james mckay dot net

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

A couple of weeks ago I was treated to two new monitors — 20 inch wide screen flat Dell offerings, each with a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. These replaced a couple of excruciatingly old CRT behemoths that were occupying three quarters of my desk.

The new monitors can rotate on their stands, so you can have them in either a portrait or a landscape orientation. After a little bit of experimentation, I’ve plumped for having both of them upright.

This arrangement really comes into its own for coding: you can see ninety lines of code on one screenful without compromising clarity. This is quite helpful when you encounter a gargantuan 1,600-line function with loops and if statements a dozen levels deep, written by someone who has never read Martin Fowler’s excellent book on Refactoring.

The only thing is that having them vertical slows down the graphics card a bit for some reason — but since I’m not playing video games or watching DVDs at work, that doesn’t really matter. It’s also a bit odd when the machine boots up because the Windows splash screen appears on its side.

Some people like to have three or more monitors, but I’m not one of them. While two monitors are definitely much better than one, I find that a monitor arrangement that is too wide can be a bit uncomfortable when you’re constantly having to move your head through an angle of about 45° to get from one end of the screen to another. With my previous setup of two 21 inch CRT monitors, my applications all tended to congregate on the left hand screen, and when I had the new monitors in landscape orientation it felt even more awkward. However, with them both upright, it’s probably the best monitor arrangement I’ve ever had, since it provides an optimum ratio of screen real estate to required head movement to make the most of it.

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Posted at 13:30 in Miscellany

I received an unsolicited e-mail from MySpace this morning. Looks like it’s one of their usual circular newsletters. What makes this very strange is that I do not have a MySpace.

Okay, granted, I did have one once upon a time, but I never actually used it, and in the end I cancelled it. I was actually quite forthright in the comment box on the cancel my account option: I said that I have no time for an ad-ridden monstrosity that violates every accessibility guideline in the book and encourages you to parade a total absence of web design skills while encumbering your blog with search engine hostile URLs. They also have a fiendishly complex system for cancelling your account. You have to click through about seventeen “Are you sure?” links, and then they send you an e-mail message, after which you have to click through another “are you sure?” link, then they tell you it will still take 48 hours.

The newsletter very helpfully gives you some instructions on how to stop receiving further e-newsletters from them:

At MySpace we care about your privacy. If you don’t want to receive future MySpace newsletters, change your Account Settings to “Do not send me MySpace newsletters.” Click here to change your Account Settings. You can also contact us with any questions or concerns regarding your privacy at: privacy@myspace.com or write: MySpace.com, 6060 Center Drive, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA 90045.

Very helpful, I don’t think, given the fact that in theory I no longer have an account at the e-mail address that they sent it to and therefore I can’t log in to change my Account Settings to “Do not send me MySpace newsletters.” I’ve sent an e-mail to privacy@myspace.com asking what they think they are playing at and I await a response. If it mentions viagra, cheap mortgages, OEM software or Britney Spears, I shall be rather upset.

Update 23 Feb: It appears that I am not the only person who has been spammed by MySpace recently. A report by someone else hit the front page of digg.com a couple of days ago.

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Posted at 09:54 in Miscellany

We had the first meet-up of our new local geek-out group here at the EurekaStep offices last night. We meet together from time to time to socialise, chat about all things Web 2.0 and swap ideas. Dan White gave us a talk and presentation on rich internet applications. Some of the things that he showed us that people do with Ajax these days are truly jaw-dropping. There are a lot of frameworks out there that make it fairly easy too, such as script.aculo.us, jQuery, and so on.

For better or worse, the group has been christened “Dave 2.0″. (One person suggested that could stand for “Developers Are Very Expensive”.) I will be giving a short five minute presentation on Ruby on Rails at our next meet-up, which is in six weeks’ time. Better get my skates on — I only started learning it a week ago…

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Posted at 14:17 in Miscellany

Ever noticed how, whenever it snows, you get a whole lot of people whingeing on the BBC News forums about how the country has ground to a standstill? Just as predictable, some American pops up and says something like this:

As for the snow…some of you guys should come experience a Chicago winter.

or this:

I live in Minneapolis and currently it is -32 C outside and it was even colder yesterday.

