August 2008 Archives

From the BBC:

Tesco is to change the wording of signs on its fast-track checkouts to avoid any linguistic dispute.

The supermarket giant is to replace its current "10 items or less" notices with signs saying "Up to 10 items".

Tesco's move follows uncertainty over whether the current notices should use "fewer" instead of "less"

It's good, of course, that they're finally going to change it to something that is grammatically correct. But what's this "uncertainty" over the current phrase? "10 items or less" is obviously incorrect. There's no uncertainty about that at all.

(Well, stage one of the project, anyway.)

A couple of years ago whilst I was working in the heart of the City of London, I noticed that my lunchtime wanders were taking me past a few of the City Livery Halls. I'd always been aware of the Livery Companies, but I'd never really investigated them, so I didn't know how many of them there were or how many still had Livery Halls. So I decided to find out a bit more about them.

I also started taking photos of the halls that I passed. Of course, when you have the collector gene that I have, just taking pictures as you wander past buildings randomly isn't enough. I had to find out where all of the remaining halls were and get pictures of them.

And finally, a couple of months ago (as I was walking to a London.pm meeting) I took photos of the last three. I only uploaded them to Flickr last night as I had some trouble with Shozu (which may or may not be related to the general phone weirdness I mentioned last week). But anyway, I fixed the phone last night and was able to upload the final pictures.So now I have a set of photos which (as far as I know) contains all of the Livery Halls. There are forty-one pictures in the set, but one of them is a plaque marking the site of the Cooks' Hall which is no longer there (they kept burning it down). If you know of any I've missed, I'd love to hear about it.

Why do I say that this is just the end of stage one of the project? Well, I was a bit disappointed to see that there was no good site on the web to get information about the Livery Companies. What information there is out there is scatter amongst a number of sites. So I decided to put that right. I'm in the process of building liverycompany.org.uk which will hopefully become the definitive place on the web to find information about these fascinating institutions.

My current phone is a Nokia N91, I've had it for well over two years, which is probably the longest time I've owned any phone, and I've been very happy with it. Of course it's showing its age technologically now, but I haven't had any problems with it.

But last week, whilst I was in Copenhagen, it started acting very strangely.  Usually, it runs for two or three days between charges, but it started running out in less than a day. Also soon after turning it on, the user interface slowed to a crawl so that, for example, it took at least two minutes to open a text message. The longer the phone was on, the slower it got. After ten or fifteen minutes the phone became unusable.

My first thought was that the battery needed to be replaced. It's still the battery that came with the phone and I'm not sure what the lifetime of these batteries is supposed to be. I found some selling the correct batteries cheaply on Amazon Marketplace and ordered a replacement.

But that hasn't fixed the problem. Everything is still exactly how it was. My next plan was to upgrade the firmware and reset the phone. But both of these actions will delete all of the user data from the phone. So I needed to back it up first. This involved booting my laptop into Windows for the first time for months (and spending half an hour installing all the security updates that have been released since I last used Windows) so that I could use the Nokia PC Suite and the Nokia Software Updater. Having installed both of those I prepared to backup the phone's data.

But it didn't work. Remember the problem where phone slowly grinds to a halt? Well that also affects the backup process. You can only back stuff up in tiny chunks. And in the hour I spent trying it on Wednesday evening I didn't manage to get everything backed up successfully. I'll try again over the weekend. I suppose I should have been taking regular backups anyway. And I would if Nokia had software that ran on a sensible operating system.

My current theory is that there's some kind of runaway process on the phone and that it is taking all of the processing power and draining the battery. Does that sound possible? And if that's the case, how would I go about fixing that? What are the Nokia N Series equivalents of 'ps' and 'kill'?

The most annoying thing about this is that my current contract with O2 only has another six weeks to run. So I'll be getting another phone soon any way. I just need to resurrect the N91 for a few weeks until I can get an upgrade.

I cheer myself up by considering what I'll upgrade to. The N96 is currently favourite, but I might just go with an N95 if their price drops following the release of the N96. Most of the phones I've had over the years have been Nokias and I'm used to the way they work.

Of course I'm not even going to consider an iPhone. There is some strange reaction between me and Apple hardware. It always ends with me wanting to throw the hardware at the wall.

Over on O'Reillynet yesterday I wrote the first part of a series of posts entitled "Why Corporates Hate Perl". I'm working through some rough ideas that might just form a talk of the same title at next year's YAPC::Europe. I didn't think that anyone would take any notice of my random thoughts, but this morning I found a link to it on the front page of Slashdot. It's also been discussed on Reddit and on Digg.

