’s organisations which claim to be “The UK’s favourite…”, “The world’s best”, “London’s leading…”.

According to who exactly?

Fight For Freedom of Speech and Belief

2004-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

I am finding the debate over the proposal to introduce a new offence of “incitement to religious hatred” really scary.

Free speech used to be one of those cornerstones of British liberal democracy (like… erm… the right to trial by jury) but it looks like it might be the next thing for the chop in this brave new labour / new puritan / Christian right world of ours.

Some comedians here caused a minor splash recently by focussing on the danger that religious satire might be banned by this law. Whilst I’d be sad to lose Father Ted, I have heard far more scary things suggested. I heard a British Muslim “leader” on Radio 4 this mornin suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that it would have been handy to have had this law in place when Salman Rushdie published the Satanic Verses, as it would have allowed them to force him to “change a few words here and there”.

Religion is not the same thing as ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or disability. People choose their religion (or at least they should be allowed to, if they haven’t had it stuffed down their throats by parents, teachers, or missionaries).

If you choose to believe something, that is your right, and I would defend your right to express that belief, however distasteful I might find it. By the same token, you should then be prepared to accept the same from others - including their right to debate the wisdom of your belief, and the possibility that it may be misguided, wrong, or even downright harmful.

Likewise, if your belief causes you to act in an illegal way (for example by attacking, or inciting attack on a group of people with a different belief), you should be subject to the same laws as anyone else. We already have laws protecting people against violence, and punishing people for inciting others to violence. We don’t need any more, and we certainly don’t need specific protection for religion.

The erosion of these kinds of freedoms are the thin edge of a very, very dangerous wedge. There is an awful lot of complacency in this country. Next time you watch the news on TV and tell yourself that it couldn’t happen here, it might be worth checking the statute books and the next labour manifesto first.

Universal Free Dictionary

2004-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Universal Free Dictionary: "Zdenek Broz writes 'The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). We are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL.'"

(Via Slashdot.)

Moving Home

2004-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

As mentioned a while ago, we’re moving house soon. Since my server lives at home, it is likely to be down for a while. Transit time should be fairly short, but a change of location requires a new broadband connection, and a new static IP address, so I fully expect everything to go horribly wrong.

I’ll try to set up some sort of placeholder in the meantime. Expect everything to go offline on Monday, and be back anytime from Wednesday onwards!

And keep your fingers crossed for me…

Apple & IBM

2004-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

The old chestnut of someone buying Apple has reared it’s ugly head again, now that IBM have sold their PC business.

Personally I think it’s a bit of a non-starter; IBM would stifle Apple’s freedom and I suspect that they’d haemorrhage creative staff after any such take-over. And I can’t really see Steve Jobs wearing a short sleeved shirt with a tie and a bunch of pencils clipped into his top pocket :)

On the other hand, some sort of strategic alliance would make a hell of a lot of sense. A bit of you-scratch-my-back technology sharing, a la the old Apple-Microsoft deal, would do no harm to either.

A survey of Dock substitutes and other launch utilities

2004-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

This Ars Technica review contains a nice survey of Dock substitutes and other launch utilities.

Most interesting is the stuff about Quicksilver, which is a really interesting utility that Josh pointed out to me a while ago. Whilst I was working at SI I had it installed on my G5, and it really started growing on me. For a long time I didn’t have it on my laptop, so I’m only just starting to get into it again. It’s pretty good though - kind of like a graphical command line (but much better than that might sound!) :)

The True Story of Audion

2004-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

I saw this on Daring Fireball.

Cabel Sasser tells the extraordinary story of Audion, the mac mp3 player that he was involved in creating.

Definitely worth a read.

Change This

2004-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

I followed a link about this site, but didn’t actually get as far as reading the article it referred to because I was distracted by the whole concept behind the site.

I like it… and I’ve been meaning to write a few manifestos for some time now, so perhaps it will finally spur me into action.

What A Delicious Library

2004-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

Tom Smith pointed this out to me - and it probably now holds my record for the shortest time between me seeing something for the first time and buying it.

It lets you catalogue your books, dvds, games, etc, and best of all if you scan (or type in) the ISBN number, it looks the details up for you on Amazon. Better yet, if you’ve got an iSight you can use it to read the barcodes. How cool is that?

I haven’t even got an iSight yet, but I suspect I may have one soon…

Drupal Site Now Live

2004-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve switched things over that my new Drupal based site is live. For the time being you can find the old site at http://old.elegantchaos.com.

There are still quite a few things that I haven’t moved across - some because I haven’t got round to it, others because they are no longer relevant.

Moving House

2004-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Completely coincidentally, Caroline & I also have to move house, which is a bit of a pain as I was planning on taking a couple of months off and so don’t actually know where I’ll be working next (hence where I need to move to!).

As a result of this move, I’m having a big clear-out of stuff. Have a look - you may well want something that I’m chucking out!

More Changes

2004-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Well my experiment with iBlog ended, and I’ve decided to switch to a different approach.

I am now using Drupal to manage my whole site - including the blogging. It’s early days yet, but so far I like it.

As a result, expect more disruption to this site in the short term!

A Change Of Scene

2004-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

As of the end of October, I am no longer working for Sports Interactive!

The parting was entirely amicable (I actually resigned in May, but continued to work at SI until the release of FM was out of the way), and I still have a great deal of time for everyone at SI, and wish them well for the future!

I don’t feel that it would be professional to go into details in public about my reasons for leaving, so all I’ll say is that I disagreed with some of the decisions being made, particularly about the technical side of things, and felt that my views and experience weren’t really being valued.

It’s a shame, because I love the game, and the company is generally a great place to work.

Work In Progress...

