james mckay dot net

My daily commute consists of a fifteen minute bike ride to Horsham station, fifty-five minutes on the train into London, and a twenty minute walk from London Victoria to the place where I spend most of my day staring at a computer screen before repeating the process in reverse. When you’re spending a little over three hours a day getting from A to B and back again, it’s essential to have a suitable means of humping your assorted bits and pieces around, so before I embarked on this particular adventure, I paid a visit to Millets in Horsham town centre and bought myself a rucksack that I thought would fit the bill perfectly.

At the time I thought the rear airflow system of the Berghaus Freeflow 20 rucksack was a bit of a killer feature. My old rucksack (which was ten years old and falling to bits) had been giving me a sweaty back on my bike all summer, and I figured that since my daily quota of exercise was just about to double, anything to reduce that effect would be more than welcome.

Unfortunately, this comes at a price. The struts that hold it away from your back seriously reduce the amount of space that you have at your disposal. Most of the time it isn’t too bad, but sometimes it seems very inflexible somehow. There are occasions when I want to be able to take a couple of books with me as well as a change of clothes for the journey home if the weather deems it necessary to do so, or maybe even just stop off for some shopping. Thanks to the way they curve away from your back, my Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard almost refused to fit into it at all. Helpful, that was not.

So last week I went and bought another new rucksack. It’s a different Berghaus model, without the rigid struts this time, which makes it much more flexible, as well as giving it a a slightly higher capacity of 25 litres instead of 20. Despite the lack of air flow between it and my back, so far it hasn’t been making me sweat like crazy, but then again, I have been getting a better diet in recent months than I was a year ago, when I was having KFC for lunch almost every other day.

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Posted at 08:00 in Miscellany

I thought I’d better mention this because one or two people have been giving out the wrong e-mail address for me, and it could cause delays in getting your message through to me.

The e-mail address that I use for personal e-mail is the one that appears in the right hand sidebar on my blog (”thecooldude” address at james mckay dot net). This is the address that you should use for anything not related to my employment as it has survived three changes of job in the past five and a half years and is likely to remain stable for as long as the domain jamesmckay.net remains under my control.

Although my personal e-mail gets forwarded on to my GMail account, I don’t publicise my GMail address for two reasons. First, I’ve set it up to highlight e-mail which gets sent to my “official” personal address as warranting my special attention, so anything that goes direct to my GMail address instead runs the risk of getting lost in the torrent of newsletters, invoices, Facebook spam and other floccinaucities. Second, I am not making any commitment to using GMail for this purpose indefinitely, so one way or another, Your Mileage May Vary if you send mail direct to that address.

My work e-mail address should only be used for matters related to my work. Needless to say, my old e-mail addresses at my former employers (james.mckay@eurekastep.com and james.mckay@kingdomfaith.com) are ancient history and no longer reach me.

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Posted at 20:53 in Miscellany

Now when you announce on your blog that you are starting work in an establishment such as Parliament, you naturally brace yourself for at least a modest increase in web traffic. After all, when your place of employment features prominently on the front page of almost every newspaper in the country several times a week, people do tend to take an interest, even if you are a serious INTJ blogger writing a serious INTJ blog about technology that is not work related. You certainly don’t expect your Feedburner subscriptions to drop overnight from 50 to fifteen.

However, that was what happened to me, and it had me scratching my head a bit. What kind of people would hit the “unsubscribe” button on reading that kind of news? I know that certain individuals in Westminster get a bit of a bad press from time to time, but surely there isn’t some kind of deep-seated prejudice out there that extends to those of us whose role is to spend the entire day looking at computer screens doing fancy things with XML?

It turns out that the cause was actually somewhat more mundane. The day after I posted that particular entry, I moved my blog off my shared hosting account onto a new virtual server, and while it mostly went smoothly, I inadvertently missed out the Feedburner plugin that had been redirecting my feeds. So anyone who had subscribed to the WordPress default http://jamesmckay.net/feed/ rather than the Feedburner version at http://feeds.feedburner.com/jamesmckay would not have been counted. Okay, download latest version of plugin, install, activate, and after 24 hours, the figure on my Feedburner widget is beginning to look a little bit more respectable again.

End of story? Not quite.

For the past couple of years or so, I’ve subscribed to my own blog in Google Reader. This is mainly a diagnostic thing — it shows how long it’s taking for my blog entries to show up (it frequently takes up to about three or four hours), and that everything is displaying correctly. Now Google Reader caches old blog entries, and for as long as I could remember, the oldest one that has appeared in my list was the entry, “Pastors, get blogging!” back in November 2006. This is what you will see if you have subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/jamesmckay.

