previously known as [cold][wet][durham], [dirty][grimy][london],[busy][shiny][toon],[frantic][crowded][south]
Cocktails. I love making them, but I don’t really drink them (though I enjoy a good martini) but the white russian, and its grumpy teenage child the black russian, captive me at the moment. With their coffee tones, and warming goodness, even though they are cold, they are like a hug.
Image by Getty Images via Daylife The news is full of tales about the youth crime, gangs, “the break down of the family” and “the break down of society”. It’s very fashionable to blame drugs, schooling, teen parents, lone parents, teachers, drugdealers, politians and a hundred other people.
Well, I’m sitting watching Nick Broomfield’s film “Nobody Cares“, which was filmed in 1971, about the relocation to tower blocks of families from terraced housing in Liverpool. Its heartbreaking, moving, and everything that a documentary should be.
Nothing is new, there are no new problems, as I was once told by a manager at an IT firm, and maybe thats true.
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The UK really is the home of innovation, really it is. It’s not been a week since Twitter announced they are not going to be able to provide an SMS service in the UK (I’d not even finished my blog post about Orange missing a huge opertunity here) and already a small UK firm has stepped in to fill the gap.
Tweeteroo is run by those crazy kids at Senokian, and run a service whereby your Direct Messages from Twitter will be forwarded to your mobile for a few pence (probably just the service charge I think). As I only ever had DM’s directed to my mobile and each and every tweet (because that would be just silly), it replaces exactly the functionality that I lost, probably for less than a fiver a month (I’m not that popular).
To sign up you’ll need a code - but give “coldclimate” a go - there are 10 up for grabs.
Impressive work Jake and team.
Image via WikipediaI’m staying in a hotel this evening. It’s rather nice, with a great room and a lovely view. For £150 midweek it should be however, especially as there is little to no reason to stay here on business as far as I can tell. I don’t begrudge them the 150 notes, it is not an unreasonable price.
I do however begrudge the price of everything else. The hotel bar is charging nearly a fiver for a pint of Carling, inexpertly poured by a teenager. I used to be a senior member of staff at a very busy bar, and the “bar top price” of a pint of Carling (eg. the cost of it sitting in a glass, staff paid, rent paid, all in, everything else is profit, price) was around 60p, given or take. This is not so many years ago that this is not a relative point. I imagine it is about £1. I balk at paying over £3 for a glass of fizzy crap, but over a fiver is having a “giraffe” as the rhyming slang suggests.
Next daft price is the room service. I have absolutely no doubt that the pizza that is listed will be little more than cheese on toast. I’ll be lucky is it’s been in an oven not a microwave, and I’ll eat my own hat (probably a tastier option) if there is any sembalence of thin crispy crusty or finest buffalo mozzarella* as promised. Any American or Italian with even the slighted jingoistic national pride would hurl it in the face of the underpaid youth who will bring it to the door and demand a refund.
Why a refund? Because this tasty treat will set you back a full £15. It the fucker is bigger than 7″ across I would be staggered meaning that it is (PI*3.5^2)/15 = 2.5 square inches were pound or 50p for a postage stamp sized piece. This is before you find the footnote which politely informs you that ” All room service dishes incur a standing fee of £2″ meaning that this pizza is now £17!
So hotel owners, listen up. I have no problem with paying you for a room, that is after all what I’ve come for, and I’ll even stump up for food and beers, but not at prices which make me feel like I am being fucked with my pants still on. You know very well that I’m not going to pop out to get a takeaway**, or a 4 pack of beers, so you take the liberty of snatching my cash whilst I am hostage in your padded cell. Shame on you.
* All mozzarella is made from buffalo milk, or it is not mozzarella just gooey cheese. It one more fashionista foodie tells me about Buffalo Mozzarella, I shall scream and probably try to kill them with asparagus. Paddy, I am looking at you here (not that I think you’ll read this)
** I often work away form home in hotels, and often do go out for food because the hotel restaurant looks like a scene from a bad British comedy in the 1970s. One evening I brought an indian takeaway back to my room (I was up late coding) and as I passed through the reception the little man behind th desk informed me I could not bring my own food and drink onto the premises. he could not explain why - it was just “the rules”. I ignored him, went to my room, ate and slept. In the morning the manager demanded to know why I didn’t get room service. I explained (as loudly as possible in front of other guests) I had seen a rat in the corridor (a lie I admit) leading me to think the kitchens were not sanitary. Let this be a lesson all of you trumped up mini-Hitlers.
