Daniel Davies - Latest Articles

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Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:25:17 +0000

In order to provide transparency to my customers, I've setup an availabilty page. This page links to my Google Calendar, so that people are able to view when I can work for them.

If you'd like to discuss a project, please contact me!

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Just say yes!

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:14:04 +0000

Last year I was sat alone in my house in Tyseley, single, in a stable but mundane job and kind of bored. You see, I'm that "sensible one". I'm that guy telling his drunken mates to shush as they sing their way home at 3 in the morning. I'm that guy that keeps things simple, stays within boundaries and thinks too much. An introvert, so to speak.

No. That was a word I used a lot. Turning things down because I didn't really know what would be in store. I also used "but". That's a great idea, but... How boring? So I promised myself I'd try to be more positive, I'd say, That's a great idea and. When presented with the unknown I would not say no, or but. I'd just say yes and and. I'd see where it took it, after all, I'm still young and can start again at any point.

January

Nicky Getgood advertised her need for a lodger. I needed a place to live, so I said yes. Now I live in Digbeth, and I love it! I also saw a question on Twitter that month, "who wants to run a Twestival in their city?". Not in a million years would I have even considered running an event like this, but none the less I threw the idea out there to the guys from work, and then BrumTwestival raised £1,500 for charity! Unfortunately I didn't know anything about the following BrumTwestival, but I believe that it did even better!

Febuary

Dave Walker suggested I ditch control panel based hosting and do it all myself on the command line. I moved all of my websites to a new infrastructure and the experience took me on a crash course in Linux admin, and now hosting is one of my main incomes!

March

Someone said there needed to be a website that told you what the Sub of the Day was at Subway. A pointless idea, I'd look pretty sad making that website. So, I built it anyway, and as the most visited website I've ever owned its taught me some lessons. One, simplicity. Two, having a purpose. By combining a purpose, with a really simple idea you're likely to find yourself a success. No matter how sad an idea may seem, do it for fun and see what happens.

April

My mother suggested I spend a few hours speaking APTUK about their website and hosting. I'd shyed away from such large freelance work, but I said yes none the less. Little did I know they would become my first major client on the path to self employment.

May

Nicola, who wasn't my girlfriend at the time, suggested we meet up. She'd "accidentally" added me on Facebook once, mistaking me for someone else. We'd chatted from time to time, had a lot in common, but I'd never have considered meeting an Internet stranger. Anyway, I said yes! We're still together.

June

Nicola suggested we go to a car boot sale. They'd never appealed to me before, but now they're a bit of an obsession of mine (the thirty+ collection of 2nd hand video games is testament to this).

July

Rhubarb Radio (well, Mark Steadman), asked me for a little help setting up the Rhubarb Radio mail server. I said yes. It was too much! I learned saying yes to "everything" can be difficult, and will no doubt leave people disappointed. I setup the mail server as I promised, but made a conscious effort from then on to be more selective in the projects I get involved with.

August

Dave Walker (who seems to be having quite an influence on my life...) said I should start my own company. I didn't say yes straight away, but as the idea lingered around my mind I thought, "to hell with it, I'm going to do it!" By the end of the month I'd left my job, and haven't looked back since.

September

A company in London asked me if I could help them migrate some websites. It didn't look like much work, and it wasn't really my "niche". To be honest, any work I could get at that point was good work so I did it on the cheap anyway. Now that client sends me work at least once a month. I learned that when running a business the best income is a steady flow from a small client base, rather than hopping project to project.

November

Some folks at Clusta asked me if I'd be interested in having an office in their building. A big commitment indeed, after all, I thought I was doing fine working from home. But I said yes none the less. My productivity has increased ten fold since leaving the bedroom!

December

I went to see a band called Monster Magnet. I hung around after the gig to buy a t-shirt and after the crowds had cleared the band emerged. They came over and said they'd seen us at the front "rocking out". After a bit of chat they asked us (the people I was with) if we could take them for a drink. I said yes, without a moment's hesitation! But we didn't go... The people I was with weren't up for it. Apparently because the car-park closed in 45 minutes we wouldn't have time. This is when it dawned on me how much I'd changed over the year. I didn't care about the car-park, or getting home; I'd deal with that when the time came. To go for a drink with one of your favourite bands is one time opportunity, and by people saying no I saw what a bore I was last year.

