Scotland
Posted on | May 19, 2010 | 2 Comments
or “What I did on my holidays, by Nicholas Avenell aged 29 and a bit”
One of the interesting things about London is that it has a kind of black hole effect. Most of the time, things come to you instead of you having to actually leave London, and I realised this week that – save for LARP excursions – I haven’t actually left the city boundaries since Christmas. Part of this is that I don’t find London the least bit boring, but when I was invited to D and Sarah’s housewarming in Glasgow, I decided to stretch my horizons a bit and go from a flat city to a more hilly one.
I’ve taken three plane trips in my adult life. To and from Amsterdam, and a Newcastle -> London plane one christmas when I was bored of trains. For this reason, I took the train this time. The price worked out almost exactly the same, but the amount of faff around getting in to and though an airport disuades me, even when I don’t factor in volcano ash or my environmental footprint. Besides, on modern trains I could sit, code and spod on the Internet, which is close to what I’d be doing at home anyway.
Yeah, not so much. Internet was terminally flakey, and my netbook’s screen was rendered unreadable by the position of the sun. On the way to the station I popped into an art shop, and replaced my much-missed japanese brush pen, and so I ended up spending the journey mostly relearning how to draw using it, being bored at Twitter, watching the scenery tick by both from the window and on my phone’s GPS + Google Maps. Even when the sun wasn’t stopping me, it turns out that the new version of PHP (which my laptop now runs) doesn’t like my favoured database abstraction library, which was last updated in 2007. I may end up having to rewrite Plank’s database stack to either use a different abstraction library (I dislike most of the others), or take over this one. Neither prospect appeals to me, and appealed even less on a train at 10am on a saturday.
However, going up by train give me a chance to watch the countrycide. Great sweeping vistas of fields and drystone walling, like someone was shooting a live action version of Postman Pat; The flat horizon of the north sea, suicidal kayakers bouncing off the coastline; the great cathedral in Durham. Shiny things.
Glasgow was quite shiny too. I hit the city with just enough time to make a pillgramage of a kind to Demijohn to buy a housewarming gift. London’s kind of skewed my idea of “a big city” and so I decided to walk it. Glasgow has several things London does not. It has, noticably, more people with red hair, slightly fewer kebab shops per square mile, and also hills.
London is mostly pretty flat. Glasgow isn’t. After a while of walking up and down hills in straight lines, I took a radical step. Cannot, apparently, go over the hills. Don’t have time to go though the hills. Have to go though them. Fortunatly, I was assisted in this regard by the fact that Glasgow has a toy underground system. It’s like the tube, but everything is built to around 6/8ths scale. So cute!
Later I was informed that this was mostly because London digs the tunnels out of mud. Scotland, being brewed from SOLID ROCK and girders, is harder to dig tunnels in. This is fair enough, but still, diddy toy trains! Also, apparently they used to be pulled around by giant cables powered by even more giant steam engines, which is significantly more interesting.
Then there was a party, which contained beer and wine and Guitar Hero and lovely people, some of whom I even remember the names of, and finally there was sleep and an EPIC journey home.
The origins of Piracy, Inc.
Posted on | May 10, 2010 | 1 Comment
About five years ago, I was watching an F1 parade and I had a Grand Idea. I would build a game based on the idea of being an F1 manager, only with more interesting things, like alien technology. The USP would be that on a saturday the people in your league would race, and you would be able to make decisions on the fly as to your strategy and tactics. I did some diagrams and thoughts around this, build up a prototype, plugged some numbers in, rewrote it all in OO PHP, buried it in soft peat for a couple of years, realised I wasn’t interested enough in F1 to make a game about it, even with alien technology. It was called Racr, and it would have had a new name before release. The codename before Racr was “Escape” because it’s close to F1.
Three years ago, I was signing up to a webhost in order to take advantage of their “100GB Web Space!” promotion to solve my backup problem. My backup problem – at the time – being the reasonably traditional “I don’t have any backups”. Part of the package was a domain, which I needed to choose on the spot. By this method, I bought the domain PiracyInc.com, and my mind started to whirr a bit.
