james mckay dot net

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

After three weeks or so of running Ubuntu on my laptop at home as my primary OS, I reinstalled Windows on it yesterday evening. No doubt this is a move that will meet with howls of derision from everyone who expects me to be an über-geek, and the bearded sandal-wearing idealists who think that Microsoft should be nuked, but the fact is that I just don’t think much of Linux on the desktop. It’s more secure and more stable than Windows, and less prone to spyware and all that, and it has some great geeky features (I just love that 3D Sierpinski screensaver) but it has one big problem: visual aesthetics.

Besides Ubuntu’s depressing brown colour scheme, which makes it look like a plate of mince, the biggest problem is fonts. Ubuntu’s default out of the box fonts are ghastly, dumpy, squat monstrosities, and the rendering engines in both Gnome and KDE are pathetic, giving uneven stroke widths and nasty colour fringing even on the Windows core fonts, no matter what settings I used for the sub-pixel rendering. I think they must be using a similar approach to Apple, in attempting to preserve font shapes over and above on-screen crispness and readability, though Apple does it a lot better. Or maybe I’m just spoilt: once you have seen ClearType in action on Windows, the Linux sub-pixel font rendering seems pretty lame by comparison.

Another thing about Linux is software. I really missed Windows Live Writer, especially having used the new beta 2 version with its much improved WordPress support, and while I guess I could have tried installing it using Wine, I decided in the light of the fonts issue not to bother. There are a couple of equivalents available for Linux, such as Drivel, but they are nowhere near as slick as Windows Live Writer. I also much prefer Corel Draw (and Paint.NET for the simpler stuff) to the Gimp, Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, and of course I was missing out on Visual Studio.

This isn’t to say that I won’t be using Linux at all of course. I have been running Ubuntu servers on VMWare both at work and at home and I will almost certainly continue to do so. I don’t know if I’ll try a desktop installation of Ubuntu on VMWare though: when I’ve done this in the past it tends to get neglected somewhat, though it does occasionally come in useful for things such as testing cross-browser compatibility. However, I don’t think I’ll be making much use of it as a primary OS in the immediate future.

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Posted at 22:41 in Miscellany

I sometimes wonder why I bother wearing a cycle helmet when I take my bike in to work. As far as I’m aware they’re not a legal requirement here in the UK and personally I think that’s a Good Thing. I’ve been observing other cyclists when I go into work and back home again, and it seems that we helmet-wearers are definitely in the minority. They do make you feel safer, but I sometimes wonder if that feeling is more a palliative than anything else. They’re uncomfortable, they make your head sweat like crazy, they’re bulky and cumbersome, and they make you look a complete wuss. And if what Wikipedia says on the subject is to be believed, there is no conclusive evidence that they make the slightest bit of difference to safety in the first place.

Regardless of whether I wear a cycle helmet or not, one thing you’ll never see me wearing when I’m on my bike is lycra — that horrible figure hugging stuff that reveals the outlines of those parts of you which should really be treated with more modesty. It may be aerodynamic and all the rest of it, but personally I think it makes you look so awful that it’s embarrassing, even if you are fit and healthy. It screams that you’re one of those fitness freaks who view cycling as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end and don’t care if you end up looking a total prat in the process.

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Posted at 20:22 in Miscellany

I’ve been humbled. We played Trivial Pursuit at our church life group this evening. Guys versus gals. Everyone expected my team to win simply by virtue of the fact that I was on it, but unfortunately, we lost.

Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that I don’t know everything. Some people seem to think of me as a bit of a walking Wikipedia, and to be sure, maybe I have accumulated a bit too much useless information in my head from browsing said Wikipedia, but there is still a heck of a lot that I know absolutely nothing about. Such as celebrities, for instance.