How has saying yes changed me? Well the lesson I really learned is that life is more fun when you say yes. You experience new things. As my December entry shows, you only really regret the things you didn't try.

I've moved house, started a company, found new hobbies, found a very special someone - all because I said a yes.

I'm now more confident, more fun, less lonely and happier with life in general. I'd highly recommend anyone else who shys away from the unknown, or thinks too much just to give it a go. Say YES!

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links for 2009-08-19

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:58:10 +0000

The Submarine

Great little article about PR, and how it works. Its quite truthful and mostly unbias - anyone who's worked in media will no doubt be able to relate to a lot of what is written here.

(tags: pr media marketing business advertising journalism news blog)

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Setting Feeds Alight

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:30:26 +0000

... or so I'm told. I've (finally) switched my main RSS feed over to Google's Feedburner. You can now subscribe through the following address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DanielDavies-LatestArticles

The old address for the feed is still active, just by way of 301 redirect, you'll end up at the new feed. If you're already subscribed you shouldn't need to do anything.

I'm told I'll be given all kinds of statistics about the feed, and that people can have it emailed to them. I'm sure I'll follow-up in a couple of weeks if its worthwhile.

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Friend Request for Facebook

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:13:41 +0000

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about why Facebook appears to get so much bad press amongst "digital insiders". Whether we like to admit it or not, its the biggest player in terms of social networking, and its recently announced acquisition of FriendFeed only increases evidence that the service is still in rapid growth.

Facebook has the most fine grained privacy options I have seen from any social networking site, allowing you to control exactly who can see what about you, right down to individual pictures. This makes it a great all in one tool, as users can maintain both personal and professional relationships through one moderated profile.

As a “general public” tool its incredibly easy to use, both my parents are on it, and its a great way for me to keep in touch with my family. Its also got a really secure, flexible API, making it one of the best development platforms from an online marketing point of view.

So what’s the problem? Sure its annoying to wake up with 100 requests to suck blood from your neighbour, or plant a tree sent by a co-worker. But this is not the fault of the site itself, rather the people you are friends with. The options to remove yourself from these kinds of notices are clearly marked.

Of course, we’d be naive to ignore the fast amounts of money Facebook are earning from selling your data and targeting ads at you. But they can only use what you give them and upon closer inspection of the T&C’s, there’s really nothing surprising here. Surely if you take such issue with Facebook, these same concerns can be raised across other services, such as Gmail.

So have I missed something? Do you have a Facebook account, how does your usage vary from other social networks? If you’re staying well clear what is it that deters you?

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Hello HTML 5!

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:04:32 +0000

In need of some touch ups, I started a redesign of this site (http://www.danux.co.uk) a couple of days ago. I thought it might be fun to give HTML 5 a go, so here it is!

I've had a pretty mixed experience, while the coding was pretty simple, and made a lot of sense, I'm about the go to war with browsers to get the site rendering correctly every where.

Internet Exlporer won't play nice at all, the navigation is broken, as well as the "Keep Current" alignment. Firefox 3.5 is having problems too, and Firefox and Safari cannot agree on how to absolutely position things. Opera seems to be quite anti-sprites.

Other than that though, its all good. Next I need to rewrite some of the copy on the site, write the new "work" section, and try to brigten things up.

Have you had a go at HTML 5 yet and how did you find it? What's holding you back if you haven't?

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New Development Alcester Street & Cheapside

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:02:27 +0000

The following arrvied by email this morning; I'm not sure exactly who its from, or how it came to my address. None the less, if true its worth posting here.

Dear Resident & Businesses

The New development on the corner of Alcester Street & Cheapside opposite The Fountain which was a case of a stagnating building due to Builder/Developer Liquidation is nearing completion. This has come about by the Bankers who held the development have disposed of it to a Development Group in London who specialise in letting bunk beds to anyone for £10-£15 per night. They intend using this sight as a let in the same style of their other 6 properties in London that are used by "Young Tourists" visiting the capital. Yes l thought the same as you are now when l heard this. The building is 4 floors and has been designed and built to provide 12 car park places and a retail unit on the Ground Floor. 1st to 4th floor contains 20 luxury apartments and is an acceptable and inevitable type of building we all will be familiar with cropping up in areas like the Jewellery Quarter and others. This application for change of use is a big leap from the existing application. Should the application be granted and overnight accomodation Tourist type be allowed and fail due to lack of use, then the next leap would be very small to change it to an emergency/drop in and temporary accomodation for new comers to this country.

