Aquarionics

Aquarion and the unmissed opertunity

So, on the first of this month I signed on to the Dol^HJobcentre. Later that same day LoneCat pointed me at a job which had fallen into her inbox, and at 16:00 on 1st July, I applied for it. The job advert read like a check-list of all the things I’m either interested in or know about. They obviously agreed with that, because they replied to my freshly rewriten CV, as the next day they replied with an interview time for the following day (This would be the third of July, or two days after I applied), which I went to.

Over the next two weeks various things happened. An interview with the lead developer over the phone, a meeting of the CEO & CTO, and finally this morning (Afternoon, really) I woke up, went to get tea, and came back to discover they wanted to see me again. Within 45 minutes of waking up, I was on my way to London, for the final in this series of interviews…

Long story shorter, I’m now employed by BrowserAngel, who are doing cool social software things I’ll mention when they go global, and start at 10am tomorrow morning.

Today is a day for celebration. Anyone for tea?

Be my slave

My first day at the new job was fun, I got keys, a desk (I have drawers!!!) and a computer. We had a long discussion on the Feng Shui of the office, and the effects on said life force of moving said office around, and we had a meeting about the product and it’s direction. Now I have a small pile of (virtual) documentation to read on Monday (Monday is Work From Home Day), which will happen just after I wander down to the Job Centre to give my “I have a job, now bugger off and leave me your money” forms in.

Meanwhile, online I’ve been watching Halflife 2 videos, and Dungeon Siege 2 videos (Both of which are looking very shiny), but this evening I’ve mostly been playing Vampires! The Dark Alleyway, a fun online game thing. Go play! I vant to suck your blood….

Making a list, checking it twice

Since LoneCat and Adrian have both put up lists of “Stuff they are taking to CCDE” (CCDE being the event half the people I know are going to this weekend. We shall be in a field, camping) I decided to put my list up:

Aquarion’s List Of Stuff Wot He Should Take To CCDE:

• Clothes
• Sleeping Bag
• Money
• Aquarion

Of course, this is heavily biased to the fact that I’m going with LC, who – as you can see above – is quite prepared enough for the both of us.

Work is… interesting. For various reasons, I’ve been working alone all week (Either from home or in the office, where the CEO has been out in meetings or just out) and I’ve started the coding on The Project. This means that I’ve had to set some precidents about how we’re doing things (Mostly based on how I do things) which is slightly worrying, since I have a feeling I’m going to be recoding everything again. It’s also worrying that I’m the person opening up and locking up, since I’m sure I’m going to walk in one morning and discover I did something really stupid like leave the window open.

Life Goes On…

Morning Broken

Last night, I forgot to set my alarm clock.

Despite this, I appear to be up (It’s somewhere in the region of half-past seven) and have been for the last hour and a half. I appear to be being turned into a morning person against my will. Scary.

Stuff’s happening. I’m seeing a huge gap in the blogging world for Threadnaut, which I’ll eventually a) code and b) announce, but right now I’m sort of caught up in this whole “Paid Employment” thing, mostly because I’m trying to turn it from a great idea (which it is) to an idea that’s firstly usable by me and secondarily marketable. Let others in the company do prioritize this the other way around, my mission is to execute this nicely.

In doing this I’m learning more about DHTML than I thought I’d ever need, and more about the JavaScript security model than I ever thought necessery (In particular, I’m discovering that there is one, and that IE supports it the same way Moz does, and that this is bad for my freedom of code, but I digress), and this is leading to research into such fun things as XUL, Sidebars (Both IE and Moz) and such. So generally I’m having fun, and getting paid for it, which is always a bonus.

Be prepared for an article on why I hate XForms, possibly entitled “A mark-up and formy blight”

Seven things that make me think today is not a good day

Nicked shamelessly from Mark

1. Drifted into awakeness, thought “I should get up, what time is it?”, then dreamt looking at my watch, seeing it was half six, and deciding to stay in bed. It was not six thirty.
2. Got up, recovered from a night of dreams of big A4 bits of red paper saying “Payment Due”, turned on my computer (to listen to Radio 4) and discovered my hard-drive in the desktop is now fragged as well.
3. Discovered that my train to Paddington was delayed. Got stuck in a ‘Quiet’ coach sat next two a pair of marketing executives discussing a deal at high volume.
4. ...who then glared at me for switching on my GameBoy (muted, natch)
5. Fought my way onto the train at Paddington (After letting people off, which put me behind the crowd I started at the front of
6. Fought my way off the train at Baker Street when the train was cancelled due to a failed signal.
7. Got to work to discover that yesterdays code panics when it encounters google. Bother.

