Dave Beer

Microsoft's very generous donation to non-profits

2018-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’m still donating some time helping out a charity with a small web-app. The concept is simple: Allow donations of prepared food, notify all agencies and allow the first agency who wants the donation to claim it.

It could possibly be done using anything from a closed facebook group, mailing list (which is effectively what this is) or even something off the shelf that I’m not aware of. But myself and a few students knocked up this web-app over a weekend and I’ve been fleshing it out a bit since.

One of the issues I’ve had recently though, is hosting. I have just been hosting it on a laptop from my office. Not ideal, but was okay while we were trialling it. We attempted to get hosting through Foodshare’s IT provider, but their wholesaler only supports Linux hosting (Wordpress mostly, on LAMP stack), so I had to look for other options.

It’s a fairly lightweight app, so I was just going to pay for hosting and put it on either AWS or Azure. A quick spot of googling though, led me to Microsoft’s nonprofit offering. After applying (and verification through Techsoup) Microsoft generously donated enough Azure credits to easily run the web-app.

But now we’re up and running (and not off my laptop). Still need to get the domain name sorted, but for now I’m really impressed.

My Nexus Journey

2017-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

I’m now on my fourth Nexus phone, the LG-made Nexus 5X. Up until the Google Pixel, the Nexus phones (and tablets) have all been designed and developed by OEMs (such as LG & Motorola) and are meant to be the flagship Android experience.

Nexus 7

In Aug 2012, I bought a Nexus 7 tablet. Just the Wifi 16Gb version for £199. And actually, it’s still in use today. But it’s terribly slow, even after a factory reset.

I’d been reluctant to get any sort of smart phone and I thought a tablet would suit me better at the time. In theory, if I downgrade it to KitKat 4.4.4, it’ll run quicker again.. I barely use it, but one day I might get around to doing the downgrade.

Nexus 4

This was my first Android phone. £279 from the Play store in March 2013. The main reason I purchased this, is my Sony Erricson 810i had finally given up the ghost.

Unfortunately, this phone took a 1-foot tumble onto a laminated wooden floor, and that appeared to be enough to shatter the screen and make the digitiser unusable. So just over six months of use for this one.

Nexus 5

December 2013 I upgraded to a Nexus 5 for AUD$449. I was looking at prices in the UK and it was more expensive there for some reason. Normally Australia is pricey, but something was a bit screwy here, so I was happy enough to wait until I got back down under.

This phone was amazing and I’d still be using it today if I hadn’t totalled it. This time is came out of my pocket while playing on a slide with my daughter. No drop-damage, but the phone refused to turn on after this, so was a bit of a loss.

Nexus 6

November 2015 and it was this time a $590 eBay purchase to get my next Nexus. I ordered a Nexus 6 package that came with a 32Gb MicroSD. Yeah… None of the Nexus line have MicroSD slots, so it was a bit of a research failure on my part. Why the seller offered both together, who knows!

I originally thought that the bigger screen would be great, but really it just made it too cumbersome to use one-handed. I actually preferred the smaller form factor of the Nexus 4/5.

That said, this phone lasted the longest. I’d had a couple of cases, but the wallet one fell apart after a year, and the other plastic one became brittle and started coming apart too. And it just happened on a particularly clutzy day, I managed to drop this phone twice. Both times damaging the screen. It’s still usable, but only the screen protector holds the glass of the digitizer together now.

After saving everything off of it, I ended up resetting and rooting it, then installing Debian/NGINX. I thought it’d be a fun little web server to play with. Not sure what exactly I’ll do with it yet, but it’s got a great UPS.

Nexus 5X

After damaging my Nexus 6, I thought it was time for another upgrade. I’d tried my old windows phone, as well as a loaner Nokia Lumia 920 which at least supported Windows 10. But that was a very painful few days. Yes, it had a beautiful camera and it’s a beautiful bit of kit. But Microsoft definitely lost the mobile OS war. I’d seen two friends with their 5X’s and both were very happy with them. Also, neither experienced any slow-down, which until now, seemed a ‘feature’ of the Nexus phones I’d owned.

An AUD$333 eBay purchase and my phone arrived from Hong Kong in just a few days. And you know what? It’s pretty much perfect, so far… The fingerprint reader is great for unlocking, the screen is the perfect size. So far, I’m really impressed with the camera. And Oreo came down within a couple of weeks of its release, so it’s on a fairly cutting-edge release which is something that annoyed me about the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact that I had, coming with various Sony cruft that I couldn’t stand and being so far behind on OS updates it wasn’t funny.

I’ve also got a couple of decent cases that should protect the phone if I have another clutzy day… We’ll see how long it lasts this time!

Private credentials on public github repository

2017-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

I was pretty happy doing my first hackathon. I took part in Bendigo’s first Random Hacks of Kindness weekend hackathon for charity. My chosen charity was Bendigo Foodshare. They currently distribute bulk food to agencies and run a very lean operation. However, there’s an opportunity to redistribute prepared food (say from over-catered events for example), if it can be done without taking up a lot of Foodshare’s time - as they’ve really got to focus on where they can have the most impact, with the larger food movements.

So our team came up with a pretty reasonable concept of a web-app that Suppliers can list Donations that they have available - and then an email goes out to around 40 vetted agencies, and the first agency that can pick up the Donation can claim it. After which, it’s the agencies that distribute the food to the needy families, soup kitchens, etc…

Our lovely winning application

The web-app was pretty straight-forward. It was when setting up the email notifications where I came a bit unstuck. Initially I tried signing up with Sendgrid. But they (rightly in hindsight) flagged my account as high-risk and wouldn’t let me sign up. Although to be fair, they also tweeted afterward saying they want to get me sending emails, so think that they’re pretty helpful really.

But I also had an existing account with another transactional email provider, so quickly set up and authenticated my test domain so we could get up and running. (This was Mistake No.1 - I should have sandboxed this domain, not fully verified it.)

The next day I had an email saying that my domain has been disabled due to bounces. Now, I knew that the students I was working with had used the odd invalid email address while testing. Perhaps 4 or 5 emails might have gone out to invalid accounts, so I thought the disable was a little on the harsh side. But when I looked at the stats, in the one hour the baddies had access, there were nearly 3000 dropped emails - and slightly more successfully delivered ones.

The penny dropped.

I’d committed the SMTP host’s username and password in with our public github repo for all to see. And it didn’t take the baddies very long to both find it, and start abusing it. School-boy error Dave! I’m perhaps too used to working with private repos. :)

Anyway, it was quickly resolved and my transactional email provider was rather understanding under the circumstances.

And just a note if you’ve done something similar (and a quick search shows that there are plenty people who have committed secrets to public repos on github)… Remember that you have to burn those credentials. Once exposed you can’t ‘hide’ them any more with another commit. Trash them completely!

4k monitors at 60Hz

2017-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’m enjoying 4k monitors. I still have several low-res ones (if you can call 2560x1440 low res), but I bought a couple of Samsung U28D590 Monitors recently and had no trouble driving them at 4k 60Hz using DisplayPort. However it wasn’t until I tried to replicate this setup at a client’s site when I ran into problems.

The graphics card they’d ordered was definitely reasonable. GTX 1050 Ti with DVI, two HDMI outputs and one DisplayPort. Which is comparable to the GTX 660 Ti that I run at home (soon to be upgraded to a GTX 1070 - roughly 2-3x faster). So I was surprised when I couldn’t drive either panel at 60Hz.

The two cables they had were DVI -> HDMI, and a standard HDMI cable. Initially, I thought it was the HDMI cable, possibly the cables were only HDMI 1.4, so limiting the throughput, restricting us to 30Hz? (I don’t know if that’s even a thing, but it seemed plausible)

Using a DisplayPort cable, it was trivial to get one of the panels to refresh at 60Hz, but the other refused to play ball. And since the 1050 Ti appeared to only have one DisplayPort output, we were limited to either DVI (which the Samsungs don’t have) or HDMI.

It wasn’t until I took a cable home and tried it on my monitors that I realised that there’s nothing wrong with the HDMI cable at all. It’s the monitors themselves that are limited to HDMI 1.4, so unless you drive them using DisplayPort, you’re totally out of luck.

Now, I’m sure that’s not the same for all situations. But it’s definitely worth checking the specs of your 4k monitor to make sure that the interfaces you’re using actually support 60Hz. Either via Dual-link DVI, or DisplayPort most likely. And if the options are limited, then make sure you’ve a graphics card with the ports needed and the cables to match.

EDIT: Okay, turns out, unless your monitor supports HDMI 2.0, you’re pretty much limited to DisplayPort for 4k @ 60Hz. Which means you basically need a graphics card with two DisplayPort outputs. Dual Link DVI only supports 2560x1440 @ 60Hz, any higher resolutions are 30Hz. And with a bit of searching, I can’t find any adapter that converts HDMI 2.0 to DisplayPort 1.2. It might be possible, but they’re not cheap/readily available. Definitely easier to choose the correct graphics card in the first place.

Am missing my Android phone

2013-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

Considering how long I avoided getting a smartphone, I find I’m really missing my Nexus 4 now.

But, the other day, my poor little Nexus took a tumble (about 1 foot onto a laminate wooden floor) and when I picked it up, was shocked to see the screen had shattered.

It must’ve been a pretty unlucky drop to cause that! Or possibly some sort of flaw in the glass. Bit gutting though, as the digitiser won’t work, so it’s not possible to even unlock the phone. Fortunately there’s very little on the phone that isn’t available elsewhere online… But it’s still a pain.

So I’ve switched to my backup phone, a Nokia Lumia 820.

Originally, I’d bought a Lumia 800, but I had never-ending issues with it not being able to even turn on, that Nokia ended up giving me an 820 a few weeks ago as a replacement. So far, the new phone is okay. The camera is fantastic. But I’m starting to realise some deficiencies when compared to the Android offering.

Mostly it’s how seemless Google seemed to present information. Like public transport from point to point. For starter’s there’s four different applications, all with map-related offerings. Whereas Google just have Google maps, which can present all of the information rather cleanly. But even if I open HERE Transit and search for directions to Paddington, Google rather smartly knows that I’m more likely searching for Paddington, London. Whereas HERE Transit shows me Church Lane, Toddington. Which has the bonus of being closer, but unfortunately is of no value whatsoever.

