Aquarionics

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 :-)

Downdate

Have new job.

Leave home at 06:00. Bus at 06:30, ‘nother at 0700, Hour on bus, half hour walk other side. 08:45ish, Work eight hours, repeat in reverse.

Until I learn to drive, get a car, and get insured (Which will turn my commute into an hour each way) stuff here – or anywhere – is likely to be sporadic unless I can do it on the bus.

Today, however, was special. It was my first day of this painfull comute, and thus the perfect time to discover that the bus stop was on the other side of the estate to where I thought it was.

As a result of this and the incomprehensibility of timetables, it took me five hours to get to Bedford.

I hate buses.

I will learn to drive.

Buses

I got on a bus to Bedford Bus Station.

But it didn’t go to Bedford Bus Station, it went to the bus stop outside my office.

Later, I got on a bus that said “Hitchin” on the front.

But it didn’t go to Hitchin, it stopped in Biggleswade and the driver told me to get off, he wasn’t going any further.

So I got on a bus which said it was stopping at Biggleswade, and went to Hitchin.

At that point, I got a taxi.

I don’t like buses much.

One Week

I arrived at 11:00 on Monday.

I’d started at 06:00. One bus had failed to be where I thought it would be, another had recently had it’s timetable changed not to stop at our stop, and I had no idea where any of the buses I want to catch stopped. Eventually, I got to where I wanted to be, and took a taxi across Bedford.

The new office is a single huge room. No dividers, no offices. There’s a kitchen, a conference room and a Room of Junk, but the main room where everyone works (Everyone, directors, coders, admins, designers) has no divisions between people, which is slightly odd. I have my Headphones of +5 Deafness To Anything Else, though, so I’m all right.

When I went in I was pointed at a nice new desk with a nice new computer under it and two nice new monitors over it (Mmm. Xinerama) and I was handed a selection of distro disks. I opted for a download of Ubuntu instead because in a work environment I don’t want to have to explain why I’m waiting for the new release of Gnome to compile for half the morning (Which is a problem with Gentoo) and the new machine is an AMD64, so I wanted a proper 64 bit install.

The AMD64 is, by the way, terribly, terribly nice. Linux on the Desktop is still not quite as there as people seem to think it is, esspecially when it come to just being able to pick a text editor (The “Choose your default text editor” dialog is broken in Gnome 2.8 (Which I’m not sure how could have made it into a release, but never mind). A couple of things (like Wine, for example) won’t work under AMD64 yet, so I’m having to live without the office-default time/task tracking thing in favour of the web-based interface.

Most of the rest of the week was spent learning how the office works, how the software works, and where I fit within both. Surfice to say I’m doing Cool Things that – once again – I shall mention when and if I’m allowed to do so.

The only blot on the horizon is the commute. Getting from Bedford to Hitchin and back again is fairly easy, and takes about an hour. But from Letchworth to Hitchin – which is about 10 miles up the road – typically takes about half an hour, and never arrives within half an hour of my connection. So I spend half an hour getting 10 miles, another half hour waiting for the bus, and a final hour getting to Bedford.

General effect of this is that I have to get up at 05:30, and don’t get back until 20:15, leaving me an hour, maybe two, before I have to go to bed again. And it’s this that’s currently killing me.

So, Learning to drive next month, then.

Questions Asked Frequently

Where are you?

Busy. As the previous diary entries have mentioned in passing, I'm spending five hours each weekday commuting from Letchworth to Bedford and back. Since this starts at 6am and ends at 8pm, I have about two hours a day to eat, catch up on email/groups and not go insane. Everything except work and learning to drive is taking a back seat until I fix this mess.

Why does it take two and a half hours?

Because it takes half an hour to walk to the bus stop, ten minutes to get to Hitchin, twenty minutes before the bus to Bedford arrives, an hour to Bedford, and that gets me into Bedford half an hour before work. So it's a combination of "Fuck of a long way" and "Lack of joined-up transport". Incidentally, this takes me over three different bus company's routes, meaning I can't ever just buy one ticket.
The train, just for all the people who don't belive I thought though all the possibilities before resigning myself to getting up at 5am, takes even longer and goes via london.
Going by car takes half an hour.

So why don't you just do things at the weekend?

Ironically, that doesn't work either. I can't do anything that will catch anyone's notice on the weekend, because it appears that most of my readership do so from work, and anything that appears on a saturday or sunday has completely fallen off the radar by Monday morning

So, what are you doing instead?

I am playing Neverwinter Nights, City of Heroes and various other things while at home, and reading the entire works of Agatha Christie during the ample reading time my life has offered me.

Don't you find it ironic that your MP3 player - which kept you sane during the time you were spending two hours a day commuting to London - decided to join the choir invisible just before you started the new job?