I have a weblog?

Lack of entries? Lack of life. My entire life at the moment seems to consist of Wake up, Go to work, Code, Go home, Dinner, Sleep, Wake up. Go to work, fix computers, go home, dinner, sleep…) with variations like reversing dinner and going home and having dinner in London with ccooke & ruthi,

The last few days have been mostly spent putting my new work setup together, which consists of a box running Gentoo Linux (named aziraphale) running enlightenment (I like enlightenment, it Just Does, but I’ll be switching to gnome tomorrow, when it’s compiled…) and vmware workstation, which in turn is running XP Pro (as crowley), which is our development environment. The main reason for that is that I have a backup of crowley on aziraphale, so when (not, not if. When) the XP install dies a nasty and horrible death (Our software has a couple of bugs atm, meaning that occasionally it’ll install itself and not be able to uninstall, and since it’s an IE thing this is complicated) I can just restore the working config, and keep coding.

This would be bad if they were both on one monitor, but usable. Fortunatly I found a spare graphics card, so right now I’m typing into OpenOffice on the little monitor to the right, whilst IRC, Mozilla and everything else runs on the 17, this was suprisingly easy to set up once I groked the XFree config file sufficently. Only problem is that VMWare appears to dislike running on a second monitor in maximized mode (moving to the edge of the screen which should take me to the first monitor wraps the pointer to the other side of the small screen unless you move reaaaaaaally slowly. All other screen edges are hard barriers, incuding and this is the annoying bit the opposite side of the monitor). On top of all this, I’ve been told that at some point I’ll be developing a cross-platform version of our s/w, so that looks to be fun.

Slightly worried about the direction of the nomic, mostly worried about people flooding the game with some rules that make actually doing things difficult. Mostly, though, I’m annoyed that I’ve spent more time administrating the game than I have playing it, and that people are trying to drag the admin into the game, which is exactly the oposite of what I wanted to do. If I’d wanted imperial nomic (A variant where an emporer decides wheather rules pass on the fly) I’d have proposed it. Bah.

The writing fails to happen. Three hours a day on a train, sitting down, would you may have thought have been perfect for writing, and this would be true if I had something to write on and with that wasn’t manual, until I can get nemo (my ancient laptop) a battery (100, roughly, that I can’t justify) that might change.

Or a powerbook. That’d help too. (My CEO was given a powerbook. Given. By a friend. Nevermind, a couple of years and I’ll be a millionaire.

(I was voted person mostl likely to be a millionaire before he’s 25 at school. This appears to have been inaccurate, so far, but I live in hope)

(Acutally, I live in Reading, but it’s close)

Software. AqWiki will get a release as soon as I can be bothered to package it, Nomic Rules Manager will get a cool name and a release some point very soon, and Aquaintances will get a release when I work out why it isn’t catching the errir that is fulling my mail box with cron errors.

Epistula will now not get a packaged release, probably, until I’ve convinced myself I don’t want to completely rewrite it in perl. It’s live code is still online, though.

General Public Virus

Today, I’m going to take a minute out of my working day and rant at you about software development.

I work for a company that does Cool Things With Data. That’s all you know, that’s all I’ll tell you. When we are looking for testers, I shall mention what it is, and you can all go “oooh”.

One of the things I’ve done in this is created the method by which RSS data is put into the program (Our automated statistics are generated into RSS, because I was fairly sure it would be easy to get it out again). Now I want to get it out again, so I’m going to have to write an RSS-Reading Thingy.

This is not my desire. The last thing I want to spend x amount of my life doing is writing RSS parsers. Far better minds than mine have spent ages on the problem of parsing the amount of really, truely horrible things that people do with RSS, and they have released these things.

The best and most respected that has been released in PHP, which is the environment I’m doing this in, is Magpie RSS, which you give a URL and it gives you an object containing data. So far, so hoopy. I installed it, integrated it, loved it and forgot about it.

Now we come to Second Stage stuff, and I’m looking at the licences of the bits we’re using. The sections we grabbed from Epistula are fine, because they’re BSD licenced. Magpie isn’t, because it’s GPL, and the GPL specifically states that I can’t include a GPL library if my code isn’t going to be GPL’d.

It isn’t. Not because of any “We want to trap our users” stuff, but simply because out continued existance of a company involves people paying us for our services. With this money, they can pay me. With this payment, I can write more software. And eat. And buy broadband. And spend my weekends making free software. And I realise that in the ivory tower of the Free Software Movement it doesn’t matter, because All Non-Free Software Is Evil.

