james mckay dot net

I’ve been thinking a bit more about my blog and what to do with it.

Content wise, it seems to have pretty much settled down into a topical blog, concentrating largely on software development and the surrounding culture. I sometimes wonder if it’s become a bit too impersonal lately though — perhaps some more non-work-related posts are in order.

I’d like to get a regular rhythm up and running too. Scott Hanselman wrote recently about your blog’s "heartbeat" — how often you post in particular. Mine has been somewhat variable in the past, between one and nine posts a month, though I like to try and post at least once a week if I can. This month I’ve decided to try something new, so I’ve written a bunch of posts ahead of time and set them to go live automatically every Monday and Thursday. Anything on top of that is a bonus. Perhaps I should have done that at the start of September, when first I was off on holiday in Scotland and then when we came back we had a church media fast. Some people write twenty or more blog entries a month — personally it beats me how on earth they find the time to do so, and contribute to various open source projects, and get any work done, and have any kind of a social life to speak of.

As far as technology is concerned, I’ve decided to stick with WordPress for the foreseeable future. Architecturally it may be completely wonky, and you may need to keep a constant eye out for security updates, but in terms of features it is the best blogging software available and pretty much a de facto standard, and there is little reason to switch to anything else.

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Posted at 14:00 in Miscellany

Our church is organising a communication and media master class on 19-20 October with Mal Fletcher. This is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in using media in a Christian context. Mal Fletcher is one of those guys who is pretty hip with using modern technology and Web 2.0 and so on to communicate. I gather that the last time he was here, he was getting everyone excited about blogging, podcasting and the like. Unfortunately I missed that particular meeting so I don’t know exactly what he said, but the feedback sounded pretty good. His websites, nextwaveonline.com and edges.tv, have a lot of interesting and effective articles, videos and documentaries on various social issues that affect us all these days.

I often think it would be particularly good to see churches making much more effective use of blogging in particular to communicate their message. Blogging has a much more personal, authentic feel to it than traditional websites, especially if comments are enabled so that visitors can feel part of the discussion. For some reason, blogs don’t seem to have a particularly high profile on most major ministries’ websites though.

(For anyone wanting to get into blogging in a Christian context, The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch is a must-read.)

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Posted at 14:00 in Miscellany

My computer had slowed down to a crawl. Since it was a while since I last defragmented the hard disk, I decided to give that a try — only to find that my primary partition (of 48 gigabytes) was almost completely full.

When you are confronted with something like this, you need some kind of utility that will give you a graphical report of all the directories on your hard drive, so you can quickly drill down and see where it has all gone.

A quick Google search led me to JDiskReport. It is a Java application that scans your entire hard disk and produces a report that you can easily drill down to find the culprit. There are some commercial (shareware) programs knocking around that do much the same thing, but this one is free, which is pretty nice.

You can easily drill down through your directories — it lists the biggest ones first — and zoom in on anything particularly horrendous. In my case, the worst offenders appeared to be Google Desktop Search, two gigabytes of photos that I no longer need, and stacks of backup files and things. In the end I managed to clear out about seven gigabytes of disk space. Perhaps I should clear out more — my user profile would be better off on the much larger D:\ drive for instance with the rest of the data files. I like to keep as much free space on my primary partition as possible to avoid hurting performance.

Unfortunately it seems a bit sluggish on Windows — it took nearly twelve minutes to scan all 48 gigabytes of my primary partition. I suspect this is probably more to do with Windows than the application itself though. There is a similar feature built in to Ubuntu and it is pretty responsive by comparison. Then again, I have always found Windows a bit slow with some file operations (especially moving and deleting) compared to their Linux equivalents.

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Posted at 18:22 in Miscellany

Can somebody please explain to me why the pointy-haired bosses in the Scottish transport office have a fetish for ridiculously low speed limits at roadworks? It’s down to thirty miles an hour on the motorway leading up to the Forth Road Bridge and ten miles an hour on a stretch of the A90 a few miles south of Aberdeen.

I’ve never encountered speed limits that low in comparable situations south of the border, but then again there are other factors at play back home. The sheer volume of traffic on the M25 reduces things to a complete crawl at times, for instance.