2004-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Ok, so the more observant amongst you will have noticed that my website has changed rather radically, or more accurately has almost completely gone away.

I will be bringing bits of it back online slowly, as I get the time, but for now I am experimenting with using iBlog to make this blog, which will form the backbone of the new site.

Things have changed quite a lot over the past few years, and as I am currently a full-time employee of sports interactive , a lot of the old content is no longer relevant.

I did think about waiting until I had the new site completely done… but frankly that could be a very long time given the amount of other distractions I have right now, so it seemed more sensible to just get on with it. In the meantime, please accept my apologies for the numerous errors and the rather painful jolts when moving between the old and new pages!

The Universal Barcode

2004-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Kevin pointed out to me that MusicBrainz already has something along the lines of what I described for uniquely identifying musical tracks.

As usual someone’s already been there and done that. I wonder how good it is at not identifying similar renditions of the same track by different artists! Can a really good cover’s band fool it…

NetNewsWire wishlist

2004-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

NetNewsWire is great, but I have a wishlist…

I want to be able to share my subscription list between machines
The “aggregate new headlines” feature is nice, but I want to be able to aggregate more than one arbitrary group of subscriptions. You can almost do this by using folders, but not quite I think…
I want some sort of adaptive filtering; by which I mean filters that I can teach by rating the items I read, giving them some sort of thumbs up or thumbs down to tell the filter whether I want to see similar items

Frequently Answered Questions

2004-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Frequently Answered Questions

My friend Boah came up with the interesting concept of Frequently Answered Answers</a>. Now admittedly he may have been joking at the time, but that’s not really the point.

I like the idea of Frequently Answered Questions (as I prefer to call them). I think you should give them to people before you work with them. It’s like saying… “before you ask…”

Exploring With WIki

2004-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

This is an interesting interview with Ward Cunningham, talking about Wikis.

Although I’ve known they exist for a while, I’ve not really used them much. They seem like a great tool for collaboration, but whenever I’m pointed at one by somebody I invariably find myself totally baffled by the lack of structure, and struggle to find any useful information.

The interviewer seems to have the same problem, so I’m obviously not alone!

Aggrigators and Serendipity

2004-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Aggrigators and Serendipity

I love NetNewsWire (and its ilk), but it occurs to me that serendipity is something that might be lost with RSS feeds, at least the way they are right now.

I am delighted not to be bombarded with adverts, but I used to enjoy catching sight of a book review on Slashdot that would otherwise have completely passed me by. Now that I am reading Slashdot via NetNewsWire, its not going to happen anymore. Of course there is probably some sort of RSS feed that will show me all the Slashdot book reviews, but that’s hardly the point is it?

Perhaps someone should extend the RSS format so that it can include “see also” items. Just as long as:

a) people don’t use them for adverts b) you can turn them off it people do use them for adverts ;)

Aaaaagh!

2004-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Why is it that every time I manage to fish my iPod earphones out of my jacket/pocket/bag, I always end up holding the right earphone in my left hand? Why why why?

URIs For Playlists

2004-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Kevin Marks posted something in his blog (“New model for music playlists”) about a playlist format which allowed you to share your playlists safely with friends. A necessary part of this would be a canonical naming scheme so that you and I can both make sure we’re talking about the same song, and our helpful mechanical friends can go find it on the net for us.

This is something I’ve been pondering for a while. The CDDB / MusicBrainz type idea is good, but it’s a bit limited because not all music starts its life (or gets published to the wider world) on a cd.

I’ve never got heavily into downloading music on the web, and I suspect that one of the reasons for this is the frustration I felt when trying to find not just single tracks but collections of tracks (back when I were a lad these were referred to as albums). At one point I decided to replace lots of my old (legally dubious) cassette tapes with equally dubious downloads from the web. The logic behind this exercise was mostly sophistry, something to do with it being less morally suspect for me to download music if I already owned an illegal copy of it! Anyway, I soon gave up, as I discovered that it was relatively easy to find the well known tracks from any of my tapes - but nigh on impossible to obtain the whole album, and especially the whole album, from the same cd, encoded in the same format at the same (hopefully acceptable) bit-rate. It wasn’t necessarily that the music isn’t out there, just that I couldn’t find the damn stuff because of people’s weird and inconsistent naming of the files. The frustration was almost enough to drive me to honesty!

This lead me to start thinking more generally about how useful it would be if the mp3 tag format could include some sort of unique identifier that software could use to label a track. I think a good start would be the cddb/MusicBrainz type approach - a combination of track number and cd identifier being a fairly good id which could be attached to an mp3 track and then used to look up the actual track name, and all the other associated data that one might want.

The problem is, what about tracks from one of my bands? Do I have to make a cd and register it with cddb just so that I can uniquely refer to it elsewhere? Seems a bit backwards to me. As online music distribution becomes the norm, I guess we’ll start seeing more and tracks out there which only exist as downloads, and it’ll become at once more important and harder to identify them reliably.

I wonder if the same basic trick that cddb et al use (based on the exact length of most cds being almost unique) could be applied to a single track in a reliable way that was relatively immune to things like bad editing and lossy compression. Something which could reliably distinguish between the same track compressed differently and a different rendition of the same song (I’m not suggesting that it would have to recognise the similarity, just that it wouldn’t get confused between them).

I suspect that it ought to be possible, although it wouldn’t be likely to work with anything so crude as the overall length of the data or number of samples. Perhaps some combined checksum produced from a bunch of signal processing trickery, and or some analysis of the harmonic or rhythmic aspects of a track.

Born Sleepy... Welcome to my world

2004-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, this is it, I’ve finally decided to lumber on to the blog bandwagon, (probably just as it’s rolling out of town).

Hmm… shame it doesn’t make me automatically more interesting, or give me something to say.