Out of interest, any Free Software Zealots in the audience know how we programmers are supposed to earn our food?

This shouldn’t matter. This is Politics, and I don’t care that ESR supports Baring Arms, nor which direction Linus voted last election, nor what RMS thinks of his country’s economic prospects.

What I care about, as a user and a developer, is that I am currently unable to use the best tool for the job because of the politics of making something free.

So, the next time you decide you want to release under a free licence, remember there are other licences than the GPL that even Debian likes.

And now, Back to XML parsing. Yay.

Blogies and Pie

Ah well, another year goes past and I’m not nominated for a Bloggie or anything. I shall withhold my disappointment and carry on with a tear in my eye…

The amount of ways I’m screwed has decreased by three since my paycheque cleared today, which lead to me being able to get to work this morning, always a bonus.

On the minus side, we have a governmental inspection tomorrow to prove we actually exist and haven’t been Dot-Coming the money for the last six months.

...and winamp starts playing ‘Our House’ ...

House has gone away. No more empty houses in Letchworth, back to flats. I want a house, damnit. Three weeks and counting until we become homeless. For the second time – for me – in twelve months.

I’d love to be able to regale you with new content, but the most amusing thing that happened to me recently was losing my glasses.

I wear glasses all the time, because I’m obviously defective and lazy, and have done since I was about 10. My first pair of glasses I left on the roof of our car when we were on holiday in France, and left them there. Forward, reverse, crunch. Since replacing that pair I’ve worn glasses almost constantly, and until a couple of years ago, this was partly because not wearing my glasses gave me acute agoraphobia, which led to a general reluctance to take them off when outside. My method of countering this is to walk home from work despectacled once in a while, which meant that not having my glasses annoyed me, instead of sending me into a panic.

I found them. Eventually. Apparently at 2am I’d put them on the windowsill to my bed’s left, instead of the usual place on the right, and they’d fallen off and slid under the bed. It took me about 4 hours to find them – on and off – while my 21” monitor sat at 640×480, I tried to stop being taken to court, and I got the message as posted yesterday that I was no longer moving house.

Yesterday, in a very real way, sucked.

Fortunatly this is a fairytale that ended happily, since not only did I find my glasses and my watch (Which has been missing so long it was still on Daylight Savings) Pol & Supermouse decided they needed Emergency Pie, and since the best pie shop in the world is in Reading (It’s called “Sweeney Todd’s”, it’s next to a barber shop, and it serves Good Pie.

After this there was Tea, conversation and pimping of good books, and they went home and I went to bed.

And now I’m going home.

12 minutes.

I’ve just sold you all to pay for my sanity.

Details in Feburary.

Unwashed

So, from mid-March it becomes a race to see which of the people who want to employ me get the funding/contract/offer first.

I wonder how I explain that to the unemployment office.

Sweepstakes, anyone?

Because it's cruel to cats (It's cruel to cats)

My back garden is a veritable feast of campanology now. Some mean, cruel and nasty person has attached a bell to one of the cats which wanders around, I watched it yesterday attempting to pounce on raindrops (Preferably without getting wet) and every stealthy step it took was accompanied by the jingling of bells. It was not a happy kitty.

Yesterday was not just a bad day for cats, in fact. It’s a long running in-joke that either me or LoneCat can be employed at any one time, and so it’s only logical that with BrowserAngel putting me on notice that they have a new grant and will be reemploying me forthwith, LoneCat has been placed on her mandatory 3 month notice of redundancy.

Not that this has stopped me applying for other jobs, I point out. Optimism is for people with savings accounts.

On top of all this, I went head over handlebars yesterday when a fuckwitted moron decided that cyclists didn’t deserve roundabouts and pulled out in front of me. My immediate reaction was to slam on the brakes, but since my right hand brake is the front brake (And I’m right handed) this didn’t have the desired effect, as whilst much of my forward momentum was curtailed, it transferred into a graceful arc around the radius of my stationary front wheel, depositing me nose to tarmac. Shortly afterwards my rucksack, which happened to be full of library books due to be returned, continued to follow its own interpretation of the laws of momentum and comedy to hit me in the back of the head.

The car behind me was tolerance itself, waiting almost two seconds after the crash before it beeped for me to get out of the way, whereupon I dragged my bruised – but otherwise unharmed – self and my unscathed cycle to the side of the road where I waited until I had stopped shaking sufficiently to go and be patronised by the Job Centre.