Happens every time. It’s as predictable as clockwork.

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Posted at 14:51 in Miscellany

I have always taken tea without milk. Normally, when you make up a cup of tea for someone, you only fill the mug about three quarters full from the kettle so that you can top up with milk. However, I sometimes find that people still leave this extra space when making me black tea, even though neither they nor I will be adding milk. Why?

Another drink that I sometimes ask for from time to time is hot squash — Ribena or something. Most people are happy to oblige, but it amazes me how often they serve it up in a glass rather than a mug. Obviously people are thinking “juice” rather than “hot”. C’m on, there are good practical reasons for having hot juice in a mug rather than a glass. For starters, a glass doesn’t have a handle, which makes it pretty uncomfortable to hold your drink in your hands when it’s still hot. It also leaves you looking like the odd one out when you’re in a group where everyone else is drinking tea.

What amazes me most, however, is that the people who do this considerably outnumber the people who get it right. Sure, I may have rather quirky tastes in drinks, but don’t people ever stop and think about this when someone asks them for something like that?

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Posted at 21:56 in Miscellany

A couple of us went to the MiniCamp Internet Professionals’ meetup in London on Friday evening. I’ve been wanting to do a bit more networking with other developers in recent months — more on a social basis than anything else — so I quite relished the idea of getting out from behind the computer and actually spending some time speaking to people face to face, perhaps picking up some new ideas and inspiration. Most of my interaction with other developers has been online up to now, and my offline socialising has been largely restricted to people whose technical expertise tends to average out at the level of the bare minimum of Microsoft Word needed to do their job. Start talking to them about open source, Creative Commons, WordPress, Ruby on Rails or Linux and their eyes glaze over and they wonder if you are a Klingon in disguise.

I must admit I was a bit daunted by the prospect of the venue — Truman Brewery in Corbet Place — since I’m not a great fan of places like pubs, nightclubs, bars and breweries, mainly because I don’t drink and I can’t stand cigarette smoke. Nevertheless, I decided not to let it put me off. The loud music was a bit overwhelming and it made conversation somewhat harder, but cigarettes were mercifully thin on the ground, and all in all it wasn’t too bad. There were about a hundred and fifty or so of us there — a melting pot of geeks, entrepreneurs, investors and other hangers-on looking for ideas for the Next Big Thing™, and it was a surprisingly easy environment to get chatting to new people. It was also nice to see an even distribution of ages from early twenties to late fifties — sometimes you get the impression that this kind of business is dominated by young entrepreneurs in their early twenties with brand new computer science degrees, and once you reach the big three-oh you’re past it.

One thing that struck me was that out of the dozen or so laptops that people had brought along with them, every single one without exception was a MacBook. It made me feel like something out of Noah’s Ark owning a three year old brick from Dell. I think going down the Intel route was a pretty smart move on Apple’s part. The fact that you can run Mac OS X and Windows and Linux on the same machine, all at the same time through Parallels Desktop, makes sticking with a PC seem almost inexcusable.

One of the first people I got talking to was a Ruby on Rails evangelist. I think “evangelist” is probably something of an understatement here: this guy’s passion and zeal for Rails would make Reinhard Bonnke look like a hermit. Personally, I’d love to get into Rails properly — a platform that has active records, Model-View-Controllers, and test-driven development right at its foundation has to have a lot going for it. However, I do wonder sometimes if it’s a bit over-hyped.

“So, do you find there are many job opportunities knocking around for Rails?” I asked him.

He hummed and ha-ed a bit. “Well, actually, not really, no,” he said, before going on to confess that in Rails isn’t that good in terms of performance and scalability.