I used to work in a team which took all of it’s work from tickets raised in a queuing system. It was a simple way for people around the world to raise requests to us and for the team to manage their work load.
Each ticket has an area of work (so the right people could pick it up), a description, and a priority rating. Exactly as you would expect. People were really good as being vague in the description (”server down”, oh really? which of the 47 server are you talking about kid?), and the area of work (UNIX Systems Administrators are not Oracle DataBase Admins) but these sort of problems were easily dealt with, and gave me a daily chance to tell some poor tetsing newbie they were an idiot.
Priority rating was a problem that we never cracked however. The original software had three priority ratings, which were pickable from a drop-down menu, Low, Medium and High. Of course, everybody considers their problem to be the most important thing in the world and they pick High. With a huge queue of jobs all labelled as High it gets difficult for people to spot the genuinely high priority job (”The entire test suite is unaccessable”) from the very-important-to-one-person problem (”my password has expired”).
After a while things got so bad that a real “Us and Them” mentality had developed, with people raisng tickets automatically picking High (because it turned out that their management staff were compiling graphs showing how bad our teams response times were) and the technical teams working in a strickly “first come first served” method (”Well they’re all labelled High so we’ve no way to tell them apart”). Something had to be done.
I had 2 possible solutions, adding a new priority rating and splitting the priority ratings into 2 parts.
Firstly - adding a new rating. I suggested we have a “Zero” priority rating. Many of the things raised were routine, and thus did not demand an immediate responce. For example a request to ” Please backup the Environment One database from cold next Tuesday” raised a week in advance could have a zero rating. The backup team will take 5 minutes to slot it into the schedule, and they have a week to do it. Sadly this solution was not adopted.
Secondly - splitting the Priority. Having a single variable of “priority” doesn’t distinguish how damaging this situation is. I suggested we break it into two options: Urgency and Impact. The Urgency gives a level of immediate, so by example, “Environment One is unaccessible” is of High level of Urgency. “My backup needs doing next week” would have a low level of Urgency.
Impact ratings give a view of how damaging this issue is. The backup example has a high level of Impact, as does the inaccessible environment (if people are actively using it). A user who has locked their password out has a high level of Urgency, but a low level of Impact.
Of course, all of these ratings systems need simple guidelines to help people judge how to rate their problems, and people will always pick one rating higher than they really should, but maybe methodologies like this can help.
As for my old team and the escalating wars between Us and Them, well, a solution was found in the end. A new Priority was added, “Critical”, and everybody started using it instead. Words were exchanged, tempers raised, blood pressure raised, and I engineered my way out of the team and off to a different job. When the frantic levels of work dropped off aparently the system works again, but I can’t help thinking that it still has a fatal flaw.
I’ve written, and written about, 6 word stories, several times in the past, but finally today I got my arse in gear any made … 6 Word Stories. You can read the last ten stories submitted, and submit your own.
Go, read, write, enjoy, etc etc.
In the last week I must have driven nearly a thousand miles, which given the current price of petrol*, and the size of the UK is not bad going. Something made me think of a game my ex used to play (or that she told me about anyway) called Car Flirting. It seemed an idea too good to only be stuck in my head (which cannot sleep at present) and hers (and I suspect she no longer plays).
The idea is simple: by regulating your speed, you try and flirt with other drivers.
You pick a “target”, that being a car which you think is likely to contain somebody you fancy. As a student this meant spotting a Golf or other small affordable car. You then siddle up to them, and overtake, so you get to have a look at them. If it’s a hottie, then give them a smile as you go past, if you’ve mis-selected, then simply get your foot down and head for the next target.
Should you have selected well and the car you passed contained a boy/girl whom you wished to play with, pull in in front of them, or possibly a car or to in front of them. After a while, long enough for them to have dwelled on you a bit, slow down enough such that they end up having to pass you. etc etc.
I’ve no idea if she ever had any luck with the technique (I doubt it was really a valid method of meeting a life partner), or where or not it was just a way to pass the time on long motorway journeys (she lived at one end of the country, university was at the other), but until today the idea hadn’t re-occured to me. I gave it a quick go, but to be absolutely honest, I spend more time avoiding middle lane sitters, speed cameras, BMW drivers and Vans Who Move Lanes Without Indicating to make enough spare brain cycles to devote to trying the make nice with other drivers. Such is life.