It’s only one example, but it just feels constantly like that. Google/Android works the way I think it should.. but the Windows offering isn’t completely hopeless. It’s just that it isn’t really in the same league.

That said, I’m actually finding some pleasure in the limitations. I’ve turned off most notifications and am relishing a device that is simpler and less intrusive. Less intrusive purely because I’m using it less. Although I’m hoping to use the camera more. It’s honestly pretty decent for a phone camera.

Live a good life

2013-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

My favourite quotation from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Just a little more detail would be nice

2013-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

I’m finding it a bit irritating getting a page build error in my blog. I suspected Prose.io initially just because there’s some weird stuff happening with the cursor in the new editor, but github isn’t really helping by giving the rather generic error ‘page build failed’. That really doesn’t tell me much.

Problem is, running windows, it’s pretty difficult to get an installation of Ruby, the dev tools, the Jekyll gem and all that running properly. It’s possible, I’m sure, but not really supported.

I actually have a lot of fun developing for windows. I like Visual Studio 2012 and MVC4. The toolset just keeps getting better and more pleasurable to work with. But there are times that I sorely consider switching to Ubuntu and developing solely in Linux. Probably single page web-apps with a ruby on rails backend… but it’s seriously going to feel like starting from scratch.

In the end, it took about an hour to sort. Installed Ubuntu 13.04 desktop on a USB stick, add a few packages (ruby, rubydev and jekyll) install git, set up a new ssh key and clone my repository, then try and build it with Jekyll.

Turns out, an old post had an unescaped ampersand character within a a-tag’s href field. In the past, that’s never been an issue. But looks like there’s been a minor breaking change. I modified the offending file and we’re back up running again. Joy!

EDIT - 15 Dec 2016 - It used to be difficult, but it’s really pretty trivial now. And Windows no longer feels like a 2nd class citizen.

One of the biggest gotchas I found with Jekyll development (using Visual Studio) was that VS would include BOM at the start of a UTF-8 document by default. Unfortunately, either Jekyll, or Github pages doesn’t like Byte Order Marks, so you need to configure VS so it does not automagically include BOM when saving… after I figured that out, I’ve been finding site development with Jekyll on Windows pretty seamless since… But I definitely lost a lot of hours until sorting out the issue.

A new booking system for donating blood

2013-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a blood donor when I’m allowed. I seem to travel to malarial regions enough that the 6 month waiting period limits how often I can donate. But each time I’m able, and I try to book online, it’s that damn booking engine that puts me off for the most part.

Searching on blood.co.uk for your local donation center is great. It’s the step after clicking the book button that I take issue with.

The first question is: Are you an enrolled blood donor?

If you answer no, then it asks if you’d like to enrol and gives you a form to fill out. But if you answer yes, it pretty much gives you the same form. Why?

Check it out:

Anyway, that’s only the half of it. The other down side, is appointments have to be manually entered. You give them a possible two times that you’d like, and they’ll maybe give you one of those times, or something near it. I’m sure we can do better than that.

Surely it could be boiled down to:

Enter Donor number
Pick one of the available appointment slots
Enter Email (and possibly phone number) for reminder notifications

…and you’re done.

What could be simpler than that?

Admittedly there’ll be a little more work involved to provide the staff manning the phones the ability to book appointments, as well as a listing page for the staff running the donation session. I’d also like to make it easy for people to cancel or alter appointments. But even with that, it’d still be about the simplest application I would have ever written.

I’d even build it for them for free if they’d like. Give me four weeks and they could have a system that’s clean, fast and hopefully saves them a ton of administration overhead.

It could be that I’m solving a problem they don’t have. But I’d love to see the before and after statistics of the current system compared with my more useable one.

What are you worth?

2013-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

It’s astounding how many people think their only option to earn money is to get a job. It’s not a given that you have to work for an employer.

That said, jobs are great for the sheeple. What you wear, where you work, taxes, working hours… all sorts of decisions are taken care of for you. All you have to do is rock up and hand over 8 hours of your life each day. In return for your irreplaceable time, the company will give you back a portion of the value you’ve created for them.

But that begs the question. If you’re worth enough to earn $XX at company Y, then why can’t you work for yourself and earn something comparable? Think of all the dead-weight at companies you’ve worked at in the past. How much better would it be if you didn’t have to carry them?

Pay off your mortgage, or don't

2013-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

You’d think it makes sense to pay off your mortgage, but for me, it doesn’t.

Back in 2004, I’d switched my mortgage to a floating rate, something with no early repayment penalties. At the time, I was considering moving to a new country, so I wanted a mortgage that was very flexible with no tie-in even if it meant paying a higher rate.

Since then, the BoE have lowered the interest rate to 0.5% and my mortgage has dropped with it. I pay about £1.20 a month for every £1000 on my mortgage. Great position to be in, but why does it not make sense to pay it off?

Well, with Self Select Share ISAs, I’ve been earning £8.30 each month for every £1000 invested. That’s tax-free goodness right there.

Admittedly I don’t do anywhere near as well with Premium Bonds. I get about £1.25 a month for each £1000 ‘invested’. Thankfully that breaks even when compared to the mortgage costs. If my mortgage went up and the Bond return was the same, then it’d be worth cashing them in. But it’s nice to leave them in there for that infintisimally small possibility of winning something bigger. My version of the lottery.

The crucial point is to look at what each pound of debt costs you, or earns you and get rid of the highest costs, using savings that don’t perform as well.

It always amazes me when people have credit card debt at some horrendous interest rate, yet are proud of having savings at the same time. Makes no sense whatsoever!

Hidden in plain sight

2013-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

A modern take on orienteering is the hobby of geocaching. And it’s one of the things that a smartphone just makes so much more accessible. Ten years ago, you’d have needed to purchase a dedicated GPS, but nowadays, everyone has one in their pocket.

I like the idea of things hidden in plain sight. I’d love to build little sleeping spots in urban spaces. Sort of like those Japanese capsule hotels, but even smaller and disguised as mundane items, like power boxes, large telephone cabinets or air conditioning units. I could see that being something a lot of people would just overlook

Geocaching is sort of similar. It’s surprising how many caches there are in the immediate vicinity. I was surprised to find one literally outside my flat.

I like these sort of subversive little hobbies. Like bookcrossing as well, where you release books into the wild in various spots around town. There’s all sorts of things going on locally that most people don’t notice.

Mining Bitcoin for fun and profit

2013-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chances are you’ve probably heard of Bitcoin, a digital currency. Well, I’ve decided to give Bitcoin mining a go to see if it’s profitable.

At the moment, the price of each Bitcoin has skyrocketed. When I first looked at it at the start of last year, the price was around $6USD per BTC. But in the first quarter of this year, it’s increased in value ten fold, from $13 to $130. £100 ~~invested~~ gambled early last year would be over £2000 now.

It’s possible to speculate in BTC by buying them through an exchange. At least, you’re able to purchase and hold (I’ve yet to see any way to short BTC). And the recent price rise could be related to increased speculation perhaps, I’m really not too sure.

Mining seems to be a relatively risk-free way to get involved, as it doesn’t require you to deposit money into an exchange’s account. By donating some CPU power, you can ‘mine’ BTC blocks for yourself.

Mining as part of a pool seems to be the way to go too. It combines your processing power with a bunch of other computers and shares out the rewards based on your contribution. Mining as an individual with just some basic hardware is likely to be completely unrewarding as your chance of solving a 25BTC block is incredibly low.

The simplest way to get involved is to download GUIMiner and join a pool. I ended up joining Slush’s pool and fired up GUIMiner.

Mining uses your graphics card’s GPU to do the computations as they’re ridiculously powerful. My computer is pretty old now, so only does 70 million hashes each second. But so far, in the last couple of hours, I’ve helped solve two blocks for the pool.

My reward for the effort involved is 0.00053039 BTC. I’m contributing about one thousanth of one percent of the total processing power of the pool, so I’ll get a comparable portion of each 25 BTC block. So for two hours work, I’ve earnt about 7.4 cents.

More difficult is working out how much extra electricity I’m using. Total power usage of my desktop is about 400W. My GPU running flat out draws around 250W of that. At idle, it only draws about 150W. So at a guess, I’ve expended an extra 0.2kWh to earn that 7.4 cents. Seeing as I pay about 15p/kWh, that makes it 4.6 cents for the extra power usage. So yeah, it’s profitable, as long as you’re not running your computer just to generate Bitcoins. Because in two hours, I’ve probably spent about 18.4 cents on electricity (not counting the juice needed to run my monitors).

With Slush’s pool, the minimum reward amount is 0.05 BTC (about $7 USD). So to obtain that, you’d need to keep it running at least 200 hours if your GPU was a similar spec to mine. (An ATI Radeon HD4850) Once you reach the threshold, you’ll get a payout and you can then use that freshing minted Bitcoin for ‘something’.

So there you go. A very basic analysis of the economic rewards of mining Bitcoin. Good luck! Now I’ve just got to figure out what to do with my newfound wealth!

Living without a phone

2013-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

For some reason, technology was a bit of a struggle this winter-escape.

As I’ve done for the past six years, I headed down under to avoid the northern hemisphere winter. I continue to work, I just do it in a warmer climate.

But this trip, I had two phones fail on me. I blame sunspots, but honestly… it was probably just coincidence. But it has meant I’ve sort of backslid a bit.

Meeting up with friends was a little more tricky. The ones who don’t mind doing it old-school (meet at this place, at this time) were fine, but I found I just didn’t meet up with as many folk as I normally do. Partly because I had more work on and that kept me pretty busy, but also because I’ve pretty much lost all my numbers.

That said, it’s been rather nice being a little incommunicado. I definitely lived more in the moment, and I wouldn’t mind extending the trial, only I feel like I need to be fairly contactable for various reasons… so I’m buying another phone. And this time, I’m giving in to the temptation to buy a smart phone. Finally…

It had to happen some day!

Always plan when smuggling weapons

2013-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not really big on over-planning, or even much planning at all. Even a three month trip doesn’t really take a lot of organising. As long as I’ve got my passport and some money, then I’ve got the essentials covered at least.

But this last trip, I did fall afoul of my lack of foresight.

Being a frequent flyer on Emirates, I do get a decent amount of baggage allowance. 42kg which after my usual 12-14kg for a trip leaves me with a lot of spare capacity. So, rather last minute, I decided to see if I could take my air rifle with me.