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Posted at 00:30 in Miscellany

It seems that scarcely a week goes by these days without someone launching Yet Another Social Networking Site. There are more of them knocking around these days than you can shake a stick at: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Jaiku, Wayn, Twitter, Second Life, LiveJournal, meetup.com … the list goes on.

Pownce is one of the latest newcomers, and I got an invite for it just before Faith Camp. It was founded by various Web 2.0 entrepreneurs including Kevin Rose of Digg fame and launched about a month or so ago with great fanfare. Its purpose, as it says on the home page, is to “send stuff to your friends”:

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

Right. So what exactly does it do that you can’t already do with a combination of MSN Messenger and either Facebook or MySpace?

It seems that your home page on Pownce shows the latest things that you and all your friends have posted on the site, so to make the most of it you need to have a network of friends who are using it. Visually, it looks pretty slick, and the concept seems similar in some ways to Twitter, but it still seems a bit pointless to me.

Social networking sites can absorb a lot of your time if you let them. You can spend hours on Facebook alone, and with a plethora of new ones on the scene it can be hard to keep track of all of them. However, most of my friends only make regular use of the biggest, best known and most useful ones: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and maybe one or two others.

I wonder a bit if Web 2.0 is reaching saturation point somewhat. Or is it just another sign of the times we live in, where just as society re-invents itself every fortnight, the latest and greatest Internet phenomenon is a constantly and rapidly moving target?

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Posted at 14:08 in Miscellany

Since I am at our annual Faith Camp this week and spending copious amounts of time in a sheep shed with only a slow Internet connection over my mobile phone, I am spending very little time online this week. Hey, what do you expect? This isn’t RailsConf — there isn’t a MacBook or an Ubuntu T-shirt in sight…

I have found in recent months that spam comments are sneaking past my arsenal of defences at a rate of about three or four a week, so I have set my blog to moderate comments until I get back. So if you leave a comment and it does not appear immediately, please bear with me. Anything legitimate should be dealt with by the start of next week.

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Posted at 13:03 in Miscellany

So I finally succumbed to pressure from my friends and colleagues and got myself onto Facebook. This may come as a bit of a surprise given my rather low opinion of MySpace, but then again, while there are similarities, Facebook is not MySpace.

What is the difference? Two things. One is aesthetics. There are none of these awful seizure-inducing profile pages with illegibly tiny pink text on an orange background, and no annoying background music, and in their place is a slick, clean, responsive, easy to use Ajax driven interface.

The second — and much more important — thing: developers, developers, developers. MySpace has hitherto had something of a reputation for sending in the legal heavies after people who write widgets and add-ons for the platform. Facebook is the exact opposite, and positively encourages it, having released a complete API with full instructions on how to make a Facebook application.

This makes it the Swiss Army Knife of social networking websites, since there is so much that you can do with the platform. You can integrate Facebook with a whole lot of other services such as your own WordPress blog (my own blog posts get reproduced on my Facebook profile via the RSS feed) or even Wikipedia if you are that way inclined. A particularly useful application that has recently been launched is Google Reader Shared Items, which allows you to share interesting items in your RSS feeds with your friends very easily. Scoble loves it.

I think sites such as Facebook are also well placed to supplant e-mail as the primary one-to-one communication means of the Internet. Because you set up a network of friends, there is an element of trust there that makes it much easier to filter out spam, phishing and viruses. Of course, these nefarious characters tend to be a pretty crafty bunch, so vigilance is still necessary, but since there is an identifiable element of trust there, it is easier to filter it out or even block it altogether, by setting your profile so that only people you have accepted as friends can contact you through the system.

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Posted at 23:22 in Miscellany

Can any of the masses of early adopters who succumbed to all the hype about the iPhone please tell me whether or not it acquires a life of its own the moment you put it in your pocket?

My present mobile phone (an Orange SPV C600) does exactly that. It has a very nasty habit of taking photos of nothing, filling my address book with mysterious characters called “dddddddd111111111″, and dialling all sorts of random numbers completely at random, including the emergency services, and it is getting extremely annoying. And yeah, I do lock the keypad before I pocket it, but it still misbehaves.