And the causing car? Drove off without even noticing me.

All motorists should be forced to cycle on main roads for at least two weeks every few years.

Employment

I appear to be employed again.

Which is nice.

false alarm, again

Infested

[11:36] {gilmae} how are we all today?
[11:37] {Aq-Work} Not too bad
[11:38] {Aq-Work} Currently I’m clearing the data off a W2k box so I can reinstall it
[11:38] {gilmae} employed again, i see
[11:38] {Aq-Work} Yeah
[11:38] {Aq-Work} This job would be easier if the main drive wasn’t compressed
[11:38] {Aq-Work} Actually, it’d be easier if the machine had been built after 1998 too
[11:38] {gilmae} why, i ask?
[11:38] {gilmae} wh…ah, that’s why
[11:39] {Senji} Dh000m
[11:39] {Aq-Work} Plus, if it had more than 256mb space left on said drive
[11:39] {Aq-Work} Which is where the (compressed, note) swap would be.
[11:39] {Senji} Have I said Dh0000m yet?
[11:39] {Senji} compressed swap?!
[11:39] {Aq-Work} Oh, and it’s infested with spyware
[11:40] {Aq-Work} Plus, it’s been though two OS upgrades and three companies since it was last installed.
[11:40] * Senji hands Aq a Fuckoff Large Magnet.
[11:41] {Aq-Work} Oh, and every Prettyness enhancer is turned on, from drop shadows to Active Desktop
[11:41] {Aq-Work} s/is/was/, obviously.
[11:41] * gilmae hands Aq a new drive and a bucket of acid
[11:41] {Aq-Work} In fact, with all this, it was apparently completely usable up until last week
[11:41] {Aq-Work} when she installed a security update.

[11:43] {ccooke} so reinstall to the 10g?
[11:43] {Aq-Work} I have to make it usable first so we can drag the accounts data off to the server
[11:44] {Aq-Work} Plus, I only have an XP pro disc, and the chances of this box being able to handle XP are slim to the non-existant.
[11:44] {ccooke} :-)

Bootstrapping

So, if you’ve been unemployed for three months, how do you afford to buy the train ticket to get you into work for the first week back?

Once again, I’ve found, applied for, interviewed for and got a job (Okay, they weren’t all the same job this time, but still) in the time it’s taken the Job Centre to process my Dole claim. As a result, I can’t buy the ticket to get to work.

So, we found a solution. Easy. Get a Season Ticket form, get our office to fill it in with all the credit card details and send me trundling off to buy the ticket. This morning…

No, they said. They needed, they said, the card itself to swipe though the machine, which I didn’t have. So I went home and phoned them up, ordered the season ticket, giving them the credit card details over the phone, and they’re now posting the ticket to me.

sigh

AqWiki got another round of updates, including the prep for the first public installs, indexing being unbroken for the new base system (was broken for oneWiki) and such stuff. On target for provisional release date. Scary.

Postcards

(As promised yesterday)

Too hot to do anything, much, so lack of blogging happens. Sorry.

Actually, there’s a lot I could say, from rants on cargo-cult programming, the weird flaming hoops you have to leap though to get funding in London, and the reasons why my job has achived stablity while the location of my workplace is in a state of flux.

However, unless you have access to (My workblog, accessable only if you’re me or otherwise are inside the BrowserAngel internal network) you can’t know any of that. My aim is that in a few years I’ll be able to declassify the archives and you can see the various bits of hell I subject myself to.

I could go on a rant about the latest “Games are evil” debate, but since it boils down to “It was an 18 rated game, he was 17, he should have been near it”, I haven’t bothered.

Hot town. Summer in the city. It really is like a furnace out there, you step out of air-conditioned coolness into the white heat of a burning sun. London stops, because it’s too hot. Then it rains and the city floods and mean that the next day it takes two hours to get from LKX to Acton.

Then we have the bit where I have to build Rome in three months. Fortunatly, I can redefine Rome.

What else? Oh, Play.com remains evil, causing me to spend money. Actually, I just ended up putting Doom³, Sims 2 and Half-Life² on preorder. So lots of money, but spread out over two months. Which is good, because I have a convention to go to later this month.

Empirical

I’ve expanded my empire.

For a year, the empire of Greater Developerdom within the realm of BrowserAngel has been cruelly banished to the dark corner of the room where the network switch is. Given that the development team has halved (ie, it’s now me) the time had come to strike forth into the world and reclaim as much space as I can!