* Dearest American cousins, if I hear one more of you on our news grumbling about $4 a gallon for “gas” I shall explode. Try $2.50 a litre, what is what it roughly is in the UK.
Rarely will these tips be of practical to anyone, but you never know…
So, today I’ve been smoking hard. Smoking trout, smoking salmon, smoking cheese, smoking garlic, smoking onions, smoking everything under the sun.
No ladies and gentlemen, I’ve not completely lost the plot and bought a massive pack of Rizlas, I’m been on one of Smoky Jo’s food smoking course. It’s a one day course, starting with coffee at the very civalised time of 9:45am. The day covered hot smoking (where the cook is cooked and eaten hot directly after) and cold smoking, for both home and commercial purposes.
Smoked Trout (and a sausage)
It was a fantastic day, and I was really lucky to meet Philip Holmes, who started (and runs) a charity called The Ester Benjamins Trust. He and a small band of people are doing some amazing work (watch some of the films on their YouTube channel). I wish him all the luck in the world with his ventures.
This week the papers (and indeed the venerable Today Programme) have been talkiong about Princess Anne wearing the same dress to two weddings, 27 years apart. What does it mean? Is she promoting recycling? Is it a fashion faux-pas? Dies it show how in touch with we proles she is and is a nod to the credit crunch? Is it a sign of how far from reality she is? It is fitting for a royal to be seen in public wearing something twice?
Now these are all interesting questions*, but the questions that people should be asking are
All I’ve heard form fashionista for the last year is “oh of course, I only wear vintage”. Vintage=old. Vintage=pre-worn. Every learly looking sex and the city wannabe I’ve seen on tv have been rambling on about how wonderful vintage clothes are, so why have they all turned on the Princess? This morning’s radio had a couple of mealy mouthed “fashion experts” having a dig about how it wasn’t “appropriate” or “fitting” or “the done thing”.
Personally, I don’t give a monkey’s about what Princess Anne wears, unless it’s completely ridiculous. I think most Manhatten swilling, coke snorting, Manolo Blahnik tottering “fashion experts” would kill to be able to fit into what they are wearing today in 27 years time, and it shows.
Somebody please make the following:
* Fabulous Cooking Blog : a photo blog curated by an aging New York socialit, all photos featuring over made-up hands, far too many wedding rings and mis-matched crockery. All measurements in the form of “2 martini glasses full of dried olives”, darling.
* Interviewing actors - can’t get an interview with the Prime Minister? Interview the person who plays him on telly!
Image via WikipediaRight - straight off the bat, I feel I should say I’m sure this does not apply to all BMW drivers, in fact my friend Adam has a wonderful M3 which he drives with great care, however …
BMW drivers - Stop Driving Like Wankers.
In the last two week I have been cut up, undertaken, tailgated and nearly forced off the road, and all by people driving BMWs. No Volvos, Audis, Saabs or other cars were involved, just BMWs.
When you’re doing 90mph in the outside lane of a dual carriageway (having just overtaken a run of trucks doing 65mph) the last thing you are expecting is for Mr Travelling Salesman in his 325 who came with out on the overtake to put his foot down and undertake. I was about to pull in. I was already doing 25mph ove the speed limit. he was wearing sunglasses and a boxy shaped tie (at 7am).
What i it about owning one of these German penis replacements that makes people drive like a twat? Not that it’s only men I should point out (though I’m not sure what the female equivalent of “penis replacement” is) as the tailgating (again at speed on a motorway this time) was by a manic looking yummy mummy (complete with blond bangs and sunglasses) who sat rammed against the back of my car for a minute before flashing her lights, pulling round me and then cutting me up. Don’t get me wrong, 60mph middle lane sitters deserve everybody’s contempt, but if you are cracking on (and there is an outside lane for these people to overtake in) nearly nudging me from behind is not on.
So - by all means go and buy a Beemer. They’re lovely cars, but there are rules:
Buy a big one; nobody is impressed with your 1 series.
Buy a petrol one; because a 320d just makes me laugh.