A quick google-fu showed me the following:

Firearms designed for sporting purposes, such as target pistols and rifles, air guns, … hunting rifles, etc., may be carried as checked baggage on Emirates flights

That sealed it… I’d strip the rifle down and take it in my checked-in luggage. Job done!

Or so I thought.

When checking in, I said that I’ve got an air rifle in my bag, just to be clear. That caused a bit of a kerfuffle, and after about 30 minutes had the baggage manager telling me that I can’t take it even checked in.

But hang on! I’m sure it said I could. Fire up the laptop and pull up the page on Emirate’s own site to see that carrying it checked in is allowed, but then I’m horrified to read the other conditions. That not only do you need prior approval from Emirates at least three days in advance (I’d only booked my ticket the day before, so that would’ve been tough), but you also need approval just to transit Dubai from both the Dubai Airport Police Department and the Department of Civil Aviation.

Ooops.

I don’t often fuck up, but this was on a rather spectacular level.

The baggage manager suggested I get someone to pick it up. Late on a workday evening, that’s rather inconvenient for anyone I know in London, but maybe I could leave it at left luggage and a mate could pick it up when possible?

Nope. Turns out left luggage won’t even store something that looks like a weapon, let alone the parts for one.

How about a taxi then? I could pay to get it delivered to one of a few mates who live in London. But nope. No taxi driver would take it unaccompanied and I asked pretty much every one in the line.

I was getting at my wits end by this stage. I was sick with the flu, I’ve still not yet checked in, and was trying to find some way (short of just throwing a rifle in the bin) to deal with the situation. Even got to the point of asking randoms if they’d hang onto it for a day (but funnily enough, once the word ‘rifle’ was mentioned, nobody wanted to know… I don’t blame them)

In the end, a pilot mate of mine came to the rescue (I own him big for that!) through a little manouvering and persuasion I was able to get it held for 24 hours in order for him to be able to retrieve it the following day.

Totally my fault for not researching more thoroughly. Like the time I booked a hotel in Geneva, that turned out to be across the border in France (where my girlfriend didn’t have a visa for) instead of in Switzerland.

Have I learnt from this? Yes, a little. One that it’s just not worth trying to do anything too much out of the ordinary. Yes, it’s probably possible to go through all the bullshit of getting permission to carry a weapon, but is it worth it? Probably not.

I detest the amount of red tape you’ve got to go through these days to appease, what is basically, security theatre. And it’s experiences like this that put me off ‘conventional’ travel. Probably not enough to stop me though. I’ll just try and plan a little better in future.

Musing on the concept of home

2012-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

My muse just suggested that my home is in my imagination. And it is something I’ve thought about recently, just what is home to me?

Sure, I’ve got my flat in the UK. But all of my family are back ‘home’ in NZ. And while I don’t have anything permanent there, I do visit regularly enough to feel like I’ve got a foot in both camps.

Normally though, I love being where ever I am. If I’m on holiday in NZ, I love it there. When I’m at home in Cheltenham I (normally) love it as well.

Problem is, I’m also attracted to other places. I loved Da Nang and could see myself spending some time there. I’ve not yet been to Portland, but for some reason feel drawn to the city for reasons I don’t fully understand. I miss Wellington and Auckland and pine for both while I’m away. I’ve also loved Melbourne for years and fancy moving there ‘someday’.

But something I’ve been unable to cure is my desire to wander. There’s something about exploring that I just can’t seem to put down. But it’s a conflicting desire. I miss my family and friends when I’m apart from them. I’ve got the most adorable nieces and would love to seem them more often. But I want to watch my Godson grow up as well and he’s on the opposite side of the planet from my nieces. So everything is a tradeoff.

It’s what makes me agree with the concept of The Traveller’s Curse and a realisation that I suffer from the same affliction. I like the idea of a home and I daydream about all the possibilities, but the lure of distant lands, cultures and new people to meet are all too enticing.

But one day….

The end is in sight

2012-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes you think the end is in sight. It’s so close it’s almost tangible. But that’s when you’re likely to get caught out.

Once, I was returning from a mission. Just training, but we’d ‘killed’ the enemy and were returning home. But only a few kilometers from base we were ambushed by enemy forces and were killed ourselves.

We’d let ourselves think we were home free. The end was in sight and we’d let our guard down. That lesson has stuck home for the last 20 years.

I’m on the home straight, but it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.

And even then, I’ll be careful.

Sailing Away...

2012-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

I used to sail a fair bit when I was a child living up north. Just little P-class or Optimists, but it was a lot of fun and something I’ve missed since.

Lately, though, I’ve started thinking more and more about taking it up again. It’s a little hard to sail in Cheltenham, being so far away from water, but I’m looking at returning to Auckland soon and if there’s something Auckland has a lot of, it’s boats.

The last time I think I went sailing - back in 1999 in Dubai

For now, I’m just voraciously reading as much as I can get my hands on. Accounts of sailing, like Paul Lutus’s Confessions of a Long Distance Sailor, RYA manuals and I’ve ordered Seidman’s “The Complete Sailor”.

Once back in NZ, I’m hoping to get some experience crewing if possible. Maybe just hanging around a marina, offering to lend a hand at anything. See what happens.

I’ve also got a few brains to pick. I know a good few people who’ve been keen boaters and while I’ve heard a lot of the stories already, I expect to be a little more purposeful in my questioning and listening this time.

It’s been on my mind for a while now. But one of my mates has just left the rat race to go cruising around the Med on his boat. We worked together briefly for the Olympics, but were so busy, didn’t really get a chance to catch up. And it’s probably that fact alone (being so busy) which has been the catalyst for me wanting to make this dream become a reality.

So many dreams, only one life. But that’s not to say I can’t keep picking them off one at a time…

Dusting off my maths skills

2012-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

There’s so much information around today. You can learn absolutely anything you want.

Today, for instance, I’ve been reading up on Anerobic digesters. It’s a pet project of mine that I’m hoping to build one later in the year. (Client projects take priority, but I like to leave room for some fun personal projects as well. Especially when they’re not IT-related!)

But all of my reading today, is actually just me procrastinating from finishing the first problem set for my Solar Cells, Fuel Cells & Batteries course that I’m doing through Stanford University.

It might be my rusty maths skills that are to blame. I’m having to use skills I’ve not touched for a decade or more. (Even this blog post is a procrastination of sorts)

It’s funny. You’d think programming is quite a mathematical thing to do, but that’s not what I’ve found. I’ve mostly implemented business logic in my past projects and any maths involved is normally pretty fundamental stuff that you could do in your head.

Admittedly I needed to study a fair bit of maths to get my NZCE (New Zealand Certificate in Engineering). But now I’m having to remember how to factorise (You remember: “solve for x?”) and in a way, it’s feeling like I’m learning it for the first time.

Makes me wonder if our teachers were fibbing to us about having to use maths after school. Seems like I’ve hardly needed it at all…

Seth Godin is wrong

2012-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

I devour Seth Godin’s work. His bite-sized snippets of wisdom make great reading, so I was rather surprised to find myself utterly disagreeing with him on his latest post about the curse of incremental improvement.

He asserts two statements. One about MP3s:

MP3 files sound not nearly as good as they could

And the other about CDs:

The thought of, for example, working on the CD for six more months before declaring it ‘done’ would have been considered short-term economic stupidity. As a result, we are saddled with thirty years of sub-par music–if they’d just held on a bit longer, it would all sound so much better.

I realise a lot of what he said could be up for interpretation. But saying that MP3 files don’t sound nearly as good as they could is pretty all encompassing.

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror ran a very good bitrate experiment (While trolling everyone into listening to arguably the worst song of all time). The conclusion of which was that apart from 128kb/s encoding, it’s pretty hard to tell an encoded MP3 vs the raw CD audio, with 192kb/s being the optimal sweet-spot.

It’s true that older (circa 1990’s) MP3 encoding was of variable quality, but today’s MP3s are an entirely different beast.

Bitrate is only one part of the audio quality equation however. The other is bit-depth, with CDs being recorded with a bit-depth of 16 bits. And the limiting factor in audio playback is not the 16-bit depth, but our own limitations on the frequencies and levels that exist between the threshold of audible or the threshold of pain.

It makes sense to record and process in 24-bit purely for the extra headroom. But for playback? Completely pointless. We’re the limiting factor and unless we evolve better ears, we always will be.

So looks like Seth was wrong in pretty much all his examples (As for the cellphone call quality example, I’m guessing he’s got an iPhone, which admittedly isn’t brilliant for calls, whereas my SE810i is great). But what is he actually trying to say?

Perfect is the enemy of good-enough in my book. You’ve got to take into account the law of diminishing returns. Release it if it’s good enough, learn from it and improve.

Don’t be frozen by the futile pursuit of perfection. Otherwise you risk never releasing at all.

Death of a website

2012-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

It’s kind of sad knowing that something you helped create is about to die.

Okay, that’s perhaps a little dramatic, but I found out recently that a site I helped write, (or more correctly, re-write) is about to get switched off permanently.

Fair enough too! It’s running on a platform that I was not a massive fan of, and the licence fees are extortionate. Another issue is the site has been a little neglected the past 18 months. Under-resourced and operating at far less than what I think it potentially could have been.

Back in early 2008, I was asked advice about doing an internal re-write of this student social platform. I’m always happy to offer free advice and, over a few pints, gave my 2 cents worth on how they could go about managing the system rewrite in-house, as well as an idea of the effort involved. Little did I think that I’d be asked to help implement it!

The existing site had about 300k users on it, who all needed to be migrated to the new platform. We were also restricted on technology and had to use a particular platform, which was a headache in itself. But on the 13th of July 2009, after finishing development and running the migrator, our first user signed up on the new site.

It was so exciting seeing the increasing number of sign-ups. Online users were orders of magnitude higher than the old site could support. For a while, we ran both sites concurrently. Old users were redirected to the old site after login, while new users got to play with the new site (several users registered twice, not wanting to wait). But once the client had confidence in the new release, we retired the old site and continued to watch the numbers grow.