That’s the problem. At the moment the business case for learning Rails seems a tad exaggerated to me: it is more or less restricted to youthful startups (some of which have, admittedly, become pretty successful) and hobbyists, who have never read Fred Brooks’s classic paper No Silver Bullet. We have clients to convince that it’s the latest and greatest thing — and they are generally rather sceptical. Enterprise development is still very much a battle between .net and Java these days, and Web 2.0 development is dominated by PHP, simply because all the most popular and stable open source apps are written in PHP, such as WordPress, or MediaWiki, or Drupal. Having said that, give it a year or two and I think Rails is going to do pretty well.

There were five short presentations by various people: the Drupal users’ group had joined in with the day, and one of their guys gave a short presentation on what’s new in Drupal 5; a Polish developer/entrepreneur who has started a promising looking hosted wiki service, WikiDot.com, which combines the concepts of wikis and MySpace; an investor giving advice for startups; someone from Tioti.com (Tape It Off The Internet) — TV with the social networking elements added; and another startup talking about video mashups, where people combine bits of different films to produce something completely new.

Mashups. It seems that’s the emerging buzzword of 2007, in the same way that Web 2.0 was the buzzword of 2006, blogging hit the headlines in 2005 and RSS in 2004.

The rest of the evening went fairly well. I had a good chat with one of the guys from the London Drupal users’ group — a Java developer primarily, but he works with Drupal on the side. Much in the same way as I work largely with .net but do some stuff with WordPress plugins in my spare time. He seemed quite interested to hear what I had to say about WordPress and compare notes with his own Drupal experience. We also chatted a bit to the WikiDot developer and swapped ideas, and to a couple of guys who were very enthusiastic about whatever they were doing, though I found it a little bit hard to figure out exactly what that whatever actually was. Perhaps I was just getting tired, but it didn’t seem entirely clear from their business cards or their website either. I think they must be designers or something.

We left to come home at about half past eight. It took us an hour to get from Aldgate East station to Victoria, partly because we caught the wrong train at first, but mainly because we were held up on the Underground by maintenance, a security alert and leaves on the line. The train to Horsham left Victoria at about ten o’clock and arrived back home in Horsham at ten past eleven. All in all, it was a good evening, and I enjoyed getting out, meeting up with other people in the industry, and seeing en masse what kind of characters get involved in the whole Web 2.0 business.

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Posted at 23:59 in Miscellany

When we moved into our new house at the beginning of October, I had to choose a new colour for my bedroom. As its previous occupant was the three year old daughter of the last owner of the house, it was a rather girly pink, and I wanted an alternative that reflected the fact that I am (a) male, and (b) straight. Admittedly, apart from that, I didn’t have much of an idea what colour I wanted it to be, other than that it needed to be as un-magnolia as possible. Having spent most of my teens and twenties in houses in which every single room was painted magnolia, I’ve developed a long-standing hankering after something at least a little bit different.

So, I toddled along to Homebase the weekend before our move and had a flick through the catalogue.

The colour that caught my attention was Dulux Roasted Red (#AE5350 for HTML geeks): a fairly deep red, but it looked good in the brochure with the top half of the room in the photograph painted that particular colour and the bottom half in a kind of cream. So, I bought a couple of tubs of the stuff and headed to the checkout. Some light coloured bedding, curtains and furniture would finish off the colour scheme rather nicely, I thought.

When we got home, I began to have one or two second thoughts, and wondered if a combination of light orange and blue would be a better idea and I should go back to Homebase and change it. However, after chatting to one or two people, I came to the conclusion that my idea could be quite successful. Besides, I like to experiment (that’s why I did science at university, after all) so, on went the paint.

The second thoughts started to increase as the paint went on and I saw just how dark it looked,  and when I found that my audacious and outrageous choice of colour was drawing unwarranted attention to me among the folks from church who were in helping us paint the house, I began to regret it. Being the hopelessly introverted kind of character that I am, unwarranted attention is not exactly my cup of tea, after all. Then when eleven-year-old Callum from next door, who was helping with the painting, said that it reminded him of the punishment room at his school (Forest Boys), I started to wonder if this was set to be my number one worst decision of 2006.

