Recently in life Category

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.

We were at our usual weekly pub quiz last night. One of the questions was this:

Who is the current captain of the Starship Enterprise?

I have to confess being rather confused by this question. Given that Star Trek is set two hundred (or so - I'm not a big fan, I don't know the details) years in the future, how can the word "current" possibly have any meaning?

The answer that the questionmaster accepted as correct was Jean-Luc Picard. Is there any way that answer makes sense?

As I understand it, he was last seen as captain in Star Trek Nemesis in 2002. But Jonathan Archer was seen as captain (of a far earlier Enterprise) until 2005.

I hate it when quiz questions are illogical.

We've acquired a cat. My step-daughter has come back from university bringing a cat with with her. And we get to look after it while she goes off on a two-month world tour with her boyfriend. I have no objections to this at all. I like having a cat in the house. What has been particularly interesting is watching him trying to establish his place in the food chain. We have plenty of local wildlife.

On the first day that he started exploring beyond the back garden he met one of the local urban foxes. I'm not sure what the circumstances of the their meeting were. The first we knew of it, the cat was dashing into our garden with the fox in hot pursuit. The cat ran up a tree and the fox couldn't follow. I went out into the garden and the fox ran away. It took ten minutes to persuade the cat down out of the tree though.

A couple of hours later the cat managed to re-establish some kind of superiority. He brought in a mouse. Fortunately (for us, I mean, not the mouse) it was dead. I disposed of it.

So we've established that cats trump mice but foxes trump cats. This morning there was an altogether more interesting contest. I was still in bed when I heard the cat flap open. Shortly afterwards there was an unearthly screaming from the kitchen. I was dispatched to investigate.

There was a cat vs squirrel fight going on under the kitchen table. And it was really hard to see who was winning. The cat obviously had the weight advantage, but the squirrel had the speed and agility. And the aforementioned screaming which seemed to be putting the cat off a bit.

I closed the kitchen door and opened the back door to ensure that if the fight moved elsewhere, it would be in the right direction. But neither of them showed any inclination to go back into the garden. Until suddenly the squirrel decided to make a break for it through the (closed) window. He sat on the radiator beneath the window scratching frantically at the glass. The cat sat on the floor watching. I grabbed a tea towel, wrapped the squirrel in it and threw it out the back door, where it picked itself up and made a sharp exit up a tree.

I went back to survey the damage. I was dreading finding the floor covered in squirrel poo or something like that. But I was spared that. I did, however, have to wipe rather a lot of squirrel blood off of the radiator. It seems the cat did more damage that I had first assumed.

Squirrels are just rats with good PR. They deserve anything the cat can give them. I just wish he didn't bring the fights indoors.

I spent a lot of the weekend clearing piles of old crap out of my study. I can't remember the last time I gave it a good clean, but it was nice to be reminded of the colour of the carpet and to be reassured that there is still a wooden desk underneath the layers of paperwork.

One decision that I took was that I was going to throw away all of the old 3.5" disks that I found. It's been years since I used a floppy disk and I can't see me needing them in the foreseeable future. The last time I bought a desktop computer it didn't even come with a floppy disk drive as standard. That was an added extra. I gave it one last workout on Saturday though as I checked about fifty disks to see if they contained anything that I wanted to keep. The only useful thing I found (I say "useful", but that's probably an exaggeration) was a set of eight disks that contained a set of Disney graphics that I must have acquired somehow when I worked for their home video group.

I also found a number of disks that were labelled with various DOS version numbers and a complete set of Visual Basic Professional 4.0 which came on about ten disks. It gave me great pleasure to dispose of those. The only disks that I didn't throw out were a copy of the original version of Doom (I remember three of us at Disney clubbing together to buy that) and the boxed set of The Lost Treasures of Infocom. This was partly just because of nostalgia, but also because in both cases the most important part of the game is a data file and there are interpreters for reading those data files available for many computing platforms. It appeals to me that I just need to hunt down a Z-Machine implementation and I'll be able to play The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy on my Linux system.

I found one other set of software that I haven't yet thrown away. I had largely forgotten about it, but in the second half of the 90s I wasn't as committed to open source software as I now am and I spent quite a lot of money on Microsoft software. I found a big stack of installation CDs for things like Encarta, Cinemania and Money. I remember being very impressed by Encarta and Cinemania when they were released - I spent hours watching tiny jumpy clips from films when I first got hold of Cinemania. Of course the presence of things like Wikipedia and IMDB makes them a bit pointless these days. I have no idea if these 1990s products even run on modern versions of Windows, but I can't help wondering if there's a market in secondhand versions of this software. Let me know if you're interested in hearing more about exactly which products I've got.

It's Talk Like a Pirate Day. So...

I'd never heard of "tombstoning" until yesterday. Apparently it's an "extreme sport" and involves diving off rocks and cliffs into the sea. Sounds bloody stupid to me.

It seems that it's also something of a craze in the town where I grew up.

A middle-aged man drowned and another was seriously injured when they jumped into the sea off a pier in Essex, in a stunt known as "tombstoning".

The two men - both believed to be in their 40s - were found face-down in the sea by lifeboat crews after jumping off a pier at Clacton, Essex, on Saturday.

Man dies after 'tombstoning' jump

Natural selection in action.

Update: More details on the story. It seems that the man who died was a former soldier who had moved to Clacton to escape his drink problem. Not sure that was the brightest of moves. As long as I can remember, there's always been a big drinking culture in Clacton.

The new London 2012 Olympics logo looks like a car-crash. Which is, I suppose, somewhat appropriate. I can only assume that this was done deliberately to make the 2012 Olympics a laughing stock.

Hopefully someone from the IOC will see the logo, realise that we're not taking this at all seriously and let some other city host the games instead of London.

Update: The BBC have published some alternative logos that have been sent in by readers. Can I just say that Sean Stayte (logo number 5) is a very naughty man. And that the editor who published that picture is either very naive or else has a keen grasp of internet memes.

Update: The dubious logo has been removed from that page. But the direct link still works.

From a recent BBC Have Your Say (as pointed out by spEak You're bRanes).

don`t blame buisineeses for exploiting the cheap labour if the imigrants can`t be bothered to learn english they have pnly themselves to blame ,in any country if you want to succeed then the first rule is to learn their langusge, every one will exploit weekness weather in work or play ev eryone aim is to win sometimes by any means

[happyfrisk], northampton, United Kingdom

So, are we clear now? If you don't bother to learn English then people will exploit you.

Actually, on re-reading it, I'm starting to wonder if it's deliberate.

Of course, it's terrible that Madeleine McCann remains missing over a week after she disappeared. And we'd all like to see her returned to her family as soon as possible.

But let's not forget that Alan Johnston is also still missing. And he's been missing a lot longer than Madeleine. For some reason you don't hear about celebrities offering huge rewards for information on his whereabouts. Perhaps that only happens for photogenic children.

It was Maddy's birthday yesterday. She was four. So today's tabloids have photos of her all over their front pages. It'll be Alan's birthday on Thursday. He'll be forty-five. Who wants to bet that any of Friday's tabloids will all have him on the front page?

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be doing all they can to find Maddy. I'm just saying that perhaps certain newpaper editors are letting emotions cloud their judgement.

Update: Oh look. I'm not the only person who thinks along these lines. I should read my Bloglines feeds before composing blog entries.