Anyway, I decided to unsubscribe from my feed and re-subscribe — only to find that Google Reader had lost track of all my blog entries except the last ten.

It turns out that this is because my Feedburner feeds are now being redirected to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/jamesmckay, which Google Reader treats as a completely separate feed.

A little bit of experimentation confirmed this. My blog’s feed URL can take several different forms — it works with a trailing slash or without, with a “www.” subdomain or without, and so on. By constructing it in different ways when you plug it into Google Reader, you can get different posting histories. The longest one seems to be http://www.jamesmckay.net/feed which goes back to February 2006.

This behaviour is only to be expected, of course. I’m sure that Google could identify when two different URLs point to the same feed, and could treat similar looking ones that give the same content as one and the same. I’m sure too that they could deliver a tighter integration between Feedburner and Google Reader in this particular respect. However, that could be an over-engineered solution capable of introducing all sorts of other problems. It would have been far better if they’d just left the feed at its original location rather than chopping and changing all over the place.

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Posted at 12:04 in Miscellany

The recent dramatic events on US Airways Flight 1549 will no doubt be getting a few people wondering about what’s the safest way of flying.

It turns out that those of us whose budgets are limited to economy class can take heart from the knowledge that scheduled airlines come out top, and private jets come out bottom.

According to this statistics page, if you fly by private jet, you are up to twenty-five times more likely to be killed in an air accident than if you spend the same amount of time flying on scheduled airlines.

Apparently, airliners have 0.089 fatalities per 100,000 flight hours. General aviation has 2.305. Small commuter planes notch up 1.230. Granted, the “general aviation” figure no doubt includes flying schools and stunt planes, but one would expect private jets to fit in somewhere near the “commuter plane” category. So the difference is still an order of magnitude at least.

(Hat tip: Matt Hellyer.)

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Posted at 15:15 in Miscellany

The answer: that someone reached my blog by typing that very question into Google. It’s been a while since I last went through my Google Analytics search results, but when I did recently, I also discovered that people arrived here by searching for curiosities such as “busker in kilt bath” or “cool stuff that ten year olds like to put on descktop” (sic) or “dentist torture” or “deliverance ministry in horsham uk”. And so, as another year has drawn to a close, here are some more particularly interesting searches from 2008, that I will take a moment or two to comment on:

“corporate dressing, corridors of power”

Does Google know too much about me?! When I came across this one, I had said almost nothing about my new job on my blog. But yes I am expected to wear a tie (except during recess and on non-sitting Fridays) — however, it doesn’t really bother me.

“curiosities of the number 23″

Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive list. Including, as ever, “in popular culture.”

“how not to look a prat in a cycle helmet”

Simple: don’t wear one. Obviously, if you are concerned about safety, or live in a jurisdiction where the law demands it, this is not an option. You’ll just have to put up with looking a prat.

“how do you pronounce mckay”

It rhymes with “eye,” not with “day.” Even Stargate Atlantis and the folks on the History Channel who interview a well known exobiologist who shares his surname with me get it wrong. Sigh. But talking of Stargate Atlantis, someone asked:

“what programming language do they use on stargate atlantis for the machines”

Hmmm, I don’t know whether Stargate Command use .NET and C#, as whoever searched for “stargate c# dot net” must have been thinking, but apparently, it turns out that the Replicators are programmed in JavaScript. It also seems that one visitor to my blog thinks that there is a “stargate near m6 motorway”.

You really wonder sometimes…

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Posted at 00:00 in Miscellany

It’s now just under three years since I started working for EurekaStep Ltd, and it’s been a pretty good time. EurekaStep is a small but friendly company and a great place to work, and you get to serve some very interesting clients with some very interesting technology.

However, the time has now come for me to move on, and so in the middle of January I will be taking up full time employment in the Houses of Parliament.

My job title will be Analyst Programmer and my responsibilities will be to take what goes on in the Commons Chamber, the various Select Committees, and so on, turn it into XML, mash it about a bit with copious quantities of XSLT, and spit out web pages and Word documents that then get sent on to news agencies around the world.

This isn’t actually entirely new to me. I’ve spent the past three and a half months in Parliament already on placement from EurekaStep, doing pretty much that anyway. This was intended to be a stop-gap for them while they recruited some new developers, but I ended up applying for one of the jobs myself, and to cut a long story short, I got it. It’s quite an exciting change nonetheless, since I’m working on-site in a team of about ten or so developers, plus a whole raft of project managers, Enterprise Architects, web designers, producers and other key stakeholders. Up until three years ago, I was the only developer on the projects I worked on, and over the past three years, most of the other developers that I’ve had to work with have been based off-site. That works up to a point, but you can get so much more out of the real-time collaboration that comes from being in the same room, bouncing ideas off your fellow developers, and so on.

