01.04.09
Sprouts!
In case you ever wondered what sprouts look like attached to their life support :
These are in the Allotment, and right tasty they are too steamed with a bit of butter. Just don’t let the Gorillas have them.
01.02.09
More web development
I spent a few evenings in December updating a charity’s web site to use a CMS system based on Wordpress. The bulk of the work involved mirroring the original site design as a Wordpress PHP+CSS template. Unfortunately, the original site was auto generated by a tool on the Mac and the mess it generated was pretty impenetrable and full of unused styles. I used Firefox’s defacto debugger FireBug to inspect the CSS of the final rendered document and created a minimal CSS which incorporated only the relevant style information.
That worked pretty well until I came to test the page on Internet explorer (still the most popular browser on the net).
IE support doubled the development time, and worst of all (as an engineer): The solution was a set of fairly arbitrary changes to the CSS (following this guide) and I don’t fully understand why the changes worked. Adding a “position:relative” magically fixed a number of problems with margins - most unsatisfying.
Sneeky Plug-ins
One of my favourite FireFox plugins is Scrapbook. Scrapbook provides a simple way of organising ’scraps’ of content from web pages, allowing you to annotate, highlight and save within a folder structure - all while retaining a link to the original.
One day Scrapbook stopped working. The plug-in failed to show in the UI (despite being activated) and I re-installed to no avail. Through a process of elimination found that it clashed with Add-on called “Microsoft .NET Framework assistant”:
Ok, so having found the culprit, I then wonder how such a plug-in got on my machine. It is installed without option as part of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and assists in the deployment of .NET “ClickOnce” applications. It also alters the user agent of the browser to report the version of .NET supported on the PC.
The MS add-on can be disabled, which cures the scrapbook clash, but not removed*.
As I’ve mentioned before, open systems and stability are in direct conflict. There is a balance between the two which can be achieved through vetting, testing, user feedback and frequent updates - most of which falls apart with clandestine plug-ins.
Full inter op testing with all available plugins is combinatorially impossible, so s/w must make it easy to allow users to attribute blame and quickly roll back. However, the frequent updates pushed over the net (acrobat, itunes, firefox, windows) make this much more difficult than a few years ago.
For 2009, I want to spend less time debugging and more time creating.
*Instructions for removing using REGEDIT here.
12.25.08
Carl Sagan’s apple pie recipe
I can see why his Cookery books never took off.
(Gag stolen from Robin Ince’s performance at the “Nine lessons and Carols for godless people”)
12.17.08
In praise of the FSCS
Yes, I was a rate tart who had stashed a bit of money in Icesave. After the Nationalisation of Northern Rock, it seemed prudent to remove the eggs from ones basket. Unfortunately, even though the FSCS guaranteed some of the Icesave money, it was up to the Icelandic compensation scheme to fork out the first £16K. Now the Icelandic scheme was backed by government and as a last resort any shortfall should have been supplied (via a gentlemen’s agreement) by Iceland’s Scandinavian and Nordic friends.
Unfortunately, most bank compensation schemes are just thought experiments, none of the thoughts include total financial meltdown of the banking system as well as the near bankruptcy of an entire country. As a result, those with a modest sum (<16K) faced getting squat.
Given that the FSCS has probably never had to deal with anything like a hundred of thousand saver’s cash, totalling several billion : we were mostly expecting a long drawn out bureaucratic process.
After the promise from Darling’s treasury backed guarantee that no saver would loose his cash - the FSCS sprang into action and were able to repay savers in just over a month.
In a surprising feat of IT literacy - the FSCS took over the icesave.co.uk domain, and made a couple of modifications to the site to only allow users to remove their cash.
This worked very well since, as Icesave is an internet only account, all savers had to link to another account in their regular bank in order to transfer money in and out. That meant that savers could withdraw their money to their linked account, and that account only (which at least in part avoids the obvious Phishing scams which pray on desperate savers trying to get their money back).
By waiting, and not hassling the FSCS, after they contacted me via email I spent about 5 mins on the website and within two days the money was back in my current account without the need to cut down any trees. Fantastic.
Some savers complained that the FSCS was slow to get in contact, but they should bear in mind that the FSCS doesn’t have a list of customers at the immediate point that the bank collapses.
I’m sure there were corner cases, but overall the handling of the situation was efficient and sensible.
Distractions
Survived my five hour DIY session with the orthopaedic surgeons. I’m not sure why they are still called orthopaedics (lit. child straightening), but it really is spanners, chisels, hammers, sterilised black and decker drills.
