james mckay dot net

There is a sneaky back entrance to London Victoria station that I’ve taken to using. It’s near the end of Platform One, and it takes you out onto the corner of Hudson’s Place and Bridge Place. It avoids all the crowds outside the main entrance to the station and on Victoria Street, and because it’s much quieter, you also avoid those really annoying characters spamming you with the London Lite and other similar vacuous drivel wherever you turn on the way back in the evenings.

Obviously you still have to negotiate the crowds inside the station, but once you’re out, the twenty minute walk to Millbank up Vauxhall Bridge Road, Francis Street, Greencoat Place, Greycoat Place and Great Peter Street is about as pleasant and stress free as you can possibly get in central London during the rush hour.

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Posted at 08:00 on 22 July 2009.
Tagged: commuting, London, trains, Victoria

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 on 7 February 2009.
Tagged: Feedburner, Google Reader, London, Parliament, RSS

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 on 22 December 2008.
Tagged: London, Parliament, work

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 on 11 November 2008.
Tagged: commuting, London, work