Don’t drive like a twat; you have it in your power, and you’re enough muscle under your bonnet to do what you like, but undertaking and tailgating are not cool.
Besides, much like Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe, my care is cheap and easier to fix, and I will drag it down the side of your shiny ego-booster, and make you cry all the way to your renewable office supplies retail middle-management shindig at the Hilton Milton Keynes.
So - in the US a judge (who may or may not be a technically savvy person) has ruled that Google must handover 12 terabytes of information about who has watched what on YouTube to Viacom, who are pissed off that lots of their content is available in crap quality on YouTube. Thankfully the judge didn’t grant Viacom access to the source code for YouTube (which Viacom must have had a very weak case to request).
What does this mean? Well, the EFF has an in depth write up, the BBC has a good breakdown of it, but it does raise some questions which I can’t answer:
If ever there was one, here is a good case for joining the EFF and in the UK the Open Rights Group
EDIT: it would appear that Viacom are OK with taking anonymised data - it’s all about “how many not who“. Thanks JackP
Image by pixelant via Flickr
Oh Fail Whale, why do we love you so? After all, all you say to me is “Twitter is kanckered again - press press F5 a few times, and go away and come back another time”. I don’t really feel an anamosity towards twitter when it is suffering from tweet overload. There was one very annoying evening when I was waiting for somebody to tweet me where beers were that night and twitter was down, but apart from that, Twitter not being broken is no hardship. Twitter is fun, but my life revolves around it.
So whats so good about fail whale? He’s cute. He’s got a little smile. For no reason he appears to be asleep. I don’t understand what the picture is trying to say. Assuming the little birds are tweet, shouldn’t they be crashing into Fail Whale rather than trying to lift him up? Why does his tail look like a mustashe?
Who knows the answer to these questions, and frankly, who cares. By having an endearing page rather than a black on white corporate styled “There has been a problem, technical staff are looking into it, please speak to your systems administraigtor” borg page, twitter make me more tollerent of their problems.
He’s also created the cult of fail too (or did this exist previously?) Failblog (http://failblog.org/) for example, as well as the huge amount of people twittering “fail” (http://summize.com/search?q=%2Bfail+-whale)
a,b,c,d,e,f,g, AITCH, i,j,k,l,m,n…
Ladies and gentlemen, of the class of 1955 onwards. I may not be able to spell, my grammer is dreadful, my punctuation almost non-existant, but I am finally loosing the plot when people see incapable of saying the letter H correctly.
As I sit on the train, the half-wit who is speaking to everyone on a more than frequent basis keeps announcing “Coach Haitch is the quit coach, please don’t use your mobile phone in carrage Haitch”.
Cretins. It’s is not said Haitch, but aitch. I know the irony of not having the letter H in “aitch” is almost too much to bear, but if she says it once more, I will probably scream.
[editted: I did not scream, but I did grimmace loudly]
Image via Wikipedia
So, having left my analytical left brain job (or rather I will on Friday) to go and work in a more creative field, I was greatly heartened to read We’re not sporty, but when it comes to spelling we Indians are the bee’s knees, explaining why India (and China I suspect) are rising stars of the business world.
Why? Because I’m currently reading Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Combined with a few of Seth Godin’s books, and a very scary chat on a train which made me realise I was killing myself to better the investment of a bunch of other people, leaving my current job became obvious.
It’s scary, and I hate the word “quitting” (I’m not quitting the job because I can’t do it - I’m leaving to work else where). I could “stick” it for another ten years, but it would slowly kill me. I think leaving is the right thing to do. Everything I do can be outsourced (if not now then in three years), automated (less so than the outsourcing, but not impossible) or is simply unrequired.
Time to go learn some new skills, and invest in me a little bit more.
Finally somebody has made something which I rambled on about ages ago (and I imagine a load of other people did as well) and created …. A light Sabre fight game controlled by wiiMote!
I see lots of blog posting about developing web-apps and online stuff using agile-dynamic-insert-your-favorite-buzzword-methodology-here, but lots and lots of software is not developed in this way, and sometimes I think some of the lessons learnt developing monolithic and sprawling software can be useful to everybody, you AJAX powered-django hacking,python boys included.
A few years ago I was working in a big project which was deep into the long grass. The goalposts had moved, the Mythical Man Month was in effect and people were trying to reach their targets by any means possible. Test teams had stopped thinging about how the current development was going to go live and were closing cases any way possible.