Luckily the Virus that had hit the hospital trust that week, did not affect my operation. It’s pretty harsh for a hospital having to deal with infections by Russian hackers along with MRSA, C.Difficile outbreaks - but highlights the security problems of re-using off the shelf ‘civilian’ technology.
Unfortunately, during the first part of the procedure to remove the metal rod, a screw broke off and they had to ‘bang it through to the other side of the leg’. Perhaps to make up for this bashing, they used a cool £1000 per gram bioactive cement to revise the non union of the femur - a sort of paste mixed with bone cells harvested from my pelvis (the iliac crest to be precise).
I’m on crutches till January and then, hopefully, I will be able to walk less like Quasimodo (though my girlfriend said that my limp was cute and I didn’t need an op).
A post op analgesic such as morphine make it almost impossible to read, and for me made it difficult to watch fast moving films or banging music. But, I found the perfect opiate companion to wail away the winter evenings : Audio books.
After scouring the interweb for some books I always thought I should read, but never could be arsed - I tried out a few public domain audio books where I found renditions of Oscar Wilde, Conrad and Dostoyevsky mostly read by nasal, winy Californian hippies. I gave up after a few chapters, preferring the sound of the my neighbour vomiting his breakfast into his lap.
I did however find that audio books narrated by the authors themselves are often very good:
- The God Delusion - Narrated by Dawkiepoos and his wife, this was lovely to listen to. The alternating of the Professor Yaffle-esque sound of Dawkins and the maternal voice of Lalla Ward helps to keep your attention, and helps to keep you attention, minimising the incessant loss of attention and rewind common to audio books and so helps to keep your attention.
- His Dark Materials:
- Philip Pullman (with a whiff of Tom Baker in his voice) provides a cracking unabridged reading of this popular rehashing of Milton’s paradise lost, complete with armoured bears. The three volumes will keep you occupied for a while. Also it’s good because you don’t have to pronounce the difficult Norse inspired character names.
I’ve been told that Steve Martin’s biography Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life
There is a rumour that the 27hour long Ulysses audio book (on 22 CDs)
Youtube as ever is the ultimate distraction and I found some classic Armando Iannucci sketches:
I also searched for “explosion idiot” and came up with this gem:
I suppose I’m going to have to do some real work now…
11.05.08
Immobile Ronin
I’m taking a short break courtesy of the NHS to finally resolve the rather obvious problem indicated in the following X-RAY:
If you are lucky, I’ll post my previously unpublished essay on writing code while intoxicated with morphine and diamorphine (medical grade heroin). It’s a real treat.
See Also
10.26.08
Lucifer, tangled in telegraph wires
Slightly jaded with modern art, my mood was lifted when I went along to a nice little display by Paul Freyer at the converted Holy Trinity church near Regents park. It’s a wonderful gallery space, and the church setting automatically blesses the works with an iconoclastic bent.
Highlight is the following piece:
Photo by my girlfriend - ace photographer - See her Flickr feed here.
More Queues
I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to customer service and especially queues. I tend to take notes in my notepad when I see good examples and really bad examples of queuing systems. Though queues may seem trivial, understanding an optimising queues involves a skilful blend of load balancing mathematics and an understanding of the psychology of people waiting. The psychological understanding of recalled experiences is also essential to dampen any trauma to ensure repeat custom.
Donald Normal has written a pretty decent paper on the later, where he discusses the various methods for mechanically speeding up queues, creating the perception of fairness and most importantly, he concludes; leaving the customer with a positive feeling from the experience (which does not simply mean the shortest possible wait).
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/the_psychology_of_wa.html
Queues occur everywhere where a resource must be shared, and a basic grasp of consumer queues can really help when approaching more abstract queues such as the requirements pipeline vs engineering capacity, or even the order in which you respond to your work emails (in which case you are the shared resource).
I’m always happy to hear about good examples and bad if you have any, no matter how trivial - then let me know.
See also
- My post on Starbucks queues
10.22.08
A specific sort of innovation
The word innovation, is a bit like the word love. You want to save it for something really deserving. In the software and technology world, profuse usage of ‘innovation has lead to not only to cheapening of the word but has made it harder to distinguish true innovation from the background noise. As a small example: The use of an accelerometer does not automatically make your product innovative.
Last week I attended the kick off for the BT sponsored Small business week at their BT tower. Hosted by that bloke from Working lunch who isn’t Adrian Chilles, with a panel including Dragon’s Den’s Peter Jones, David Frost from the Chambers of Commerce and Maxine Benson from everywoman.com.
My favourite comment was from Peter Jones who said “What I mean by innovation is a very specific innovation which will generate success, like copying existing things which already work”.
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