I took some of the files from Racr, filed the serial numbers off, plugged in some pirates and monkeys, and had a better idea. Piracy Inc. Now, mentioning projects on here has been a death knell for them for a while, but with any luck this will stop here. Having written a couple of abstract scripts and some ideas, I started coding it about three years ago in Django, because it was New and Cool. Unfortunatly, the webhost I was with for the domain didn’t support Django very well, and I spent most of my development time dealling with differences between my local environment and the live one, Cpanal funtimes, reasons why fcgi had broken today and, on top of this, learning a brand new envrironment which was rapidly drifting towards 1.0 and kept on rendering the foundations of what I was trying to learn obsolete. I could have stuck with a single version, but a) I was trying to learn how to do this, and learning the Wrong Way to do it was a waste of time, and b) I was trying to build For The Ages, and doing it in a way I *knew* I would have to rewrite quite soon was pointless too. A lot of this was because development tended to be in bursts of a few days every month or so, but in the end I spent more time fighting the development environment than coding things, and gave up.
At the end of January last year I sat down and Did Stuff. I wanted to write this thing, and what I know how to write is PHP web applications. I’ve used most of the PHP frameworks, and I’ve got major problems with most of them. Zend pulls things out of thin air too often, Code Igniter has a Mahoosive God Object problem (They do not, obviously, see it as such), and all the others tend to have a 4mb footprint before you can write “Hello World”, so I decided to do this freestyle, building an MVC framework as I went. Obviously, for a full professional project, I’d highly recommend using an existing framework and staying within it, because the flexibility and things you may lose by doing this are ofset by the fact that multiple people have to work on it and understand it. However, I also believe that it’s important to understand where the problems with writing a framework are, and the line between a design decision and a pile of crap. Actually trying to do it all yourself gives you a far better perspective of why you wouldn’t want to.
Within six hours of starting the new version, I had decided to split out the framework into a different project, which is called Plank (Because it’s what a game about Pirates is built on). It’s designed to be light, flexible, and include the ability to use almost any Zend Framework plugin. I suggest you don’t even think about using it, it’s not even close to stable or ready.
Anyway, so I’ve been working on that, and some of it has been fun and interesting. A couple of weeks ago I had a problem with suicidal ex-captains shooting themselves in the head, and yesterday I attempted to rebuild an economy from scratch.
Voted
Posted on | May 8, 2010 | 1 Comment
49% of my current constituancy voted four years ago. They voted for Labour, well, enough of them did.
58.9% of my current constituancy voted yesterday. Enough of them also voted for Labour for Meg to keep her chair, but it took ages to find this out. Mostly, it took ages because the polling stations were unable to cope with the demand.
Unable to cope.
40% of the people in this area could not be bothered to walk, put six ticks in six boxes, and decide who would help rule the country on their behalf, nor their local council. That’s quite good.
Why is it good? Well, with 60% of the area voting, there were multi-hour queues and people being unable to vote because of the cut-off time. Imagine what would happen if the entire area gave a fuck? Where would we be now?
Because of the fact that 10% more people gave a fuck, we didn’t get either General or Local election results until 15:00, at which point we learnt that Labour had won the whole shooting-match for our local area. Independent Candidate Denny de la Haye, who campaigned on a platform of direct democracy, got 96 votes including mine and his. Another candidate was down under the party alias of “Direct Democracy (Communist) Party” got 202 votes, and I can’t help but wonder if some of that is from people who meant to vote for Denny. OTOH the member standing for the Communist League got 102 votes by themselves, so possibly not. Hackney’s non-major-party list appears somewhat oversubscribed, with 12 different possible MPs to choose from, 5 of which I’d never heard of before I saw the final candidate list.
(Yes, we had two different communist factions standing against each other. No, I do not feel the need to make a joke about them working together.)
Generally the entire election has been one large advert for Proportional Representation, unless you’re in one of the top two parties, and even one of those has seen the light.
Talking about seeing the light, Barking and Dagenham cleaned their council of BNP members, and a record turnout saw Nick Griffin personally told to fuck off where he came from.
In the end, it appears a lot of the people who said “I agree with Nick” went and bottled it in the booth, leaving LibDems short on seats, but it also gave a new set of people an appreciation for the online echo-chamber: Sadly it doesn’t extend to the real world every time.