Ironic is one word for it

You should buy an iPod

That is not a question

Shouldn't you buy a replacement MP3 player, for example an iPod?

Yes, because I'm sure that County Properties will not mind if I don't bother paying my rent for a month, after all, it is for a worthy cause.

That was sarcasm, wasn't it?

Yes, Yes it was.

Well, if you're going to be sarcastic, sod off and carve pumpkins, make pumpkin soup and pie, and do other halloween related activities

Thank you, I will.

By the way, is it true you went to a halloween costume party with a white sheet with eye holes in it, and went as a ghost?

Actually, yes, that is true.

Isn't that a bit of a crap costume?

Well done, have a point. Lonecat's costume was better

Ask Me About

One day, many years from now, I shall be able to look back on today and say “Oh, that was the day with the eCommerce System”, and I will be able to laugh.

Today is not that day.

And the best part? I’d love to explain to you exactly what happened, but I’d be sued.

And fired.

And problably shot.

From a cannon.

On top of this, the bus from Bedford was early, so I missed it. The bus from Hitchin was early, so I missed that too. And the taxi driver overcharged me.

Tomorrow: Driving Lessons Redux.

Now: Pizza.

Day Off and IRC Evil

One of the channels on which I am an op is having a bad week. Nice little Script Kiddies with massively parallel spam-bots are attacking the small network it lives on, and the ops are spending their time playing whack-a-mole, as are the server ops.

Anyway, if you find the channel is restricted, /msg an op or /join #afp-invite and someone will let you in. Sorry, it’s just until we can attack flamethrowers to the defences.

In the time I’ve been writing this, someone has come into #afp-invite and left again because I didn’t respond in five seconds. This is not an automatic service

In other news, I’ve done the first bit of Christmas Shopping. I’ve bought the gift for the office Secret Santa thing. I hate these things. Fortunately, it’s anonymous. Unfortunately, I’ve resisted the urge to attempt to be funny. Ah well, maybe next year…

Oh, yeah. Office Party season. Thursday is our office Christmas party. This would appear to be exactly as Entertaining and Enlightening as it suggests, though since we’re at Jongleurs for it, the whole “eating cheese on cocktail sticks by the photocopier” aspect will be reduced.

OTOH, we have been mandated to wear “Outrageous Hats” which is kinda the ‘enforced joviality’ that I desperately try to avoid the rest of the year.

So today I also looked at silly hats. Sadly none were sufficiently outrageous.

I was crushed.

I did return today with not only the office gift, but a set of panniers and other misc. bicycle things, various and sundry items, and nothing I hadn’t planned to buy, which was very good of me.

Then I walked into the second hand bookshop, and had to get a taxi home.

Ah well.

Random screams of fear

Lack of posts. Here’s why:

My main problem with Zope is the documentation which is either a) for a version in advance of the one I’m using; b) has a prerequisite level I can only aspire to; or c) Doesn’t answer the question I have (like ‘What parameters do I feed it?’) whilst being the comprehensive, only documentation on the subject.

I’ve switched to KDE at work, because whilst I don’t like the interface, bloatedness or flakyness of it (esspecially JuK and Artsd, which I have to manually kill several times a day), the KIO system rocks (Basically, it allows me to open webdav documents with the filename ‘webdav:user@server/path/to/doc’, other documents over an ssh connection (fish:user@server/path/to/doc) or anything. There is absolutly no fucking way this should be part of the desktop environment, it should be split off from KDE so that everything, everybody, from curses to gnome to enlightenment should be able to (and should) use it.

Most of all, because the only text editor I can use with it is Kate, the KDE Advanced Text Editor, and I keep getting syntax errors because ”:wn” isn’t valid python. No, kvim doesn’t work. The Ubuntu (actually Debian in this case) package for AMD64 doesn’t actually include the kvim binary and I can’t get the thing to compile manually.

And now I have 10 minutes to get up and dressed before I have to go try to catch the bus. TTFN

Sanity

Okay, so I’ve spent five days doing very little. I’ve scored zero for three on all the things I had to do over the holiday, zero for $MANY on all the things I wanted to do over the holiday, and instead have played to completion KOTOR2.

I am, as a result, quite a bit more sane than previously. I have a Lack of Stress, and am generally back to normal levels of me-ness. And I no longer feel the urge to go anywhere with a machine gun.

Now, a light-sabre…

I fully expect this trend to be in danger by half past six tomorrow morning and utterly destroyed within five minutes of being in the office. They’ve probably implemented the Great Office Movearound that’s been on the cards since I arrived in October.

Oh, and we’re doing interesting things I can talk about, too.