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Posted at 15:00 in Miscellany

Pretty much every antivirus software package that I have ever used has a really annoying flaw. Whenever it launches into a full system scan, it slows your computer down so much that it hardly even responds to your keyboard and mouse. Given that a typical PC has up to half a million files knocking around on the hard disk, such a scan takes a good couple of hours at least.

It seems that when they perform a scan, they process the files back to back, which results in a lot of churning of your hard disk as the heads continually seek all over the place to find the next one. The fact that they’re both processor intensive (with fairly complex heuristics and pattern matching algorithms) and hard disk intensive means that during this time, they effectively brick your PC for a good two hours or so.

I’d have thought it would be fairly easy for them to fix this, by introducing a pause between each file (or each chunk of a file, for larger files) to give your computer a chance to respond to user input in a timely fashion. They could go in to a fast mode if you were running a screensaver, but while you’re actually trying to get some work done, you really want them to ease off the gas.

Unfortunately, I’ve not yet come across any antivirus programs that do this. Why not?

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Posted at 19:10 in Miscellany

Although I don’t drink alcohol, I am not averse to socialising in a pub from time to time, especially now that smoking in enclosed public places is illegal. However, you naturally expect a few raised eyebrows when you order something non-alcoholic, if not outright peer pressure to go for something inebriating.

Surprisingly, I find that almost nobody ever bats an eyelid, and I suspect that it’s because I always order a Diet Coke. It helps if you insist on Diet Coke rather than normal Coke, with ice cubes and a slice of lemon: the embellishments have a somewhat distracting effect that makes it easier to overlook the fact that none of them contain C₂H₅OH.

On the other hand, I don’t recommend orange juice, unless you want to draw attention to the fact that you intend to remain sober for the entire evening. In situations like that, it makes you look like a stereotype.

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Posted at 09:00 in Miscellany

If you’ve ever done anything with XSLT, you’ll no doubt be wondering why anyone would want to use such a verbose programming language, given that you need to churn out code such as this all over the place:

<xsl:element name="foo">
  <xsl:attribute name="bar">
    <xsl:value-of select="/some/xpath/@expression" />
  </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:element>

However, did you know that you can do this instead? Much cleaner and easier to read:

<foo bar="{/some/xpath/@expression}" />

(Hat tip: Ned Batchelder)

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Posted at 08:00 in Miscellany

I’ve made a few observations after ten weeks of daily commuting to London.

The unpleasantries of the rush hour can be alleviated somewhat by choosing your train carefully and getting on at the right place. I always catch the 07:25 train to London Victoria at Horsham and go for the rearmost carriage, and so far I have had a 100% success rate at getting a window seat. Most of the stations between Bognor Regis and Crawley have short platforms, and consequently the front of the train is generally much more packed out than the rear. I do not recommend getting on at Littlehaven: its platform is only four coaches long, but more people get on the train there than at Horsham, and it can be a bit of a crush at times. Then you have to jostle past people through several coaches in order to get a seat.

This effect is even more pronounced on the way home in the evenings. On Thursday I made the mistake of going for one of the front four coaches, and even though I had a seat, it was not a pleasant experience. The entire Littlehaven crowd pile in to the front four coaches right from the word go, rather than spreading themselves more evenly through the train and moving forward once we get to Crawley. This means that the back of the train is definitely the place to be if you are disembarking elsewhere.

I avoid the Underground like the plague. London buses may be a bit of a lottery in terms of overcrowding — I’ve had both good and bad experiences on the 507 — but at rush hour, the Underground is guaranteed to be so packed out that it makes a Kenyan matatu look like an intergalactic void. However, as I am working just under a mile from Victoria, it is cheaper, less crowded and more healthy to walk, as well as giving you a good bit more elbow room at only minimal cost in terms of time.

Finally, the best place to sit in a train is near the middle of a carriage. You get a pretty smooth ride there, whereas by contrast you get jolted about quite a lot near the ends of the carriage. It’s much the same reason as why the middle of a boat is where you’re least likely to be seasick: the carriage acts a bit like a lever, so the ends tend to wiggle about a lot more. Another thing about the ends of the carriage is that they can be a lot noisier if the doors at the end get jammed open.

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Posted at 09:00 in Miscellany