And finally, the ghost writer who wrote Danny Dyer’s column for Zoo magazine got Danny Dyer some kind of record for worst advice in an ‘advice’ column – a hotly-contested award. The magazine has a) made a donation to Woman’s Aid, b) Apologised completely for the entire massive-ratings-boosting encounter, c) Stopped paying Danny Dyer not to write a column with his name and image on it, d) Pointed the army of justy angry critics at a man who is guilty of allowing someone else to write under his name and, basically, said “Go, sic him!”
Vote
Posted on | May 6, 2010 | No Comments
If you complain,
but don’t engage
when you can,
you are part of the problem,
and your opinion,
while I respect it,
is invalid.
You can spoil your ballot
or vote for the bastards I don’t like,
I don’t really care
(Except I do, just a bit)
but if you’re not counted,
then you don’t count.
And a small foam axe
Posted on | May 4, 2010 | 1 Comment
On my home from work last week, I went via Asda.
Specifically, I went via Asda to pick up for that evening, milk and bread.
I bought some food for that evening, a George Foreman Grill to replace the broken one my brother bought me for christmas many years ago, Green Apple vodka, coke, lemonade, elixir of holy hand grenade, pizza, duck, pasta, a kitchen timer, a pizza cutter, seven pairs of socks,
and a small foam axe:
I am aware that there is a rule of “Do not go shopping when you are hungry”. I’m pretty sure I need to expand that to “Do not go shopping when you’re distractable” or possibly just “Do not go shopping when you are me”.
On being a late adopter III
Posted on | May 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
Depite my great and brand new phone and its wonderous open-sorcery, I still don’t hate Apple.
I mean, I assume my new phone is great, as I write this it still hasn’t arrived.
I said, at the end of that article, that the choice of whether I wanted to waste my battery life is mine, the choice of what I install on my computer is mine. This is because I am a geek, and it matters to me.
I actually believe that there is not a right to tinker. In fact, having worked Desktop Support for a while in both professional and power-user contexts, I am firmly of the opinion that the right to tinker by someone who “knows better” than the guy who set up the system is, sometimes, to be nuked. From orbit. Twice.
In fact, the concept of giving a barely-computer-literate a machine that will work one way, can do the things it should do and also let them change the wallpaper, is a Very Good Idea, because it would minimise the amount of time I, or someone like me, spent on the phone or in a dusty back-office attempting to work out how to revirginise the PC in front of me.
(My favourite, ever, was a machine with a Windows 2000 install where they had infected it with a couple of buckets of spyware, and then ran out of diskspace as the porn-bot-net it was running filled up the hard drive. They had then seen the “Compress Drive” option when looking for ways of gaining space back. As a result, you had a PC running out of memory, where all its swap files needed to be decompressed in memory before access. It ran like almsot frozen blackstrap molasses)
One of the favourite metaphors surrounding the closedness of the iPhone & iPad ecosystems (For those of you playing at home, the iPad and iPhone can only get software via the “App Store”, which required apple vet every piece of software available. The vetting process is currently inconsistant, which is bad, but there is no other way to install stuff, which people see as worse) is that of the car engine, and how this turns the computer industry from the old days where you could see where all the bits went, into the modern car industry where everything is hermatically sealled under a plastic case. The complaint is that the barrier to tinker with your stuff is now higher.
I can accept some of this. I have been tinkering with computers for longer than I can remember. one of my earliest memories is crawling along the carpet to behind the sofa, and pressing the magic button on the white thing that made the numbers go to zero. This – I found out many years later – was the tape counter on a Commadore 64. My first computer was this same C64, where the entire interface *was* a Basic input shell. Shift Run-Stop, Press Play on Tape. I can see how people would say that this meant more people would become computer programmers when they grew up, but I think we’ve already passed that. With PCs up until Windows 95 and the Rise of the Mac, you *had* to learn the basic concepts of computer command lines to use them, be it the ability to type “cd games\Doom” “doom2″ or the inner workings of the config.sys file on the boot disk you created for when you wanted to play Theme Park.
The rise of GUIs pushed a lot of the people who would have become programmers, I think, to having their first experience of source code to be HTML. It just shifts a bit, and if it means that people do not have to understand how a computer works in order to use it, that’s possibly even better. To continue the car simile for a bit, it’s not as if the rise of BMW-type sealled engine blocks entirely removed the people who know how your car works. I’m pretty sure that the people with the mental tendancy to tinker with code aren’t going to be put off forever because their phone or their video player doesn’t compile things for them, as they’ll gravitate to the ones that do, and if it means that I can know my non-existant Uncle Martin has bought an iPad and I won’t be spending the 27th December scrubbing spyware from it, so much to the better.