The fact of the matter is that the latest version of Trivial Pursuit seems very celebrity oriented. I got the impression that the majority of the questions were about characters such as Britney Spears. Even some of the geeky questions were about Britney Spears. And I know nothing whatsoever about Britney Spears, other than that she’s a pop singer or something like that. I’ve never really followed the celebrity scene in any depth — I simply don’t tend to find it all that interesting.

I think this is probably why the ladies’ team won in the end though. Celebrities and the like tend to attract more interest from women. Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has published a book that goes into quite some detail about this kind of thing: he says that men’s brains are hard-wired for understanding and building systems, such as cars, computers and the offside rule in football, whereas women’s brains tend to focus more on empathising: subjects such as people, soap operas and Celebrity Big Brother. Make of that whatever you like (if you don’t like it, just put it down to the fact that he’s the cousin of the man behind Ali G and Borat) — I’m just making it my excuse for not sweeping the board with useless trivia about pop stars.

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Posted at 23:58 in Miscellany

The signs in stations on the London Underground direct you to platforms for a particular line heading in a particular direction — for example, the eastbound Circle Line, the northbound Jubilee line, and so on. The different lines are all colour coded — the Circle Line is yellow, the District Line is green, the Bakerloo Line is brown, and so on. With many platforms being shared by two or more lines, one would expect that the trains themselves would arrive indicating primarily which line they are running on, preferably with the same colour coding fairly prominent, right?

Wrong.

The trains themselves, and the notice boards on the platforms, indicate only which station is their final destination. There is no clear indication of exactly which line they are running on. When you are on a platform that is shared by two different lines, this can cause quite a bit of confusion if you are unfamiliar with the routes themselves, and, as is often the case on the Underground, you have only seconds to determine whether the train on the platform is the one you want or not before it closes its doors and heads off into the unknown.

Take what happened with the five of us who went up to MiniBar last night as an example. After some debate on the way back as to whether we should walk to Aldgate East or Liverpool Street station, we decided to head for the latter. At Liverpool Street, you head for the eastbound platform and take a Circle Line train. The Circle Line turns south then west after Liverpool Street and reaches Victoria after a dozen or so stops.

The train on the platform was the one for Barking. Okay, fine, where’s Barking? These trains stop for less than a minute, so rather than find a map and then look for Barking to see if this was the right line or not, we collectively decided to jump onto the train with only seconds to spare, and then ask questions.

We were halfway to the next station before we realised that Barking is, of course, at the end of the Hammersmith and City Line — i.e., heading in completely the wrong direction.

Not to worry, however. You get out at Aldgate East, cross over to the platform on the other side of the tracks, and catch the next District Line train heading west, arguing vigorously all the way about whose fault it was that you ended up on the wrong train in the first place.

The only problem is that you have the same problem on the other side. We had arrived on the platform and were scrutinising the map when a train came along. “Hammersmith via Kings Cross/St Pancras.”

The same individual who led us onto the wrong train in the first place now embarked on this one, and most of the rest of our party would have done so too, but for the fact that two of us had already figured out that this one was also operating on the Hammersmith and City Line, which does not go directly to Victoria, and would merely have taken us back to where we started.

Fortunately we managed to convince them to wait on the platform until we had determined which train was the right one before getting onto it, and eventually we ended up on the right train, but by this time, we were beginning to come to the conclusion that the game of Mornington Crescent bears a lot more resemblance to reality than originally intended.

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Posted at 09:06 in Miscellany

The next MiniBar meetup in London is on 20th April at the Truman Brewery, Corbet Place. I’ve been to it twice now and it’s a great time to meet up with web developers, Internet professionals, investors and general hangers-on, and geek out to loud music. April’s event looks set to be particularly popular because the featured presentation will be by Canonical — that’s Mark Shuttleworth’s company (of Ubuntu/space tourist fame). I am, of course, planning to be there.

Attendance is free, but you need to register for it if you want to go. Seems it’s filling up pretty quickly this time round, so you need to sign up sooner rather than later, as it’s limited to 150 people.

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Posted at 10:11 in Miscellany