The past couple of days, I’ve downloaded the signup date for each user to produce this graph (horrible clunky API unfortunately - but there’s only 3 people online, so no impact on any users). Then grouped by day and averaged over seven days to remove some of the massive spikes, created the above chart. It shows clearly when we switched it on in 2009 (earlier registrations were based on the old system users) as well as the cyclical/seasonal user-signups which were related to school years and occasional promotions.

Considering how little love it’s had recently, it’s not actually declined as badly as I’d thought. But it’s still not profitable with the license fees they have to pay, hence the imminent power-down.

I don’t know exactly when it gets switched off. But it’s going to be a sad day for me. I loved the process of building it and value the people I worked with and are friends with them still. Part of me wishes I could have helped revive the site somewhat, restoring it to the potential I knew it had. Or even just helped stem the recent neglect. But it wasn’t to be.

When people 'borrow' your images

2012-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

What do you do when people use your images without permission?

Back in 1999 I took this photo in Dubai’s Gold Souk which I then used for my blog post about getting settled in Dubai.

In those days, the pipes to the interweb weren’t as fat as they are now. So the image was processed, cropped and over-optimised to produce the following:

That still didn’t stop people (mostly websites out in Dubai) from saving the image off my site, uploading to their own without attributing the original source. Three pages worth of search results, showing sites borrowing that image.

I was a little irritated when I first saw the plagiarism, but in the end, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be hypocritical to complain. I’ve probably done the same in the past before I learnt about copyright and fair use. It was only until I wanted to get permission to use a creative commons image that I started looking into how my photos are being used.

On my site, I’ve taken pretty much every photo myself. But there’s a few that I didn’t. This world trade center photo is one.

But I can’t seem to find the source for the image. The best quality image is on a greek news site. But are they the source? If I can’t attribute it or get permission, should I take it down?

Hard to know what the best course of action is…

Wearing the same shoes

2012-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Back in 2002 I was on holiday in Las Vegas. I’d packed fairly light, as is usual, but needed some shoes for going out. I ended up picking up a pair of Steve Madden Roloo’s, which initially, I wasn’t overly fussed about.

They sat fairly low around the ankle and initially felt like they were going to slip off. Completely unfair to compare them to trainers, but that’s all I had with me.

But after a very short run-in period, they became my absolute favourite shoe of all time. Molded to my feet, were dressy enough for me (I do smart casual at best!) and I thought they looked good.

A few years later though, and my pair were looking rather tatty. Ended up finding a few pairs in a clearance sale in the States, but the shop only delivered State-side. So I got a mate in New York to forward them on for me.

Ten years on, and I’m probably half-way through my third pair, with just one pair remaining. It’s got me wondering, what will I be wearing when I’m 50?

Ubuntu to the rescue

2012-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Earlier this year I managed to break the screen on my trusty laptop that I’ve had for the last four years. Bit gutting really, as I still loved using it and still haven’t seen anything released since that I like any better. (Although the Asus Zenbook is getting close)

I’ve also noticed my power usage increasing quite a bit since I’ve started working on a new project. I’m leaving my development server on 24/7 which is really sucking through the juice. It’s noticeable at least.

So to hit two birds with one stone, I decide to set up my old laptop as a low-power server. The tricky bit is installing an operating system on it. Neither the VGA, nor the HDMI, output any sort of display until the OS is loaded. Which makes installing a new one a little difficult as I think the BIOS isn’t set up correctly to boot off USB.

So by removing the SSD HDD, transplanting it into another machine and installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 I thought I could then swap it back and windows would figure out what it needs to do to output to VGA at least. But it looks like Windows doesn’t particularly like being transplanted like that. Testing it in a laptop with a working screen, I just get BSOD during bootup. I’m guessing Windows 7 is a little more fragile than XP used to be when you try and do this.

So in the end, it was Ubuntu I turned to. Installed Ubuntu while the harddrive was in another machine, then put it back in the original laptop and sure enough after boot I get a nice HDMI output. And I’ve got to say.. all the other problems I had getting various bits and piece to work last time, for some reason were a doddle this time round.

But unfortunately, I needed a Windows OS for my server, so ended up going for VMware Player. I actually wanted VMware Server, as I wanted headless operation, but that seems to be unsupported now. You’d have to use vSphere Hypervisor, but I’d be back with the same issue of how do I install it without a screen as I doubt that’d transplant particularly well.

In hindsight, I should have used VirtualBox, but I really can’t be arsed reinstalling Windows now that I’ve activated one of my precious licences. But the added benefit of having Ubuntu as the host OS means I can do a hell of a lot more with the box. Overall a win and a great use of some old equipment.

The productive procrastinator

2012-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

A bit of background. I have a to-do list of a ton of odd jobs about the place that I seem to manage to put off. Probably forever if I extrapolate it out far enough.

I’m organised with my work though. Emails are actioned using a bastardisation of David Allen’s Getting thing done. And I tend towards Inbox to Zero (although I’ve currently got 19 emails in my inbox that I need to sort through). It’s just all those personal tasks that seem to suffer.

But this last week, it seems like something has changed. Think it came to a head when I wanted to go visit a mate who lives about 10 miles away. It’s just a pain to get to by pushbike, so for the first time in (I think three) months, I tried to use my car. It’s had a problem for ages, which I think is related to the Mass Air flow sensor. It coughs and sputters and just drives like crap. I don’t know how long I’ve put up with it. Ages… But the car was a no-go on Friday, so I ended up taking my motorbike.

That spurred me into action. I had the part, and had recently bought the security tools to undo the tamper-proof screws holding the thing in. 20 minutes later and it feels like I’ve got a brand new car! I can’t believe the difference. Why did I put up with it like that for so long?

Completing that one task seems to have unblocked a whole bunch of productivity. I’ve been a real Dave’ll-fix-it the past few days.

Yesterday, for example:

I ‘fixed’ the soundcard on my PC. (It had a bad audio socket, which I found hard to unsolder with the tools I’ve got, so I just bypassed it to another socket with some jumpers and am now using that. Works a treat.
I took a ton of stuff to the tip. Mostly cardboard that’d been sitting around for ages, but also clothes, broken appliances and some scrap metal.
Found some neat speakers at the tip that were too good not to salvage. A bit of glue and wiring and I’ve got some great sounds downstairs.
Wired up two new sockets downstairs. I’ve had bare wires (terminated) since we redecorated back middle of last year.
Set up my old laptop (the one with a broken screen) with Ubuntu to run as a low-powered server. Now that I’m working on a new project, I’ve noticed running my current server 24/7 has a big impact on my electricity usage.

It’s hard to explain what’s changed or where the motivation has come from. But I’m enjoying this new-found productive phase. I definitely needed it! By sorting out a few little niggles each day, life just seems more pleasant.

How to love a woman

2012-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t think I really need to add much. Bob Marley said it all:

You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect - you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.

Ideas and execution

2012-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

I get approached by a lot of ‘idea people’ wanting a technical partner to help execute their idea. I’m open to the concept, but always keep in mind the adage ‘Ideas are cheap, execution is everything’. Although I recently read an article by Derek Sivers which probably put it into better perspective.

Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.

But there also seems to be this push for a unique idea. Which is something I don’t particularly think is needed. There are plenty of great ideas out there which have been executed poorly. Your idea doesn’t need to be unique by any means. Think Myspace/Facebook, Quicken/Mint, Experts-Exchange/StackOverflow or anything else where a complacent incumbent gets completely owned by someone executing essentially the same idea, just much better.

There’s plenty of ideas out there that’ve been executed poorly. Find one that causes people pain and do it better.

How long can the Lumia 800's battery last?

2012-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

On Monday the 20th of August at midday, I took both my phones off charge and decided to do a longevity test. This isn’t a real world test, in as much as I barely use either phone. I just wanted to see how long they could possibly last without charging, but minimal usage.

What’s the point? Well, I often travel and it’s nice to know how many days I get out of a device between charges. My Kindle is awesome, allow me a couple of weeks between charges. (I don’t have wireless on normally, but I read a lot, which sucks through the battery)

It’s now three days into the test and both phones are still running. I’ve made a call and sent and received texts on the w810i and it’s battery looks to have around 60% charge remains. The Lumia on the other hand only has about 30% remaining. It doesn’t have a SIM-card in it, and is purely using WIFI. But it does regularly download emails, but I can’t say I’ve used it much more than to check how the battery drain is progressing.

When I travel, I normally get over a week out of my w810i, depending on how much I’m using it. But the Nokia, being my first smartphone, needed regular charging. Admittedly I was using it a lot more heavily. The camera is awesome and Photosynth lets you take incredible panoramas. And the off-line GPS navigation was a big plus while riding around Europe.

It looks like I’ll get almost 5 days out of the Lumia, but closer to 10 out of the w810i. Considering both are on standby, neither result is particularly shabby. The w810i’s battery is a 900mAh, whereas the Lumia’s is 1450mAh. The main benefit of having a phone like the w810i though, is a replaceable battery. I can carry two spares on the road, which give me almost a month of phone without needing a charge. That’s definitely come in handy in the past!

Migrating Wordpress users to .Net

2012-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Having a little bit of fun today trying to figure out which algorithm has been used on a Wordpress site I’m in the process of rewriting (in ASP.Net MVC).

The original site is creaking at the seams, so I’m writing a new bespoke system to handle the workload. But one of the tasks I need to do is migrate all the existing users across. Fortunately, the version of Wordpress uses some sort of nice one-way encryption for all user passwords. That’s nice for security, but makes my job just that little bit more difficult.

Now looking at the data from the original database, I can see an account that I know the password of, and I can see a 34 character value starting with $P$B… which all of the passwords begin with.

A quick google shows that wordpress uses a framework called phpass. Another little google finds a port of phpass written in c# by Ryan Irecki (a fellow Kiwi?).

I was hoping the passwords would all be BCrypted, but a little bit of experimentation showed that they are indeed just MD5-based salted and variable iteration hashes. The only modification Ryan’s code needed was to switch out the $H$ header for $P$ and voila! Portable password checking on .Net.

Now at least, users will be able to log into the new site with their migrated records. After a successful login, because I’ll have access to a valid password for the user temporarily, I’ll be able to create a new hash using either BCrypt or PBKDF2, which will be a lot more secure.

Not yet ready to switch to Linux

2012-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

I keep flirting with switching to a completely Linux OS for my computing needs, but can never quite make the switch.