Delicate hints prevailed, and we discussed moving the office around a bit. My personal preference for stealing another desk so I could have a wall of monitors between me and the rest of the office was nixed, on the basis it would leave me fenced off from the rest of the office. Bah.

Eventually we decided upon the current layout, giving me two desks, two monitors on each, three computers, and with me on a spinny-chair between them, multitasking between four different keyboards at once.

geeks out

Now to try and get LDAP auth. working…

PHP Developer Wanted

BrowserAngel is now looking for a PHP Developer

The prospective candidate will need:

• PHP
• MySQL
• Apache exp.
• CVS (Preferably admin experience, but it’s pretty easy)
• DHTML

Ideally also:

You’d be working within a small team on a Cool Thing, with any luck the Next Big Thing. Wages aren’t stratospheric right now, but possiblities could be. You’d need to either live near, or be willing to commute to, Kings Cross London.

Send CV and cover letter to recruit@BrowserAngel.com.
—
Nicholas Avenell, Developer/Sysadmin, BrowserAngel
e: Nicholas.Avenell -at- BrowserAngel.com t: (+44|0)20 7713 0001
a: 212 Spitfire Studios, Collier Street, London Kings Cross, NE1 2BE

(Disclaimer: This post is posted at the request of BrowserAngel. All will be explained)

The explaination & Python

After a number of similer requests, I’ve done a Goodbye Browserangel FAQ at holistic.

I leave BA on Friday 15th October, I enter Those Who Evolve so that’ll be fun.

Today I’ve spent attempting to work out how to do Python Web Apps sensibly without being tied to Zope. I’m grasping the Python Way, I think, but I still think in PHP and Web Dev terms, so actually learning by creating a site – rather than the abstract card games I’ve been doing – would probably be more useful.

So far I’ve been playing with Quixote mostly, but since Evolving seem to have centralised on Zope, that would probably be more useful. Thing is, every time I look at it I think something along the lines of “Crikey, that’s a bit overkill for this” and look for something simpler, but the more I go into it, the more Zope looks like The Thing I Should Know, since all the alternatives seem to start with comparing themselves to it. Input from those who know more about this than I do would be handy :-)

Rains and Pours

Busy week

Okay, right now I am unemployed. My final day at Evolving was friday. They bought me leaving presents, and beer, and we went for a drink and I will, to a large extent, miss the company and all the people in it, it’s been part of my life for a couple of years, will remain my longest continuous employment period until I’m 28 at the very least, and is a decent place. They’re looking for PHP coders, incidentally, so if you speak PHP and are willing to travel to the darkest depths of Bedfordshire, send a CV (either to them, or to me and I’ll pass it on).

But I’ve left, which took – as you may have noted – quite a while. This may mean I’ve got some time to dedicate to the site. But don’t count on it, I’ve still got NWN2 to complete.

I wandered down to London on a visiting kick on Saturday, spent an entertaining evening with Sian, flatmates & guests talking, playing pool (I’m now a member of a Pool hall in E17. E17 and Sunderland, in fact. Linked by the fact I live nowhere near either, but I digress) and watching “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, a film I liked quite a lot more than I was expecting to. Wandered over to another friend’s house Sunday morning to, in part, steal his Wii for a little while and use it to play Super Monkey-Ball, which I’d also got as a leaving gift.

Ten hours later, we stopped.

Okay, so there was food part-way though that, but still. Ten hours. It’s a very more-ish game, you’ll spend hours stuck on a single level, and then the “just one more try” – or “just one more level” – thing takes over and you’re absolutely doomed. Do not buy this game if you have something to do this week. Or own a Wii.

I do not own a Wii, for the one that I bought has ceased to exist, along with the shop of the man who sold it to me and the money I paid for it. Now I get to go though Paypal’s complaints procedure. They say the measure of a company is how they treat you when you’re complaining, and now I get to see it from this end.

On a slightly happier note, I stayed over with the Wii owning ccooke and ruthi overnight, and the next morning got a phone call asking if I would mind popping in to ccooke’s company for an interview on my way back home. So, at about an hour’s notice, I’m in the offices of a startup in Kings Cross – entirely unrelated to the last one – interviewing for the job of Web Dev. Woo.

I went home, did little for a while, and got two phone calls. The first was from the company who I was interviewing with, asking for a second interview the next – ie, today. The second, and literally seconds after I put the phone down, was an exclaimitory web based company, asking if I would go to an interview on Wednesday.

At this rate I’ll never get any time to enjoy my unemployment :-|

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