Controlled development methods had broken down and the team who looked after the test and ev environments were being harrassed in person, so whilst trying to clone a database, upgrade an operating system and resolve somebody else’s crap SQL (”It’s a DBA issue!”) they had somebody standing over their shoulder and badgering them to do something else that was in their issue queue “now - it’s urgent”.
It was not a happy time, but it taught me a huge amount (including how to work shifts, but that’s another matter). I was going to have a list of all the things I learnt during this time, but they all come down to one phase, one which you can apply to lots of situations. It was first explained to be by a man who gave up computing to go and smoke dope and be a folk singer because “Cobol was rubbish” and came back to the industry to become a configuration management expert because he’d dried out and was now broke… “Do the important, not the urgent”.
The more “urgent” something is (and thus the noisier they are about you fixing it), the more likely that it is that somebody is stepping round the process and doing something that will eventually bite you in the arse. By solving their problem now you will be pulling the pin on a handgranade of pain for later.
For example, their test fails because of some crappy data in the test environment, so they get a DBA to clean the data up and now the test is passed. Problem is, that crap data also exists in your live environment, and the action to either clean up the data or bomb-proof the code never happens, because this bug is now closed. The “important” thing got missed because of the urgent thing.
“Doing the importnant, not the urgent” is a difficult thing to master, and a two pronged approach might be needed sometimes. In fact, I think it’s probably needed most of the time. Using the above example, a whole queue of batch-job testing might be stuck behind job1, which fails because somebody has changed their name by deed-pool to “~~$EXPORT .” (honest, some bugger will have done it). The test team can’t not test job2,3,4,5,6,7…87. (there’s a whle tale of poor batch job design here, but that’s for another day).
Instead of “fixing” the urgent data-problem, and not seeing this again until Mr ~~$EXPORT . buys something and can’t be billed for it, launch a two pronged attach made up of a) resolving this guys problem so he buggers off and b) putting into process a resolution to the root cause of the problem.
Absolutley the first thing to do is to explain this approach to the noisey man standing next to you. He just wants to hear that “the issue is fixed”, you have to explain that you’ll identify the root cause of whats making his life hell, give him a quick-step to work round it, but that he is responcible for fixing the root cause, but that you can probably help him with it.
So then you need to find the root cause of the problem. In this case that would be to confirm this man exists in the live environment and it’s not a bit of crap data inserted by a test harness. Mr ~~$EXPORT . is there in live is he? Job done (once you’re figured about a good way to escape charaters in SQL neatly - grrr).
Secondly, get the tester to raise a bug with the dev team to handle special characters in names and tie it to test scenatio job1. This will get the root cause (not that the man exisits, but that the code fails to parse him correctly).
Thirdly, give him the work around that doesn’t make the root cause vanish into the “solved bug blackhole”. Maybe fudge the data to show that job1 ran correctly, so that testing will continue.
End result, everybody is happy and the important has been done, not the urgent. The tester gets to move on, the bug will get fixed, and the test scenario for running job1 remains undone, so it will get run next time round once the bug is updated in the code respoitory to trigger it.
It all sounds so easy doesn’t it? Unfortunatly during the heat of client-facing testing, with deadlinea approaching and young managers involved, this methodology will get lost. Patches will be applied to just one test system. Database configuratio will get tweaked to make it perform better on the batch testing box and not on the online day testing box. Somebody will put a symlink into the directory so that something compiles instead of checking a load of libraries.
None of this will show up until you start cutover into the live system, or at best when you do a trial deployment into a live-like environment. If your controlled development processes are broken, worked round, or hotfixed, you are going to feel a huge amount of pain. Vast pain and probable embarrasment. It you have a couple of technical rock stars, you might just be able to pull the rabbit out of the hat at the last minute, but you really shouldn’t rely on it.
OK, so maybe thats over egging it a bit, but gone are the days where the statement that NASA have found ice on Mars looked like this, because the Mars Rover twitter feed has this on it this morning: “Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!”
Ah technology, I love you sweet.
It would appear the fat white right wing racists are getting a bit scared by the prospect of a black president and are having to play on peoples fears with piss poor jokes. You know the end is near when you have to fall back on campaigns such as “If Obama is president… can we still call it the white house“.
You pathetic pricks.
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