The new application is for the ground floor to have part retail, kitchen, cafe and beds. 1st to 3rd floor 68 beds per floor and the 4th floor to have 46 beds ( TOTAL PLAN inc Beds in the retail area 256)
YES! YOU READ THAT RIGHT!
The change of use has to go through Planning and will be vigourously opposed by all tenants and property owners around here as these details are staggering. We have little tourists to the city and already have a good range of cheap Hotel accommodation including THE PARAGON within 100yds of this site. l can imagine that as they start off, suddenly we will have many very undesirable characters turning Digbeth into a place NOT to live or work in. This is exactly the type of use for a new building we all should be opposing.

The following 6 local residents/businesses have already been to view the application and meet with John Davies at Alpha House, the meeting was positive and John was very receptive to our views. John asks that we should any local Residents/Businesses want to oppose the application they should write,file on the website or email John Davies as the details below to register their views before 5th August 2009.
Please consider the following areas of concern: Increased noise (Especially late at night), Traffic, Insufficient Parking, Fire Hazard, Possible undesirables in the area, Potential for increase in Crime, Transient Residents with no local pride in the area.

Attendees at the meeting with John Davies
Paul Sankey (PS Graphics), Kim Johnson (VIP Publishing), Paul Jones (Paragon Hotel), Dave Fisher (Father Taffe House), Brian Tohill (The Fountain) & Mick O'Loughlin (Local resident).

Thank you for taking time to read this letter, please play your part by adding your comments to the Planning application:
The application reference is C/02504/09/FUL and if possible please send a letter opposing the application via email: john.davies@birmingham.gov.uk or post to: .

John Davies
Planning Service
Birmingham City Council
PO Box 28
Alpha Tower
Suffolk Street Queensway
Birmingham
B1 1TU

www.birmingham.gov.uk/planningapplications

C/02504/09/FUL

Regards Paul

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What I have been up to

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:58:20 +0000

Mark Steadman asked the question, 'What have you been up to?', and so I guess its only right I answer such a question. And a lot I have been up to lately. First, and perhaps, foremost, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Then there's of course been some doing, and then there's been my deliberate non-doing.

Thinking

I've been thinking the web takes a heck of a lot of commitment. There are routine things which we do, like RSS, Twitter (i.e. "social" web, or so we're lead to believe). These create a burden. Then there's the things which make our lives easier, such as getting train times, buying something, getting car insurance. These are non-routine, and make our lives easier. I've been thinking about this a lot... and I think I've found a pardox in the modern web, but I'm still unsure, so I'll write my thoughts in more detail when I understand them more. Essentially, a committment to accept these burdens is all that's needed to perceived to be an "expert" by those too busy not to accept the burdens. Any who, that's just my thinking.

Doing

Doing isn't so easy, thoughts can (and usually do) come in traffic on the M6. Coding isn't so easy to perform at such times.

Ubuntu UK Planet - I'm working on the theme for the new Ubuntu UK Planet. Its becoming very hard to find the time to commit to my least favourite actively, xhtml/css. But I'm slogging on none the less to make sure I get it done.

Rhubarb Radio - I've offered my help to Rhubarb Radio. At the moment I'm setting up their email for them, and using a little project of mine called Hermes to let them manage all of this through their Django admin.

This blog - I've been doing loads of work on this blog, in particular tidying up the code to act as a platform for all future developments I'm doing. You can see how its looking in the Subversion repository. I've also added a nifty little gallery, which I'll populate as soon as I've fixed iPhoto on the mac...

Non-doing

A side-effect of the "thinking" is that I've actually learnt to appreciate the satisfaction of being away from the Internet, in the "real-world", interacting physically. Its incredibly valuable, and the return on investment of seeing people for real far out-weighs that of a conversation online.