I've mentioned here before that I run a small free software project which supplies simple web programs. The programs are quite widely used, but we generally only hear from the users when things go wrong. It was, therefore, nice to get a mail from someone who hadn't had any problems and just wanted to say thank-you for the programs. Here's what he said:

David I wish to personally thank you for the help you provided to my wife in being able to place a search engine on our friends website. We have needed a search engine on my own personal site and have not been able to accomplish it but now that we have done it on our friends site [url removed] our site is next in line [url removed - but it's a gun site].

Please believe me from my heart when I say thank you and I am so glad there are people like you in this world. I help many people in my business and because of their needs and lack of money. Many many times I do not charge one red cent. Well it came back to me 100 fold in enabling us to use your valuable information. We cannot afford 20-30k for what we needed and because of you we can now make it happen. Thank you ad infinitum, [name removed]

If you ever need help in locating a machine gun, silencer, destructive devices, mortar or grenade launcher, or anything else down to a handgun or long gun don't hesitate in contacting me I am completely at your service.

[contact details removed]

HARD-CORE RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVE AND PROUD OF IT

I wrote back to him thanking him for his kind words. I tried to explain the concept of open source to him and pointed out that personally I was involved because of the good fit with my socialist principles. I also thanked for the offer of business assistance but pointed out that in the UK those kinds of weapons are not allowed to be owned by private citizens - a law which I wholeheartedly support.

I'll let you know if I get a reply. But it's an interesting illustration of how open source software can help all kinds of people. Not just the ones that you'd like to help.

It's been a bit quiet round here for the last week or so. Sorry about that. I was busy in other areas.

I spent the last week in Copenhagen, speaking at YAPC::Europe. Over four days I gave three short talks and a full day training session. It good to catch up with a number of old friends. I'd never been to Copenhagen before, so there will be some photos appearing on Flickr before too long.

As always at these conferences, I get fired up about interesting projects in the Perl world. I think there were three things I really want to get involved in this year. The first is my Proud To Use Perl blog which is already up and running. The other two I'll talk more about as they become more concrete.

Like a number of the conference attendees I was staying in a cheap hotel near the central railway station. There are a number of similar hotels in that area. But it turns out that it's also a slightly dodgy area to stay in. There were a few sex shops on the same street as my hotel and usually as I was returning to the hotel there was someone on the street who was happy to offer me either sex or drugs.

We were also very close to the Tivoli Gardens. So on Friday evening, after the conference was over, After a couple of hours I found myself in the middle of a free rock concert (Fredag Rocks! apparently). There was a huge crowd watching an incredibly dodgy Danish band. They sounded to me a bit like a Danish version of INXS - which is, in my opinion, a really terrible thing to sound like. I left after a few numbers. Later investigation revealed that they were called Gnags and that they are "frequently referred to as one of the best live band in Danish rock history". I couldn't see it myself.

p.s. Oh, and I've upgraded the software running this blog to the latest version of Movable Type. There seem to be a few glitches. Please bear with me as I try to sort them out.

It's been a week of anniversaries. Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of the first London.pm meeting. And last night we had our tenth anniversary meeting. But for me personally, today is an even bigger anniversary. It was twenty years ago today that I started my first "real" job. I hope you won't be too bored if I spend a few paragraphs reflecting on my career so far.

My degree from South Bank Poly (remember polys?) was in computer studies. This was very much aimed at people who were going to work in large data processing departments. We studied COBOL and CODASYL databases. SQL and C were seen as the cutting edge technologies. Interestingly I spent my sandwich year working on PC product releases for IBM. The documentation for these was in an obscure format called SGML - the weirdest things turn out to be useful in the future.

So I left South Bank with my degree in computer studies and got a job working for a company called Learmonth and Burcheet Management Systems (LBMS). LBMS were big on structured development methodologies. They apparently had a big hand in the design of SSADM. They did consultancy and training, but they also had a CASE tool. That was where I came in. I was part of a team who was reimplementing their CASE tool. It was to be a Windows application (which in 1988 was a rather brave step to take). Over the next four years I became pretty proficient at Windows programming in C (Visual C++ wasn't around in those days). I also, probably more usefully, learnt a lot about data modelling and databases as that was the part of the tool which I worked on. LBMS not longer exists. They went out of business soon after structure methodologies and CASE tools went out of fashion.