Work, Rest and Play

In much the same way that dancing around the high street naked will probably filter back to your co-workers, you should realise that anything you say on your public weblog will also possibly get back to them.

So, don’t do stupid things. If you do stupid things, apologise, find out exactly what you did that was stupid, and move on.

Google isn’t helpful in this. Within two weeks of my accepting the job with Evolving Media, my category of the same name was in the top five matches for the phrase on Google. This means that a client of the company googling for our past works will probably stumble upon this little rock in the ocean.

So, a couple of entries on here have been edited at the company’s request, and I’m considering a few things I’ve been looking at for a while, like blocking access to diary entries more than six months old (Articles stay, that’s the point). I’ve also added the disclaimer to the end of the site.

I’m also saving all my rants about what we’re doing until I can formulate them into an impartial essay on the relative benifits of technology over other technology, rather than “ARGH! $FOO SUCKS GOATS THOUGH FINE GAUZE!”, which would be roughly my current thing.

So, with little time to do anything but work (I’m passing taking my driving theory test on Monday, the next step in a long road that will lead – eventually – to driving down roads instead of taking steps down them) and censoring myself from everything I _am_ doing, this thing’s looking a little sparse.

Currently, however, I’m ill, spending time in bed feeling sorry for myself (and attempting to work) and attempting to start a movement to start the entire millenium again.

So, with no time and no energy, I’ve done the only logical thing.

I’ve started a new project, more creative than most of the recent ones. See how long this one lasts…

Short Notice.

There is a very special level of hell reserved for hosting companies who issue the 72 hours notice of planned downtime at 11:30 on the saturday of a bank holiday (ie, Long) weekend.

My impressedness level is not high. Pipex, I mean you.

Meandering

There is the distinct possibility of multiple worlds colliding in my near future, which is going to be… interesting. I’m not sure how I should cope with working professionally with people I know online, but it’s going to be fun finding out (Of course, I only got my first job because of pol, so it’s not exactly unprecidented)

Vague enough for you? How about this:

The mist on the horizon that I’ve been gazing at for years has come into focus. I have yet to believe it’s ever going to resolve, but it certianly seems that way, and it’s either going to be the start of my return to something approaching sanity or else another albatross around my neck.

I wrote my first AJAX-based application today. Or, rather, finished. Sort of. It’s apparently broken in Safari, but I’ve got no way of testing that, yet, so it’s going to stay where it is for a while. I’d release it, but it’s an interface to our intranet’s diary system, and that would be Non Optimal, esspecially with my six-month review around the corner (Fear).

Stuff I can actually talk about, although it’s going to sound a bit party-lineish, is MATS, which is the name of the product that’s been consuming my work for the past six months or so. MATS is an attempt to use a combination of internet, SMS and other communication mediums together to help people understand where they are in a long running – and usually totally opaque – process, such as applying for a loan or mortgage. Nationwide are using it, which is cool. The website has more details.

This also means we are sending out Actual Emails telling people their mortgage has been approved. This makes life interesting.

Years, Drugs, Webs

So, Three hundred and sixty five days.

Fifty two weeks, at thirty five pounds on bus tickets a week, four and a half hours every working day is… No, I’d better not think about it.

Today is my first anniversary working for EM, and therefore ranks as my longest continuous employment since I had a paper-round. Yay the new economy.

There is a new design for Aquarionics on its way, BTW. Maybe even new content, or something. The design is stuck in limbo since I redesigned it in PSP and then my trial ran out, so I’m waiting until I can justify buying the full product. Or I could use that as an excuse to leap to Photoshop etc.

I bought the new Barenaked Ladies album – Everything to Everyone – last week (Via iTunes. Yes, DRM isn’t ideal, but until we can convince the record industry that there are more honest people in the world than people who will get something for free if they can. While we’re at it, can we convince me too?). It contains a couple of ‘future classic’ type tracks I can see myself listening to for a long time, and there is a track whose first lines are “You’ve never seen as many monkeys in the Daily Mail”, Which even out of context (It’s a song about postcards of chimpanzees) makes me laugh. I’m a sad person.