15 years ago, SCO System V & HP UX were my first introduction into the Unix world. After which I played around with Slackware Linux to help solve a problem we had in Defence to enable some X.25 legacy hardware to run over TCP/IP.

That started me on my Linux journey, but at the same time I started developing web applications using the Microsoft stack using Classic ASP (version 1) on IIS 3.0.

My latest play is with Ubuntu 12.04, in fact I’m writing this post with it (although I’m just using a browser, so it could be Chromium OS, Windows or anything really).

I’ve got several issues. But my main problem is related to codecs. The Rhythmbox Music player won’t play mp3s out of the box so you need to install a package called ubuntu-restricted-extras. (This is one bit where Ubuntu is lovely. Installing and updating via the package manager is a lot less faff than doing the similar thing via windows)

Now I can understand that the codecs have IP/licensing issues, but VLC player works just fine - and Rhythmbox can play streamed radio perfectly. But Rhythmbox still refuses to play sound for mp3s.

Another issue is youtube/iplayer in Chrome both play at stupid-fast speed with incredibly choppy sound. Firefox makes a better attempt, the video seems almost normal speed, but the sound is still incredibly choppy.

I’ve tried installing and reinstalling ubuntu-restricted-extras without success. And the supposed solutions online are of no help. All of which just sends me running back to the comfort of Windows. For now…

Innovation in business

2012-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

I was watching a video where Scott Cook (One of the founders of Intuit) talked about capturing employee ideas. Where a couple of his new hires built a system called Brainstorm. It was an idea capturing portal that encouraged employee collaboration on new ideas. Scott described it as a passion marketplace.

Then I realised, I’d built an idea-capturing system in one of my last permanent roles which eventually became a company-wide product (admittedly after some politicising). It was great to see a critical mass of employees really get involved.

I also helped one of my recent clients implement a similar system using Yammer. It took a while to build up a critical mass, but the culture of the company was incredibly risk-adverse, so it wasn’t really conducive to capturing and experimenting with employee ideas.

How you actually go about changing a company’s culture, I’m not too sure. But if a company is not capturing and acting on new employee ideas, then they’re missing out on a great opportunity.

Fixed priced quotes for Agile projects

2012-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t often bid for work. In the past, I’ve normally been approached to work on a project by someone who either knows me, has worked with me, or has had some sort of recommendation. So it was a unique experience to write a proposal for a client who I believe wants a fixed price quote.

For one thing, software development is a Wicked Problem. In my early years of software development, I’d spent time doing traditional big design up front in an attempt to ‘nail down the requirements’. I can say now, with hindsight, that that is one of the riskiest ways of doing software development.

But I can understand the desire to know exactly how much something will cost, even if it’s not clear exactly what it is I’ll be building. My approach has been to Educate. Emphasising that there will be regular releases (I release weekly as a minimum) and to show that the client will have excellent visibility into progress means that very quickly it’ll be possible to measure planned vs actual business benefits.

Whether that is enough to win a project or not, I guess we’ll see. But I’m happier not getting the work rather than having to work on a fixed price project with vague initial specs and the ensuing contract negotiation that happens afterwards.

The cost of a cup of tea

2012-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

This is the sort of thing that occupies my brain some days…

My jug broke just before I headed off on my winter migration, so I’ve been using a pot to boil water for my tea ever since. But ended up getting another electric kettle as an impulse buy, but it’s got me wondering, which one costs more.

On the face of it, I’d have thought gas was the cheapest. Per kWh (that’s 1 kiloWatt/hour of energy, which is sort of equivalent of turning on 10 x 100W lightbulbs for one hour of continuous use) I’m paying around 3.7p whereas electricity costs around 15.2p per kWh. The energy involved to heat a given volume of water should be roughly the same regardless of the energy source used to heat it.

Sure, there’ll be some differences. There’s probably a lot of waste heat being lost when heating water in a pot. And having to fill the kettle to a minimum line, means you’re boiling 750ml of water when you only need to use 250ml. The other bonus is the electric kettle will turn itself off automagically, whereas you’ve got to keep an eye on the gas one. (I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve gotten ‘distracted’ only to find I’ve boiled away all the water. Yes! I can actually burn water…)

Without boring you with the methodology, here are the results:

Method	kWh	Cost
Electric Kettle	0.1	1.52p
Pot on gas hob	0.167	0.62p

So, boiling the water on the hob took a little more energy, but it’s a lot cheaper per kWh so ends up being the best option overall. And since I drink around 10 cups a day (well, a couple of coffees and a lot of Roibos), then it looks like I can buy a nice stove-top whistling kettle which will pay for itself in a year. Either that, or get cracking on my solar-powered samovar and get my hot water for free.

Update - 17 Sept 2013 - Oops! I had to edit my numbers as I’d transposed them. Took me this long to notice. But yeah, boiling a cuppa on a gas hob is a lot cheaper. Approx 40% of the cost of electricity. So go old-school!

Forty is fast approaching

2012-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Am not sure how I feel about it, but I’m turning 40 in a few weeks. I still remember going to my father’s fourtieth birthday party (and driving him and Grandad home afterwards). And here’s me with no kids, single and still larking about the planet without looking like I’m slowing down.

Not that I want to change anything, because I do love my life. My last winter was in 2006 and things start to look pretty good when you follow the sunshine around the globe. Mind you, I’m still open to opportunities. I’ve got plans through til about the middle of the year, but after that it’s open-ended. If anything, there’s too many choices. It’s hard because I’d like to do all of them.

But the big ‘four zero’ does seem significant. Even if it’s just a halfway marker of some sort. I do wonder if it’s like a 100m sprint though, where the runners reach top speed about 50 or 60 meters in. After that it’s all winding down. I’m not sure I can wind down too much further without going in reverse.

Mindfulness and why I've not yet gotten a smartphone

2012-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

I’m still wandering around with just my Sony Ericsson W810i for a phone. I get a little bit of stick from friends who possibly don’t get why I’ve not yet ‘upgraded’ to a smartphone considering how much of a geek I can be in other areas.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen a group of friends sitting together somewhere, and every single one of them is playing on their phone. If they’re on facebook, then they need a kick up their bum. Your mates are right there with you!

Thing is, I’ve got maps, internet, a camera, music etc.. on my phone. The interface isn’t as slick, but my battery tends to last about a week. It’s also a pretty good phone when all is said and done. I’m not sure you can say that about some of the iPhone models. And I’ve been rather underwhelmed with the quality of the photos the iPhone takes when compared to a dedicated camera.

But crucially, I just don’t need a smart phone. Sure, it’d make certain things easier, but I’m pretty bored of the internets these days. I’d rather be here in the real world. Now if I could just go the next step and actually get rid of the mobile!

Can't trust the internets

2012-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve lost my mojo a little lately. Feel like I got sucked in by two online purchases. One was a laptop which has a fault whenever I try and run it off battery. I had a bad vibe about it from the start, but persisted with the sale for some unknown reason. Now disputing it with ebay, so we’ll see how that goes.

The other was me trying to find a replacement for my ray bans that went missing in Thailand. I couldn’t find the exact ones I’d bought in the states, but I didn’t fancy paying nearly £200 for something similar here. Found a model that I like on a .co.uk website and ordered it from there. But now I find that it’s being sent from Hong Kong and I’m fairly sure it’s likely to be a counterfeit item.

Normally I don’t fall for this shit, but I’m wondering if my bullshit radar has been dulled by time away from the internets? I don’t know, but it’s time to sharpen my act up a little. Also, I should be buying less crap tbh, not more. Lesson learnt!

Updated - Well, turns out the Ray bans were completely legit. Or at least are such good copies that neither me, nor the specialist in the local sunglass shop, could tell the difference when looking at the same model side-by-side. Result!

A stoic approach to the loss of 'stuff'.

2012-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve lost a few things recently. But one of them hurt more than the rest.

While in Thailand, I went for a Thai massage - one where you change into a sort of loose pyjamas. I’d put my necklace, which I’ve worn pretty much every day for the last three years, into a pocket of my shorts.

After the massage I did a few errands, as I was about to leave Bangkok for Koh Samui, when I noticed my necklace was missing. Immediately gutted, I thought the most obvious place would have been the massage place, so went back there to ask but we couldn’t find it.

Gutted, I realised how irreplaceable this necklace was to me. And while I made myself accept the loss, I couldn’t help but kick myself for being so careless.

I’ve had a few other losses recently; some very nice Ray ban sunglasses, my camera - not lost but broken, and a small accident on a motorbike that ended up costing me a few hundred USD in repairs. But none of those ‘losses’ meant anywhere near as much as this necklace.

Fortunately when I returned to Bangkok, and went back to the same salon, they’d found my necklace and hung onto it for me. I was overwhelmingly grateful to them for finding it and have a renewed appreciation for how much it means to me.

Most things are easily replaced and in theory should mean nothing more than the monetary cost of replacement. But to understand how much something does mean to you, you need to truly contemplate losing that item in the first place.

Microsoft say Bing as good as Google? Not yet at least.

2012-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

It looks as though Bing still need to sort out their indexing.

Davebeer.com isn’t a very mature site, but you’d expect a little bit of indexing from Bing after a few months of posts. But no, all Bing had were some old links from back when I was playing with Wordpress as a blog engine (before deciding to host this blog using Github pages)

Bing either is very slow at crawling, or it’s update rate is incredibly slow. So I fired up Bing’s webmaster tools, validated my site (by a simple upload of an bingsiteauth.xml file) then submitted my sitemap url.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting. Four hours later the sitemap is still listed as pending. So I guess I just have to be patient. There isn’t much else I can do for the next day or two at least.

This does make me wonder if more people are using Bing, but its poor organic search rating is mostly down to its indexing? I’m not sure, but on the few sites I’ve been doing SEO/SEM work on, the older more established sites are still well indexed by Bing. It’s just the new (< 6 months) sites that have a poor showing. Google’s Caffiene still kicks arse as far as freshness goes.

Just knowing how to program is helpful

2012-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve had a bit of insight into how non-developers use computers in support of their job. One example in particular was of a Finance company who offer quite a sophisticated service for their clients, but the back-end is anything but.

Turns out they use Excel as some sort of transport mechanism. Occasionally using SQL Server as a datastore, but mostly it’s a manual job of copy and pasting from various data-sources into a lot of different Excel spreadsheets. All cobbled together with VBA to generate other spreadsheets which then feed into another system or two to generate some fantastic looking reports for the clients.