I left them before that though. In 1992 I decided to move to pastures new. I got a job working for a company called Comtext. They specialised in communications tools like telex. I was there to give their tools a nice Windows front-end. I was only there for six months. By then I had a CompuServe account and I could tell that email was going to kill off their business. I don't know what happened to them. There's no evidence of them on the internet now.

Early in 1993 I got a job working with Walt Disney. Actually it was with Buena Vista Home Video - their home video group. We were building a system to report on European video sales. I got the job on the basis of my Windows and SQL experience, but whilst I was there I moved to working exclusively on Unix. We implemented our system in a number of European offices and as part of the project I spent a few months working in Madrid.

Unfortunately for Disney, the technologies they were using (Sybase, C, Unix) were exactly the set of skills that were becoming popular in the City of London. And the City was crying out for contractors with that skillset. So in April 1995 I set up Magnum Solutions and went off to start contracting in the City.

For four years I worked for various banks in the City doing Bank-type stuff. I was during this time that I picked up my knowledge of Perl. In fact, by 1999 I was getting work purely on the basis of my Perl expertise. I was getting a little bored by banking though so I decided to try working for dotcoms for a while. Actually, it took a while for the change to take place and I spent eighteen months alternating companies like QXL and Sportal with financial work.

2002 started badly. I spent all of 2001 working for a single client but the contract finished at the start of 2002 and the jobs market had collapsed. I spent five months out of work before taking a permanent job with Bibliotech (now known as Spider Networks). That didn't last long though. In November they went through a bit of a cash crisis and made a lot of staff redundant. Including me. Luckily the market seemed to have picked up a bit and I found a new contract within a week or so.

Following that contract, at the end of 2003 I made one of best connections that I've ever made when I spend a few months working on the Guardian web site. I've been able to return there a couple of times since.

2004 was another bad year. I was unable to find a contract to follow the Guardian so I ended up designing and building a new web site for Karma Download - a site for musicians to sell MP3s of their music. They didn't make any money and closed down a couple of years later. In May of that year I took another permanent job, working for Outcome Technologies. I lasted until the end of the year before the call of freelancing became too strong and I left them.

Since then, things have been going pretty well. I've bounced between three different clients. Two of them are media organisations and the other is a bank. So I'm getting plenty of variety in my work.

It's been an interesting twenty years. It hasn't gone in the way I planned it at all. I was a Windows programmer. And now I'm a reasonably well-known expert in a language that I hadn't even heard of when I started out.

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring. Retirement, with any luck.

Richard Dawkins' new documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin, begins on Channel 4 this evening. He has therefore been doing a round of publicity interviews and the results have been appearing in the press over the weekend. It's interesting to see how different papers treat it.

The Times ran a pretty straight article about Dawkins and his work (actually they ran another piece a couple of weeks ago).

The Guardian gave the article to Charlie Brooker. Brooker has no time for religion in any form so his piece is as funny and unapologetic as you would hope.

The Mirror's piece is quite strange. The writer takes the approach that actually, the evidence for evolution isn't quite as strong as Dawkins claims and that an intelligent person wouldn't take a firm position in the discussion. The Mirror writer is, it would appear, a fool.

But the strangest approach comes from the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. Both of these papers have found a way to spin the story so that it backs up their xenophobic agenda. They do this by picking up on a remark from Dawkins where he says that many muslims have creationist beliefs and that it is therefore muslim families who are largely responsible for the increase of creationism that we are seeing in the UK. Now, no-one will deny that there are a large number of creationist muslims. Or that their children are being indoctrinated into believing that evolution by natural selection is "just a theory". But I strongly suspect that this is rather missing the point of the documentary which, from what I understand having not seen it yet, is to explain the power of Darwin's theory.

But if we're going to get into the discussion of who is behind the current growth in creationism, it looks to me like the Mail and the Telegraph are ignoring some convenient facts. There are also a growing number of christians who are telling their children that evolution is unproven and Genesis is literally true. Of course that doesn't sit well with the papers' agenda. They want to promote the idea that it's the evil foreigners who are destroying our society. Their argument is as weak as it ever is, but it seems that an argument doesn't need to be particularly logically coherent in order to convince the readers of either paper.

Oh, and I don't recommend reading the comments on either of those stories. Discussions of creationism and evolution always seem to attract the hard of understanding and it seems that the Mail and Telegraph readership has more than its fair share of people like that.