Those phones that flip open like the communicators from the original series of Star Trek are great in this respect. Because they flip closed over the keyboard, you don’t get your keys rubbing up against them and setting them off all over the place.

It is a fundamental and absolute necessity that my next mobile phone behaves perfectly in my pocket rather than like a spoilt child throwing a tantrum. The iPhone may be the coolest, hippest, trendiest gadget on the face of the planet, but unless I can have a rock solid guarantee that it meets this one essential criterion, I don’t want to know.

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Posted at 19:12 in Miscellany

Well just a couple of days after I reinstalled Windows on my laptop, the screen finally decided to die. This means that until I get it replaced, I’m offline in the evenings and at weekends. It’s about time I replaced my laptop anyway though. It’s now nearly four years old, and while it’s still perfectly serviceable, it’s beginning to get a bit geriatric in computer terms now. It weighs a ton and feels like having a fan heater sitting on your lap, it gets that hot.

I think this will give my wrists a bit of a well-earned rest. They’ve been getting a bit sore with my recent experiments with /(Dvor|Colem)ak/. Shai Coleman, the designer of Colemak, responded to a comment that I made on the Colemak forums saying that you do experience some discomfort initially, but it goes if you persist. However, I am still on qwerty at work and that isn’t likely to change now.

I’ll still be blogging when I get a chance, however. I’ll just be relying on pen and paper a lot more for the first draft of each entry. I think this speeds up the process somewhat though. I tend to be something of a perfectionist at times: I find it all too easy to either (a) over-research my blog posts, or (b) spend too long editing, chopping and changing them, and just having a pen and paper puts a bit of a restraining hand on me from both these tendencies, since I have to write it all offline in one pass without recourse to Wikipedia.

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Posted at 18:13 in Miscellany, Typing

Robert Scoble mentioned a few days back that large software companies don’t like their developers talking to the press. This, he says, is because their PR departments know fine that we developers (a) don’t tend to be all that good at PR kinds of things, and (b) have a tendency to tell “the unvarnished truth”.

I sometimes wonder if this is a bit self-perpetuating, somehow. That kind of thing means that your average enterprisey geek doesn’t get to see how PR operates, so they haven’t a clue. In a small company, it’s different. When you are sitting cheek by jowl with the PR department, you get a first hand experience of what not to say to the clients. You soon learn, for example, that expressing a lack of confidence in your own products is generally a bad move.

However, I think a lot of it is down to differences in perception. When you are a sales guy, your job is to get the clients to sign on the dotted line. You tend to make bold statements that instil confidence in the client. You don’t tend to worry if you’re promising them a holodeck, a dozen tricorders and a warp drive. Making sure that it actually can get you to Alpha Centauri in one piece in less than a week is Not Your Problem.

We developers tend to be much more cautious, however. We see what goes on underneath the covers: the stack of outstanding issues in the bug tracker, the multiple copy-and-paste jobs of four hundred line functions by the previous developer, and the fact that one of the other developers on the project is called Paula Bean. When you’re staring that in the face every day, the glowing statements by the PR guys start to sound like barefaced lies.

The other thing, however, is that just because a developer thinks that the code is rubbish doesn’t mean that it actually is. We tend to be an opinionated bunch, and we usually have pretty strong views on things such as what language to use, stored procedures versus dynamic SQL, or even tabs versus spaces. We tend to get into Religious Wars about this kind of things, and some developers even regard people who take an opposing stance to them as total idiots.

The fact of the matter is that the best developers are hopeless perfectionists for whom “good enough” is never good enough. We encounter so many bugs that we worry somewhat in case a disastrous one will slip through the net. Usually our worries are unfounded, of course — that’s why we have quality assurance guys — but we don’t want to be the ones that get sued if everything does hit the fan.

The time that you really need to worry is if a developer tells you, “There are no bugs in our software.” Every developer with more than zero experience knows that this is never true, and if he actually says it, it’s an indication that either (a) he is telling a bare-faced lie, or (b) his testing is woefully inadequate. (I speak from experience here. A while ago I got an e-mail from the lead developer of a commercial software package that said just that. The program was so buggy that it was almost unusable.)

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Posted at 21:45 in Miscellany