But really? Surely there’s a better solution than all of that manual - incredibly susceptible to human-error - process?

Well, it turns out that there is. Lots of options, in fact. SQL Server’s Integration Services could be a good start. But there were other stages, like uploading data to a remote web-service, which are trickier to automate and would require writing a little bit of bespoke code. That said, we’re talking a couple of weeks development effort to save something like four hours a day - forever…

Which got me thinking how powerful it is knowing how to program, if you’re doing a job that isn’t necessarily I.T.

Then just yesterday, I read the following after seeing a link on Hacker News which seemed apropos.

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You’re much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. – From Learn python the hard way: Advice from an old programmer

I like the idea of that. Carrying through the skills I have into another profession. Only question is… which profession?

The easiest way to save more

2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

I just watched a very interesting video from TEDTalks about Behavioural Finance.

The key concept I took away from this is how easy it’d be to save more money without feeling like you’re saving. Every time you get a pay rise, save half of it. That way, you never actually have to try and spend less, you’re just not letting yourself get used to spending your entire pay raise.

Shlomo was talking about just a few percentage points in this video, but I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be half of whatever your payrise is.

Mr Money Moustache probably wrote the clearest example I’ve seen on how easy it is to retire early. It’s something I’ve been able to do the past four years, live off around 20% of my income. And I don’t feel like I’ve had to sacrifice to do so. I’ve still travelled and haven’t seen winter since 2006. But having been more efficient the past four years, I’m now not far off being able to retire.

It might be a coincidence that I was able to reduce expenses after becoming single in 2006.. but hey, I’m not knocking it. Especially when I can pretty much do whatever I want now…

Problems navigating Sydney's CityRail network

2012-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

I’m spending a few weeks in Sydney and something I’ve found glaringly obvious is how difficult it is to find your way around. I’m not inexperienced at travelling. I’ve used the Metro/Rail systems in Moscow, London, Singapore, New York, Barcelona, Auckland cough (hey, we’re improving…), Manila, Taipei, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Paris and Geneva (and others, but those are the highlights). And you know what? I’ve found every single one easier to navigate than Sydney. (Bejing only had two lines operating when I visited and Dubai didn’t have a metro when I lived there.)

But c’mon! Even Moscow, where I could only read Cryllic enough to transliterate, I managed to find my way around without difficulty. And that was back in ‘99, possibly things have improved since then?

So what specifically is wrong with CityRail and how could they improve?

To illustrate, let’s take yesterday’s journey. Milson’s Point to Rockdale. Not particularly tricky. I only had one change to make at either Central or Redfern. Changing from the yellow (North Shore and Western) or red (Northern) line to a dark blue (Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra) one. So armed with the knowledge that I need to head south and change at Central, I set off.

At Milson’s Point it wasn’t entirely clear which side of the platform you need to jump on. There might be other clues, but I found the best way was to look at the screens next to each platform (there aren’t many though, so you need to walk up to one), see which stations the next train calls at and figure out if the one you’re trying to get to is on that list. But if possible, it’d be better to do something similar to how the London Tube shows the departing trains. It lets you instantly make a decision whether to turn left (for north-bound trains) or right (for south-bound).

Then once you’re on the train, there’s the matter of which station you’ve just arrived at. Sometimes it’s quite difficult to get a glimpse of which station you’re at - and the trains are inconsistent about displaying the information (some are awesome, others don’t seem to have any display at all).

But Central was pretty obvious - I also knew roughly how many stations to expect. But the next problem was figuring out where to hop on this blue line train heading south towards Rockdale.

I basically had to walk down a tunnel to what appeared to be the only rail map on display. There I helped another tourist figure out how to get to Parramatta before figuring out which of the two blue lines I needed to try and find. Maybe you’re just meant to know which line you need to jump onto next, but I’d like to see more rail maps posted around the station. Eventually I’d learn that at Central, if I’m heading to Rockdale, I need to go catch a train from junction 25. But as a tourist, I need that information to hand when I hop off the train at Central so I know where I need to go afterwards.

Even heading south wasn’t completely simple. Turns out the next train was a limited stops one, which got me as far as Wolli Creek, so I had one more change to make, but that didn’t seem too difficult. And that line/train was lovely and smooth, so no complaints there!

I don’t want to sound like I’m moaning. Sydney CityRail has done a few things incredibly well. Huge trains, a/c was lovely, two-way adjustable seats are a nice touch. But they could improve the signage significantly. If they do that, then they’ll be mixing it up with the big boys.

Fear of the blank page

2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some stage I lost that easy ability to draw. I used to draw a lot as a child, but find it hard to even start now.

It’s possibly always been a problem. I’ve always loved new stationery. Notebooks are almost a fetish for me. But there’s something perfect about a blank one and I feel like I’m defiling it when I first start writing in it. I was the same with my schoolbooks as a child.

What’s caused this?

In an attempt to see if I can get past this, I’ve bought a pad to draw in and am making myself doodle at least. To see if I can’t get past this need for everything be perfect. That’s the problem I think, that my expectations of quality far exceed my ability. So in order to not fail, it’s easiest to not even try.

But that’s not good enough. It’s time to start failing. Only then am I going to improve.

The biggest loser. What a pile of shit!

2012-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t really watch television, but last night happened to watch an episode of The biggest loser. What an absolute pile of steaming crap that was! It seems to be nothing more than a boot camp for fatties, with a bit of reality-style game show thrown in.

I really hope that other episodes have more emphasis on the diet side of the equation. Exercise is all well and good, but from what I’ve read and experienced, diet is definitely the biggest factor. Get control of that and you’re most of the way there.

Looking at the show’s website, they’ve got a nutritionist who seems to know her stuff, so hopefully some of the future episodes will educate people on what to eat (and what not to) when trying to lose weight. As for the episode I saw, it was mostly just watching fatties going through some form of exercise torture. And the weigh-in at the end was equally ridiculous in its theatrics. (No weigh scale I’ve seen fluctuates like that… it’s a gimmick to draw out the tension) And getting rid of people who lose the least weight each week? Why? Why not keep all contestants on the show and just have a leaderboard which changes week by week? What’s with this voting bullshit?

Perhaps that is what is needed to get viewers in America. If so, they’re really starting to scrape at the bottom of the barrel. (I hope)

Comparing life to golf

2012-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

There’s something pure about golf. It can be bloody frustrating at times, especially now when my swing has been disected and I’m trying to get used to a new way of playing. But one of the main things that intrigues me about the game is the mental aspect.

You play a shot, hopefully to the best of your ability, after which you play another until you finish the game. Each shot will either go roughly how you planned, or you’ll end up somewhere completely different to where you envisioned.

But that’s life as well! You can have the best laid plans, only to have to reevaluate things when they get upset. But as in golf, nothing in the past matters really. The core thing to concern yourself with is this shot you’re playing right now, this moment in time. You have a little bit of concern about the future, but you’re not planning how to play the 18th while you’re still only at the 9th.

Likewise, it should be today that you’re concerned with. Don’t worry too much about how you got to this point. Sure, the past will affect your decisions and actions to some degree. But for the whole, it’s possible to take stock of where you are now and decide where you’d like to go - each moment of your life. That’s the bit to pay attention to. Life in it’s purest form. The now.

Road rage and avoiding the daily commute

2012-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

I had the most amazing experience the other day. Needed to meet a friend in Auckland City and was figuring out how long it’d take me to drive there from Beachlands. I hate being late when I meet people and Auckland traffic can be diabolical at times. I find it very hard to judge how long it’ll take to get from point A to point B sometimes.

However, on this day, I had another option. Just a few kays away was Pineharbour, who run a regular ferry service to the City Centre. It also had a ferry leaving at just the right time so I’d make it into the city for my lunch appointment. So rather than drive, have hassles with parking, possibly getting lost (my navigation around Auckland is occasionally a little random at times) and getting stressed over all the idiot drivers on the road, I decided the ferry made sense.

Free parking was a nice perk, and it helped that it was a gorgeous sunny day. Someone had left the paper and it was a nice chance for a comfortable sit down and catch up on local events. Forty minutes later, we’re pulling up at the dock in the city. Brilliant!

Catching the ferry back was just as painless. This time, I sat outside, enjoying a little bit of salt spray, while watching the other boats out on the harbour. Looking at the ferry, I was struck with how good a houseboat that double hull would make. (Note to self: try and find out how much Q-west would charge for a fairly empty shell of a boat..) There’s also a decent enough surface area. Just by eye, I reckon it was something like 16m long and a bit over 5m wide, which’d give around 60kW of solar energy hitting the boat when the sun was out. That’d give around 80hp if you could convert it all into mechanical energy (you can’t), which’d be plenty enough to push it along, albeit at a bit of a dainty pace. Definitely wouldn’t be giving the dual diesel engines of this particular ferry any sort of challenge.

So, I was sold. If I find myself living in Auckland anytime in the near future (and working in the city) then I’ll probably try and base myself in a location that’s a short ferry ride away. I’m sure it won’t be quite as pleasant in winter, but still beats driving a car.

I also notice a massive difference in driving styles between Auckland and Wellington. Wellingtonian’s are, for the most part, quite courteous. You’ve got a pretty good chance of being let into a queue, or being waited for if you’re turning off a main road onto a side street. It’s something I’m very used to in the UK, but Aucklanders are very much out for themselves on the road. Truly awful drivers! And I’ve got to admit, it angers me when I see blatant stupidity on the road. Hence why I don’t think I should ever try and commute. It’d just stress me out.

That said, could just avoid work altogether?

Went fishing, didn't catch a thing

2012-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Been out fishing a few times this week, but last night was a lot of fun, just fruitless.

Sun was setting and the tide was almost at its highest. We’d just thrown cast out lines a few minutes ago and I made some comment like we weren’t getting any bites when Pow! Snap! Big bite and the line was broken. Stupid me, I’d left the brake tweaked on too tight, so lost Hari’s new lures that she’d just bought.