First of May
Posted on | May 1, 2010 | No Comments
On being a late adopter II
Posted on | April 30, 2010 | No Comments
The story of Flash on the iPhone is interesting.
I don’t want flash on my iPhone, to be honest, and I don’t want it for all the reasons Steve Jobs said in his essay yesterday. Firefox is a lot more stable if you don’t install flash, so is Chrome. Apple say that Flash is the number one reason for crash reports in OS X.
However, I said in my last thoughts on the subject that the iPhone isn’t very ideologically sound. I cut out the paragraph explaining that, because it distracted from the main point, but it’s probably worthwhile anyway. One of the main complaints about the iPhone from both a metaphorical software point of you and a literal hardware perspective, is that that it lives in a hermatically sealed environment. Partly, this is a function a phone OS developed in the US mobile market, which has always been more closed than the European one. You can make less hermetically sealled by jailbreaking it, but the process of Jailbreaking an iPhone is basically a three-shell game with firmware revisions, and if this doesn’t go 100% smoothly you may end up with a phone that no longer has any concept of such things as “how to respond to the on switch”. Apple’s approach appears to be to make this three-shell game slightly more complicated – more out of due-diligence to the phone companies who say you can’t run custom software on a phone than because they hate us – but every so often do things like rewrite the entire bootloader to make it 30% faster, with the side effect that there are now *five* shells and two of them are made out of explosives.
All of this is because most of the US phone network is built of sticky-back plastic, string, hope and tangerines; and this has traditionally lead to the US phone networks making an absolute – and somewhat paranoid – ruling that nothing not personally signed off by the network could be executed on a phone , just in case it went ballywacky and managed to bring down the entire local phone network (GSM, the mobile phone network protocol we use in Europe and that is beginning to take hold in the states, has a couple more safeguards). This has existed since days of Java apps. The years before the iPhone, where people could grab java games and apps and put them on their phone? The US missed 90% of that, because building an app for java in the states meant submitting every new build (and a java app needs to have several different builds for each version, because no two phones have the same capabilities) though an expensive, arbitrary and somewhat brittle certification process *per network* whose phones you wanted to run on. This is why the iPhone was such a revelation to the US market, it was a phone that didn’t suck on a fundamental level (Most .eu phones – being GSM – didn’t make it to the states. The most popular phone up until the iPhone there was, I believe, the Motorola Razr, which is a device with a user interface that actively wishes you to THROW THE PHONE UPON THE FLOOR AND STAMP ON IT WITH MIGHTY BOOTS).
Anyway, the upshot of this was that the iPhone had no capability to add software on launch – it was scary enough as it was for AT&T, being a phone they didn’t have enough control over – but even when they added the App Store for revision 2 it had no hooks for it to take over any of the phone’s basic features. In fact, the App Store official policy states that you cannot post to the store any app that duplicates existing iPhone functionality, and even if you could, there simply aren’t the “hooks” in the system to say “When you get a phone call, run this app instead of Phone”, or even “Use this app instead of the email client”.
Most of the reason for that appears to be control-freakery. Apple’s primary selling point is simplicity of use, that you do not need to know how to work it to work it, and stopping an arbitary app you install from being able to modify what happens when you click on an email address in an SMS is part of it. There is a way that an iPhone works, and this is it, everything else is in its own little sandbox.
Recently, they’ve made steps towards building a climbing frame in the sandbox that things have to build upon. The idea of an app that works the same on Android as on Palm as on iPhone isn’t good for them, because it won’t follow the UI guidelines for iPhone applications in order that, by having used an iPhone application, you roughly know what this button on this other application is going to do. This is actually important to Apple, which is part of the reason they put the block on cross-compiling applications. I agree with this, for the most part. The easist route for an app *should* be the one that follows the UI guidelines for what they are releasing it on, and doesn’t look entirely out of place on the phone.