However, by now we had painted about three quarters of the room, and with the new carpets due to be laid the following morning and our belongings to come in the afternoon, and Homebase well and truly shut as it was now ten o’clock at night, there was not a lot I could do but to press on and make the most of it. Besides, the brilliant white paint on the roof did at least make it look a little bit Christmassy, if nothing else.

The walls were pretty dark and it did make the room feel a good deal smaller and closed in than before, and it actually turned out to feel quite oppressive. In an attempt to brighten it up a bit, I got hold of a large map of the world that was sitting in the study and put it up on the wall. This made things marginally better, but the improvement was small enough to suggest to me that my idea of a cream-coloured wardrobe, bedspread and curtains would not be sufficient for it to work out in the end. Besides which, having a room that looks like the punishment room at Forest Boys could adversely affect the resale value of the house.

So, after suffering in silence for three months or so, last weekend I decided that enough was enough, I was going for the light orange and blue after all.

Monday lunchtime, I was back in Homebase, scanning my eye along the shelves of cans of paint. It didn’t take me all that long to pick out the colours I was after: Dulux Natural Saffron (#E2BF86) and Dulux Blue Babe (#96B5D4) luxury silk emulsion. Monday evening, I shifted my bed away from the wall, put down some dust sheets and started slapping the paint on.

The improvement was immediate and dramatic, and I could tell straight away that it was going to make a big difference. The contrast between the new colours and the old brick red made it look a bit like a 1980s derelict kindergarten building in an inner city council estate, but even so, it was obvious that it would work out fine with the blue on the end walls and the saffron on the sides. Some more paint went on every evening except Wednesday, when we were out, and Friday, when I spent most of the evening sleeping off the week’s hard work, and when I finally got the last red wall painted over yesterday, it at last looked no longer like the Black Hole of Calcutta nor a derelict council estate, but like something that I’m not ashamed to call my bedroom.

I woke this morning feeling much brighter and happier, and actually invigorated enough to make getting out of bed seem easy. I can see now why people go for magnolia so often, even though I still think it’s the most boring colour of paint on the face of the planet. The lesson has been learned and the repentance has been done. For a bedroom, deep red walls suck.

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Posted at 23:35 in Miscellany

One of the fun things about blogging that the MySpace crowd completely misses out on is that people get to your blog through Google, and if you have a bit of techno-savvy, or a Google Analytics account, or both, you can see what people are searching for to get to it. It’s quite amusing to take a look at these from time to time, especially when you get gems such as this one:

“replacing a spleen with something else”

Don’t ask me why, but at the moment I am at the top of this particular Google search, despite the fact that my knowledge and understanding of, and interest in, spleen transplants is zilch. What exactly they were thinking when they typed that into Google, the mind boggles.

Here are a few others:

“windows live writer and myspace”

Windows Live Writer works very well with several popular blogging packages and providers, including Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, and, of course, Windows Live Spaces. However, MySpace is not one of them. It’s totally unsupported, mainly because MySpace has never released its own API. MySpace is all very well for social networking and showing off your gratuitous absence of web design skills, but as a blogging platform, it is rubbish. Get a real blog.

“james mckay poetry”

I did try writing a little poetry as a teenager. However, the doggerel I came up with was on a par with William Topaz McGonagall or Amanda McKittrick Ros so I threw it out. Nothing to see here. Move along please.

“jim mckay world cup”

It seems I have a namesake who is a well known American sports broadcaster. Apparently, I also have another namesake who is an expert on ferrets, as I discovered when somebody from the Netherlands e-mailed me to ask if that’s me. Sorry, it isn’t.

“ideal microwave height”

Any height is fine as far as I’m concerned, as long as it doesn’t bring it into conflict with the wireless router…

“interactive swearing keyboard”

Why, oh why, oh why, do people search for things such as this? I’d hate to have a keyboard that swore at me. So would all my colleagues. So would everyone else I know. But then again, you get all sorts…

“unathleticism”

That’s my middle name

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Posted at 23:50 in Miscellany