Thus I've been doing nothing at all, especially at the weekends. Here are the real world things I've been doing, in my deliberate attempt to relax with a little bit of non-doing.

Car Boots - I've been going to a lot of car boots lately, primarily because they are the best places to pick up dragons and Playstation 2 games dead cheap. I've picked about 15 games in the last couple of months from car boot, and my dragons are looking great with a few additions I've haggled on to my display case (which, by the way, cost £1 from car boot)

Crafting - I like to take things I don't really like, such as my £1 display box from car boot, and turn it in to something I do like and can use. This is, without doubt, a physical manifestation of the thing that ticks inside me every time I program. A tin of black spray paint, some gold and a lazy Sunday afternoon in the garden is all it takes to occupy my non-doing time. Now for a few light bulbs and its a full display cabinate.

Playstation 2 - I brought one for £30 a few months back, but never really played it. This is one of my best non-doing pass times for when I'm on my own now though, as I've accumulated a fair few games lately. I'm trying to track down copies of all Final Fantasys to play at the moment, and so far I've gone and got myself addicted to 7 again.

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Distributing your Django Projects

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:04:28 +0000

Django is my framework of choice for virtually any problem the web can throw at me, and I've had a lot of fun working on my own projects using it. Unfortunetely, I've been hitting some issues with it. I might not even be talking about Django here, but Python itself, or may be even frameworks in general. The problem is how you distribute your projects.

When you distribute a project, as in attempt to make easy for other people to run your code, you need to make a few considerations.

Initially downloading/installing and its dependencies
Customising and updating

Installation and Dependencies

Python adopts a modular approach, with heavy use of namespacing to make organising your code very easy, as well as promoting the DRY principle. This is great, because it generally means as a developer I can grab someone else's library and pull it in to my own apps. But what happens when I want to share my project? Does whoever chooses to try out my project also need to download the library? What happens if they get a newer, incompatible version of the library; am I oblidged to make my code work with the latest version of the library? What if two apps needs different versions, do we need PYTHONPATH wizardary to sort it all out?

At Europython this issue was briefly touched upon in a talk. With modern broadband speeds, and the relative size of a code base it was suggested that its only logical to actually include any dependencies within your project. But what does that mean for Django projects? Should there be a dependency package within each project in which the developer specifies which versions to use? How would that work if you need PIL?

So here's another scenario. I have a website with a blog, and a gallery. They both make use of a great paginator someone's written. I decide that I will distribute the source of my website and call it a CMS.

Because I don't want the paginator to belong to my gallery app, or blog app, exclusively I store it in myproject.dependencies.paginator

Someone sees my gallery and decides they only want this. Python's modular approach should mean they can just grab the gallery package, but they'll also need to work out the paginator dependency. This means we've not really solved our original problem. I could, of course, have the paginator in both the blog and the gallery, but this would cause repeated code and would be seen as a major no-no.

I'm not entirely sure how to solve this issue, I'm open to any suggestions! Is this a Django related problem, or a general side-effect of working with frameworks? How do other frameworks deal with dependencies and external library? Are framework based projects even possible to distribute problem free?

Customising and updating

By customising, I actually mean "skinning to your environment". Were you to download this website you'd no doubt want to be able to customise the look and feel of it. But what happens when you want to update? Are your templates going to be overwritten by changes to the main codebase?

Thankfully this is quite a simple problem to solve in Django. Have a look in my repository, you'll see that I have a "personal_website", and a "danux" folder. Personal website is the core of the website, with all the models and views, essential stuff that if you update you will want. Then there's danux, which is actually my website. This will never need updating, it contains site specific settings, templates and media. I'll also be adding a "default" soon, which will be a plain, un-branded theme that can be used on personal_website. This will be my starting point for all future project, and I currently have a number of sites actually running off a single, "personal_website" codebase.

There's a few things you need to consider though:

Make sure the settings file includes the master settings file
Things such as dumping data to fixtures will not work if your manage.py is not in the same package as your core code

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links for 2009-07-02

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:59:53 +0000

How to: GnuPG for Mail.app in Leopard — Arthur Koziel

Interesting looking guide. GPG support is the main reason I use thunderbird over mail so if I get this working I'll be quite happy.

(tags: gpg gnupg leopard mail howto tutorial)

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