We have, once again, returned to the classic, battered battlegrounds of the War On Drugz. Every so often the needle of popular culture appears to drift from “liberal” to “conservative”, and the further into time we get the faster the metronome appears to be ticking. Anyway, some of the Popular Press (Who, in a rare display of Actual Humour, refer to broadsheets as the Unpopular Press) have decided that some of the white powder coating the fashion industry must be blown away (possibly in the hope that they can sniff it as it goes past.) and… and… in the great traditions of journalists everywhere, when someone says it better than I do I’m going to use their words instead. From The Friday Thing 2005-09-23 (Which if you don’t read, you should, it’s well worth every penny):

The point being – God, what *is* the point? The point being that
millions of people take recreational drugs in this country and
it’s madness to think of them as criminals. OK, so Moss happens
to work in a particularly stupid-money tiny-talent industry in
which coke-taking is practically compulsory, but frankly, even if
she’d been less lucky in life and had never made it further than
the customer service counter at TKMaxx in Croydon, she’d probably
still burn holes in her pretty little nose of a weekend. Only it
would cost her an awful lot more and would be cut full of chalk
and paracetamol. The point being, for the love of Belushi, in the
name of all that is holy and legally-permissable – it is a little
bit of coke. An inconsequential smudge of bullshit-dust. It is
not important.

Waging a deeply cynical tabloid war on celebrities who take drugs
is a waste of time, and investigating and prosecuting anyone who
take drugs is a waste of time and money. Furthermore, the fact
that Ian Blair took time out from devising futuristic Supercops
to get personally involved in publicly chastising druggy Moss is
madness, particularly as it means that now, if he’s not going to
appear like a hypocritical superloon, he’ll have to make it his
personal business to investigate Doherty, Deayton, Williams,
Walliams, every other catwalk model alive, 90% of all TV
presenters and pop stars, Russell Grant, Prince Harry… the list
is endless. He’s certainly going to have his work cut out for
him. He’ll probably have to bring in the TA to help out.

It’s very simple. Prohibition doesn’t work. The pros and cons of
various drugs don’t and shouldn’t come into it. The fact is,
people take drugs. They always have and they always will. The
least we can do as a society is educate people as to the risks
and ensure that if they do take them, at least they’re getting
stuff of a certain purity, and in relative safety.

Something like that anyway. The next weeks episode (Which would have been the first of October, I appear to have deleted the email and since I’m composing this from (looks out the window) somewhere between Henlow and Shefford (while bopping along quietly to Barenaked Ladies still) I don’t have a connection to teh interwebs) [Next week’s episode of TFT] had a rant on the subject of the government’s stated desire to have an “adult debate” on the subject of drugs whilst simultaneously refusing to budge from… well…

“Lets have a Proper Discussion on drugs. Okay?”
“Sure. I don’t agree with everything you say, not all drugs are the spawn of saran, you know.”
“How dare you publicise drug use like that! I can have you arrested, you know.”
“What? I thought you wanted a discussion on drugs?”
“We do”
“But if we even mention something that isn’t inline with your views, you say you will arrest us”
“Well yes, it is illegal, after all.”
“But not all drugs are utterly evil!”
“Yes they are”
“No they’re not!”
“Yes they are.”
“This isn’t even a proper discussion! A discussion is a series of statements made to establish a consensus or logical conclusion, this is just contradiction!”
“No it isn’t”
“Yes it is!”
“No it isn’t”
“Yes it IS!”

etc.

(Yes, I should have resisted the Python humour harder, Sosume.)

What else? Oh, yes. Web 2.0. Argh. Words cannot express how much I find this entire 2.0 thing incredibly annoying. The web is a series of evolving technologies, and the integrated web-app Gmail type thing that characterises Web 2.0 hype is just one new use of a reasonably new technology. It’s not that AJAX and DOM Scripting aren’t cool things, it’s just they are not immediately better than what we have. The ability to “access your information from anywhere” has the downside of not applying when you don’t have a net connection. In a world where “going to work” consists of going from network connection to another this may seem less important, but the world isn’t that globally connected yet, as can be gathered from my Henlow/Shefford statement above (As an update, I’ve now reached Shefford). From here I can’t access GMail, flickr, Mint or whatever. I could, I suppose, connect by connecting to my mobile via bluetooth, and then over 3G to the internet, but when I’m paying per kilobyte for my connection I’d quite frankly prefer optimised and compressed text-based communication. XML surrounds data with metadata, which makes it a good general transport protocol, but not a wonderfully bandwidth-conservative one. While in this bandwidth limited state, I get to view the world from the 1997 perspective of all styles and all images turned off, no sparkly effects or anything. I’d use Lynx if it didn’t feel silly doing so on a Powerbook.

This entry, btw, is part of a new initiative to get me to update more often. It consists of writing Journal on the way from Hitchin to Bedford and Frontier (Of which you know nothing) on the way back.

Explanations as to Frontier will be forthcoming soonish.

Corperate Shrill Mode

Okay, The folks that I work for are looking for a PHP developer/Sysadminny type person in order to do, you know, stuff. For money. It’s a decent company, so if you are – or know of anyone – looking for that kind of thing in Bedford-type area, you could do a lot worse than take a look at the advert thing

Here endath the shrillary.

Here

Home again, incidentally. Now off to work.

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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