Caught one little snapper which had to be thrown back, but then Todd hooked something big on his rod, which had a much stonger line on it. It was surging in waves and we think it was a stingray. The two of us spent almost two hours working it to shore, but just as we got it to within meters of the boat-ramp, the line broke. Halfway through that episode, we noticed that the line on another rod was fully out, so I started winding that in to find that we had something hooked on that as well and spent another hour and a half slowly working that one back to shore before the line snapped as well (Am assuming another stingray). Got him to within a couple of meters off the rocks based on the angle of the line, but when he’s that close, it’s nothing but dead weight and our lines were too light in the end.

Very tiring, but I feel like I learnt a lot from it. Haven’t really done much fishing with a rod, so it’s been a good experience. Fortunately we’d caught a ton of snapper the previous day (which made for a delicious breakfast) so it didn’t feel like we’d come back completely empty handed. Looking forward to another decent session though!

Living out of a suitcase

2012-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’m about six weeks into my Summer down under. Been wandering around a little, catching up with family and friends, enjoying Christmas and seeing the New Year in. Now I’m about to head down to Wellington for a spot of networking and seeing more friends down there.

But I’ve noticed something about this wandering lifestyle. I’m effectively living out of a suitcase. I’ve got a few changes of clothes, my laptop, kindle, four cameras (a little excessive..), golf clubs and my little ipod shuffle… And you know what? I don’t really miss all of my ‘stuff’ back in the UK.

Sure, a desk and some big monitors makes programming, or just using the computer, a nicer easier experience. But it’s definitely not essential. Perhaps the main thing I miss is my bed, but you can get used to sleeping wherever you can after a while.

So one thing I’m hoping, is that living this minimalist existence for the next few months makes it easier to get rid of all my stuff when I return to the UK. I’ve been weighed down by too much crap for too long. Time to boil it down to the essentials, lightening the load. Otherwise, all that stuff just ends up owning you.

Travel Hack: No jet-lag after fasting

2011-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

A few days ago I flew from London to Auckland. That’s a very long flight and a large time difference. But this time I decided to try something that I’d read about quite a lot, which is resetting your body clock by fasting.

The theory goes that if you fast for 16 hours prior to breakfast (in the time zone that you’re going to) then your next meal helps to reset your body clock. So I avoided food on the DXB->SYD leg of my voyage and didn’t eat until it was morning New Zealand time. That meant I missed two meals on the plane, but they didn’t look anything special so it wasn’t a big deal.

I was kind of tired when I landed in New Zealand. But that’s to be expected after a big journey. Went to bed around 10pm and slept through until 8am. Same thing the next few nights too. No ‘wide awake at 4am’, no ‘so tired at 3pm’ weirdness. Unfortunately I did get a cold almost as soon as I landed, so have felt a little out of sorts otherwise, so it’s not a perfect test. I’d like to have seen how I felt without that to get a feel for how effective the fasting was, but as far as I can tell it’s a brilliant way to avoid jet-lag.

I’ll give it another go when I return to the UK next year and see how it goes then.

If you seek tranquillity, do less

2011-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

I’m reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and really enjoying it. But one bit has struck me as particularly thought provoking.

He wrote:

Because of most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?”

And that’s got me thinking…

Is this necessary?

Another summer down-under

2011-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Feels like the end of an era now. I’ve just finished a contract at a client site having worked there on and off for the last three and a half years. Feels strange to know that I won’t be going back. (Although I might have said that before - and never say never seems to be a theme with my life)

I’m heading back to New Zealand for another summer. Winter here in the UK is just a little too cold, dark and bitter for my liking. I might miss snowboarding, but body-surfing is a fairly good substitute in my book.

There’s a lot to prepare when heading away so long. Things like storing the car and motorbike properly. Although I almost wish I’d sold them this year as that would make it less things to worry about. De-junking has been partially successful, but there are so many things I’d still like to get rid of!

It’s amazing how much stuff weighs you down. It was so liberating when I got rid of everything I had in storage back in NZ. Most of it was worthless junk that I didn’t miss or even knew I had.

It’s hard sometimes to triage stuff when you’re in clear-out mode. It’s all too easy to get wrapped up in memories, distracted with other little projects or just find yourself shifting stuff from one part of the house to another. Having three boxes (Sell, Donate, Bin) and trying to sort out the items is one part of the equation, but what criteria do you use on whether you’ll keep a particular item?

Relevancy is a good criteria. If I’ve used it in the past twelve months, then it’s probably something relevant/useful. That spare arabic keyboard then probably needs to be donated/binned.

Is it something that enriches my life somehow? I would keep a painting that I liked. Books, my one big weakness, are also something that I consider enrich my life. I have a cupboard full of books, written by my favourite authors, that I read and re-read.

What other criteria should you use when making a decision to keep or get rid of something? And how much ‘stuff’ is enough? For three or four months each year, I effectively live out of a suitcase and don’t find it too restricting. Does that make everything I’ve got at home superfluous?

There's no excuse for being bored

2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

It’s just incredible the resources that are available these days. I’ve got a lot of interests and it’s possible to learn so much about all of them online now.

While research quantitative finance, I found a guy who was planning on doing his own Masters in Financial Engineering. But his approach was that you don’t need to go to university to learn whatever you want. (Well, you do if you want the piece of paper at the end)

Khan academy has been interesting to play with. I’ve been brushing up on my admittedly rusting mathematics there. Salman Khan has done an amazing job creating the videos and his naration and pace of teaching is excellent. The range of subjects is amazing and getting more expansive all the time.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare is another incredible resource that’s going to take a long time to absorb. I was hoping there’d be more depth in papers on Thorium reactors in Nuclear Engineering (I’m liking Thorium as a potential fuel source for small reactors), but there’s not a lot that I’ve been able to find so far. Also, depending on which department you’re exploring, a lot of the courses don’t have lecture notes and feel a bit incomplete. But it’s still a valuable resource.

Lastly, I’m enjoying Stanford’s youtube series on Programming Methodology. I’m not sure what’s drawn me back to something I believe I already know fairly comprehensively, but it’s comforting and I’m enjoying Professor Mehran’s lectures.

Still a wealth of knowledge out there. Would have loved to have access to this when I was a kid!

Happiness and hedonic adaptation

2011-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been reading A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy lately and really enjoying the ideas behind Stoic philosophy.

One of the important points I’d picked up was to do with hedonic adaptation. There’s the often quoted study about people who lose the use of their legs and people who win the lottery. Roughly six months after the tragedy or good fortunate, people were roughly as happy/unhappy as they were before the event.

It just shows how we adapt to situations. A permanent change is relatively quickly accepted as the new norm. Now that’s handy if something bad has happened, but kind of depressing when the good events become the norm. If we adapt to them so conveniently, then we are never satisfied. That sort of explains why so many famous actors and singers, who you’d think lead an amazing life, have so many issues with depression and unhappiness.

So is there any way to forestall this adaptation? To find the good things in your life enjoyable all the time without taking them for granted? Apparently so.

The Stoics recommend we spend time imagining that we’ve lost the things we value. Imagine losing your job, car, friends, family etc… This negative visualisation makes you appreciate what you have now. Either that, or you discover what is and what isn’t so important in your life.

Another crucial takeaway from reading further about hedonic adaption was that relationship and social life goals increase your subjective well-being, whereas materialistic life goals have a negative effect.

I’ve started looking at what’s important to me in my life and while I appreciate what I have, I definitely have some changes to make too.

Oh my god, it's everywhere!

2011-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

I noticed something kind of beautiful when I was landing at JFK the other day, returning home after a couple of weeks in Belize.

It was early evening, the sun had well and truly set and I could see the sparkling lights of the city. In a lot of cities, you can see a shimmer/sparkle of the street lights, but there was something different about the area around JFK that I’d not really noticed elsewhere.

The flickering lights that really stood out, weren’t street lights or house lights, but light from televisions. One in every house.

Now everyone having a television isn’t surprising, but from the air, it looked as though every house had theirs turned on. It’s just scary to think that everyone just turns on their television when they get home from work. Doubtless there are some good shows, but it looked like 90+ percent of New York were anesthetising themselves with the goggle-box.

Maybe I’ve got a different view of television having grown up some of my childhood without one, and having gotten rid of my television at home. I’ve noticed that I’ve got more time to do stuff without one! But having just been on holiday where there were three televisions in our apartment, I found it all too easy to surf the 100 plus channels to see if there was anything interesting on.

I can’t say I miss it now I’m home again…

Why your external USB drive is a stupid backup strategy

2011-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Physical harddrives fail. They fail a lot. In the last ten years I’ve lost at least four drives. (Three of them were IBM Deskstars - not good)

Fortunately, all of my drives were part of a mirror set, so I never actually lost any data. I think the last time I lost data was about 12 years ago when I coded a poorly thought out shell script to rename a number of files. I ended up with one file after running that. Oops! (I’m not counting not being able to find stuff. I once needed to find some code for a client, but had to have access to the physical drives I’d taken out of my old server for that. I managed to find an okay version of the code. Shame I wasn’t using bitbucket or github back then!)

Anyway, today I got asked by a friend to look at her USB drive which isn’t appearing as a drive on windows. I can see that the USB device is connected, but the drive itself is asking to be initialised if I look at it with Drive Manager. And diskpart just fails when I try and get any details.

Next step is to remove it from the USB case and try it in one of my machines, but the failure of this drive got me thinking. I know a lot of people who use an external USB drive to store their stuff on. And not just as a backup - it’s their main storage facility. Which is okay, but only if you don’t mind losing everything on it.

If you’ve got a few files you don’t want to lose (less than a couple of Gig’s worth), I’d recommend something like Dropbox, Microsofts Live Mesh or even Google Drive when it arrives. But if you’ve got half a terabyte of photos and videos, then at a minimum get a second drive and make sure they’re backed up on that. At least then, when one fails you’ve got the other around to make a copy of.

Even better would be a little NAS device. Can be as simple as a mirror-set (RAID -1 which is two drives that automatically keep a copy of each other) or as complex as RAID-6/RAID1+0 (which involves parts of files shared across many drives or a combination mirro/stripe configuration). You’ll need to do some reading to figure out what is most appropriate for your situation though.

Also don’t be fooled into thinking that if you’ve got RAID-5 that your data is safe. With drives getting larger than a couple of terabytes, it’s statistically likely that you’ll lose data even with a RAID-5 array in event of one disk failing. If you are buying a NAS device, look for it supporting one of either RAID-1+0 (otherwise called RAID-10) or RAID-6.