However, it should be a fence. A short fence, white picket, which can – if necessary – be stepped over. It should not be a wall. For example, Safari and iTunes for Windows both look exactly the same as their Apple counterparts. Partly because maintaining one lot of code is easier, partly because they’re adverts for how shiny a real mac would look. They both follow some guidelines – the window manipulation buttons aren’t arbitary trafic lights, the application closes when you press the close button (not just the window), iTunes even integrates with the taskbar to provide a mini-player when minimised, if you want it to. Microsoft didn’t block iTunes from Windows because it looks entirely out of place (Which is fortunate, otherwise they’d have had to block Steam, Xfire, Winamp, Sonique, and thousands of apps down the line, including Office 2010. Also IE8).
So, basically, it’s not your decision, Steve. It should be mine.
That’s why I’ve just ordered an HTC Desire. I may go back to the iPhone, but at least this way I can pick my own variety of battery drain for a while.
Bacon Non-Profit
Posted on | April 30, 2010 | 1 Comment
…[I]mmigration minister Meg Hillier tells voters in Dagenham, [...]. “We fingerprint anyone who comes in for over six months. Foreigners now have to carry special national identity cards.” [Guardian Opinion, Apr 26th]
We treat immigrants like criminals, and then we are suprised when some of them act like criminals.
Soon we shall treat *everyone* like criminals!
Vote labour. Woo.
Is it me, or does the word “Foreigner” now automatically come with its own greasy mark when used in the press?
Not Asleep
Posted on | April 27, 2010 | No Comments
It’s a quarter to two.
My sleep pattern can take quite a beating if it has to, providing it averages out to more than six hours a night over a couple of weeks. In fact, I can stay awake for as long as necessary and still get up the next morning, so long as there are four hours between me and regaining my sense of the world. This regain has to happen tomorrow morning at six AM, because that will mean that the domino effect of my morning will finally see me at my desk at 8am ready for another week’s work.
This means that, without a fail, I need to fall asleep by 2am. Minimum.
However, somewhere in E5 there is a car alarm going off.
It’s not anywhere nearby. It’s on the edge of hearing, the quietest it could possibly be to still be entirely obvious. A shrill two tone trill, splitting the universe into two parts, the ones who are sleeping though it, and the ones who cannot sleep because of it.Fifteen minutes ago it was annoying. Now, it’s maddening.
It’s not intrusive, really. If I follow a train of thought, get distracted, consider butterflies or rainstorms or sheep or toasters, get distracted by my newest coding problem then the noise fades out of my forebrain and it stops being a bother, until I realise “hey!, the car alarm isn’t bothering me anymore!”
And there it is.
I put a pillow over my head, and the sound is muffled but present. I stick a finger in my ear. The sound is gone, but I cannot sleep like this.
The inevitable future dawns on me, and I spend a few more moments under the warm duvet, dreaming up increasingly elaborate Rube-Goldberg contraptions involving car alarms and their absent owners, now present.
I am not usually a single issue voter, but right now I could happily vote for the BNP if they had a policy on deporting people who don’t turn off their car alarms. Given that this is Hackney, one of the most richly multicultural places in the country, it’s entirely possible that -tangentially, and in this case – they do.
As I say, maddening.
A dramatic flourish sends my duvet into a far corner, fyr still snug under hers, and I attempt to find my headphones to block out the noise.
I pad around in the darkness.
It appears to be coming from the East. That is, if I go to the south facing kitchen window, I cannot hear it. Our room faces East, though.
The headphones are not where they are supposed to be.
Occasionally, I suffer from tinnitus, imaginary bells on the edge of my hearing in my case sounding like a sine wave in the back of my head. Somehow, the car alarm is worse. I know the tinnitus is temporary, imaginary, and I am experienced though many long years of blocking it out of myconscious mind. The car alarm’s constant and abiding trill begins to cut though my skull like a blunt sawblade.
The headphones are not where they shouldn’t be – but invariably almost always are – either.
It’s 2am.
I consider waking my PC up. Whining on twitter about the noise. Using the “Vote for the BNP” line above, probably. Hacking away at Piracy Inc for a little longer, maybe I can fix the bug with the suicidal ex-captains stabbing themselves in the head. Maybe I shouldn’t.
It’s gone.
For a moment I stand their, stock still in my dressing gown. I just got distracted again, did I filter it out? It should be… there.
It’s not. There is silence all around. I step out onto the balcony, away from the faint hum of the computer fans, and into the deep and well lit background of a London night where there is no noise but the wind in the trees far below me, the distinct flap of the flag hanging from the balcony below ours, and the sounds of a city that never sleeps,
doing its best to try.
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