But two things to always remember;

Physical drives always fail, and…
your backup is only as good as your last restore.

Danbro, Crunch and Freeagent: Switching Accountants

2011-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been trying to improve my accounting situation. When I started my company back in 2008, I originally went with Danbro accounting. They seemed pretty good, but I did find them quite expensive for the service I was getting. That said, I just needed someone quick when I first started. And every hour I spent fussing over accounts was a huge opportunity cost.

Now that I’ve throttled operations back a lot, the time-saving is not so crucial. I’d started losing love for Danbro as their communications were not terribly clear. Dealing with them just felt difficult and this year I found myself chasing them for things they used to do automatically.

So shopping around I found Crunch Accounting. They looked good, or at least, their site did. Switching accountants is a real pain. And there were a few things I really didn’t like about their setup process. (They asked for my username and password for Government Gateway for one thing… I don’t think that’s normal)

But now it’s my quarter end and VAT is due soon. But I’m really struggling with Crunch’s web application. For one thing, it’s horrendously slow. Really really slow. And my account seems to be a little broken. I’ve uploaded this quarter’s bank transactions and want to start reconcilliation, but an opening balance hasn’t been set apparently. I’ve phone up to try and resolve it, but the woman I talked to said that the website was running slow because she’s just updated my account and to try again in five minutes. I’m sorry, but that’s not how web applications work. At least, not in the 14 years I’ve been developing them.

Last month I’d signed up to FreeAgent as well to have a look. My trial had expired, but I’d asked for an extension so I could evaluate it and that wasn’t a problem. Since Crunch was looking to be exceedingly painful, I thought I’d see how difficult FreeAgent was to set up with the same information.

First thing is how quick it was. So nice to have such a responsive site after Crunch’s glacial pace. Also, the forms are so much better laid out. Keying in all my invoices for the quarter was actually pretty painless. And reconcilliation seemed amazingly smart. I’m not sure how long it took from start to finish, but I think it was less than I took talking to Crunch trying to get my opening balance sorted (and failing).

What I’m not clear on, is how expensive year-end accounts will be. At £25/month for a limited company, FreeAgent + an Accountant for year end will work out more expensive than Crunch. But visibility into your finances is so much better. (Well, it’s better than I had with Danbro. I’ve not really been able to evaluate Crunch yet due to their system)

I think I’m likely to bin Crunch and find a FreeAgent-friendly accountant to do my year-end for me. Will give that a go and see how it works for me.

Update 03 September 2013

I actually didn’t find much benefit from using FreeAgent in the end. I’ve written a little package for myself that is simple and exactly what I need, saving myself a cool £30/month. Which helps pay for my accountant at the end of the year when he produces my yearly accounts from the information my system spits out. It’s easy, fast and free. That said, the FreeAgent interface was very nicely done and Crunch’s web interface seemed to be evolving quickly too. But my books are so simple, I found it hard to justify the expense of either…

Dave's year of golf

2011-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been thinking a bit more today about an idea I’d talked over with my Uncle Ken. Our thought was to spend a year doing nothing but playing golf. Since then, I’ve found out about The Dan Plan where one guy is testing the hypothesis that it takes ten thousand hours to become good at something.

Mind you, I wasn’t planning on spending ten thousand hours. Just 365 days. (I guess that’s eight thousand something hours technically, but obviously not all of those will be spent playing golf!)

My idea is to try and play every golf course in New Zealand. Outside of Scotland, I believe we’ve got the highest number of golf courses per capita. Hard to put an exact figure on it, but the closest figure I can come to is around 400.

Think it’d be a lot of fun, as well as hard work. But I’d be very surprised if my game doesn’t improve rapidly throughout the year. As it is, I’ve had my swing recently disected. I’m technically still on a 28 handicap, but I know I’m able to play at a much better level if I can just get out more often.

So once again, when I do my annual migration to New Zealand, I’ll take my clubs with me. (Thanks again to Emirates who allow golf clubs as an extra free allowance. That’s awesome!) And hopefully this time I’ll get a decent number of games in. But I’ll also start planning on how I can spend twelve months making a decent go of it!

When reality catches up with the US Dollar

2011-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve just been reading Peter Schiff’s book Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse. It makes for some thought-provoking reading. Not that there’s anything completely new in there, but his analogies make a lot of sense out of a fairly complex financial situation.

I don’t know when the world economies will wake up to the fact that the US Dollar doesn’t actually have the intrinsic value that it’s had in the past, but when it becomes reality, I see hard times ahead for the States. As a nation, they’ve been writing cheques for decades that are of dubious value and in no way could they all be cashed at once.

Thing is, fortunes have been lost (and made) betting against the strength of the US Dollar. But it does mean that equities valued in US Dollars could be worthwhile having in your portfolio. Gold and silver, two metals that already seem to have a ridiculously high value, could still have a lot higher to go? At a guess I think we could see USD$2000/oz by the end of 2012.

If things seem obvious for the US Economy, what then for UK and Europe? Personally I see NZ and Australia being a safe haven. More Australia though as mining seems a little more valuable than agricultural exports.

I don’t fully understand why we couldn’t have been more like Iceland, refusing to bail out these financial institutions. It’s not just because politicians wanted to keep their jobs, surely? The big question for Europe seems to be should Greece default, possibly exiting the Euro-zone, then have their own currency that they can allow to depreciate? That would be good for Greeks, but bad for the bankers who lent the Greek government more money than it could repay.

Interesting times ahead.

Getting upgraded when you fly

2011-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Just had this conversation with a few people today while out for some work drinks. Our CEO came over and was talking about her upcoming holiday. She’s very tall, so feels it’s pretty much essential to pay for business class when flying long haul.

Now I fly long haul a fair amount I guess, seeing as I tend to fly UK to New Zealand each year, and other holidays always seem to be at some far-flung destination. So one trick I have, is to try and always fly with the same airlines. The benefit of which, is the occasional upgrade.

Not only can you upgrade the odd sector with miles, but I’m pretty sure that being a member of a freqent flier program means you’re far more likely to get the occasional upgrade. My favourite was when I’d upgraded my flight from economy to business using miles, but got upgraded again to first class for the first sector. That was an experience.

When I used to work for Emirates, I’d always ask if there was a chance of getting an upgrade. (But to be honest, that never actually worked) It’s only been in the years since that I’ve gotten lucky occasionally. So far, only on BA, Etihad and Emirates. But flying Singapore Airlines is such a good experience that an upgrade is unnecessary.

I've got a new training target

2011-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Having done my first triathlon a couple of weeks ago, I need a new target to aim for. Fortunately I got a skype message from my Uncle yesterday. He’s doing the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge and has a spare bike. So that gives me my new target.

Can’t say I’ve ever ridden that sort of distance before. So going to have to start getting some miles in.

Also going to miss the gym as my membership ends at the end of this month. Really been enjoying the weights. I’m doing the Stronglifts 5x5 program, but will have to replace it with bodyweight exercises now that I’ll be travelling.

On making myself unemployable

2011-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

I’m nearing the end of my contract with a client and am considering what to do next. The team I work with is amazing, but I’m unenthused by the product and am really looking forward to a new challenge.

One thing I really want to do is design and build an array of heliostats. Heliostats are mirrors that reflect the sun’s rays to a collector, allowing you to either heat water, or generate steam (and using that steam, generate electricity). It’s an interesting engineering problem, requiring high-quality machining, software development, mathmatical calculations and a good bit of kiwi ingenuity.

Doing what I love will be better for my soul, but I wonder if I’ll make myself unemployable that way. And if that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Only thing to do is give it a go. And who knows, I may rediscover my love for software development along the way…

Climbing out of that pit

2011-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

It’s funny how bad you can let someone else make you feel. There’s no real reason for it. Why should someone else’s behaviour have an effect on me?

But for the past couple of months, I’ve let that happen. Someone who I thought was a friend treated me horribly and I found it incredibly difficult to deal with.

NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) has been a big help. One technique is reframing. Where you look at remembered events from a different point of view. The bonus there is you can lessen the negative emotional impact of a memory (or strengthen positive ones). It doesn’t make the emotions go away, but it does help bring them down to manageable levels.

At some point I seem to have lost the ability to do this naturally. In the past, when negative things have happened, I think I’ve normally been able to see the silver lining quite easily. But this recent low hit harder than I’d expected and for a while I couldn’t see a way out.

But I’m beginning to see the positives again. Life is wonderful and full of opportunities and surprises.

Magic!

Hosting your blog with GitHub pages

2011-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Okay, GitHub Pages is pretty amazing. Jekyll just makes it even more magic, as it will apply templates to your posts giving you plenty of control over formatting, but allowing you to easily change your site.

The beauty of hosting a blog this way, is the pages are completely static. So delivery time is always going to be incredibly quick. Running Wordpress using a shared server instance, I was getting around 1000msec to deliver an incredibly light homepage. On GitHub, that’s normally down around the 150-180msec range. Pretty much an order of magnitude faster.

And these days, speed counts. Especially if your blog gets slashdotted/reddited/digged (well, maybe not digg any more) or HackerNews’d. The static site has a good chance of surviving that load. Admittedly, a well cached Wordpress site should do as well, but I’ve lost count of the number of unavailable Wordpress blogs when the going gets tough.

And that’s not to say your site has to be completely static either. You’ve always got things like Disqus/Facebook or GetSatisfaction to dynamically include commenting on your site without adding extra load to your server.

That said, I’ve not found it completely straight-forward. I wanted to be able to edit my site from any browser, so needed some sort of front-end to GitHub. In the end I found Cloud9 which looked the business. GitHub does offer a code editor now, but you can’t create files, which is a bit of a pain.

So the process was; Create a github account then create a repository for your blog. Create a Cloud9 account. Sign into c9 using your github account. Clone your repository. Start editing. That was all fairly easy. But I’m either struggling with Git (having come from an SVN background) or there’s something a little odd with Cloud9. I’m editing from a few different machines and I thought all of the repository is hosted with Cloud9. But weirdly, when I’ve switched machines, I’ve ended up having much older versions of files when I open them.

Maybe it’s all a lot simpler when I’m a little more solid on Git commands. For now I’m just hacking away with Add, Commit, Diff and Push. Mostly I want to get to a point that I’m happy with what Jekyll has to offer and figure out the rest of the toolchain as I go.