AddedBytes.com

Life Chart

dave@addedbytes.com — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:04:00 GMT

Inspired by the brilliant graphs over at Information is Beautiful, I spent some time finishing up a little data visualisation I've been meaning to do.

I seem to be on a permanent quest to reduce time wastage, and I was curious where my time was actually being spent. So, I recorded a week of my life in 5 minute intervals, rounded numbers to the nearest hour, grouped similar activities and popped it in a spreadsheet.

It turned out, fortunately, to be a fairly typical week. Work was hectic, and I spent a few extra hours at the office buried in code. I had Open University work to do, though no more so than usual. I didn't do enough cooking or reading, watched too much TV and definitely didn't get enough sleep. Running is conspicuously absent, though I did have a couple of squash matches.

Unfortunately, this didn't really tell me much I didn't already know. There were no giant time-sinks that I was blissfully unaware of. I need to spend a little less time at the office, in the pub or watching TV and a little more time reading, exercising and sleeping.

By the way, I have no way of knowing how much of an impact, if any, the Observer Effect will have had on the data, but this is fairly unscientific anyway, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Mathematical Anniversaries

dave@addedbytes.com — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:20:43 GMT

My wife, as is traditional among married folk, celebrates the number of times our Pale Blue Dot has whizzed around our Bright Yellow Dot since we got married, back on the 22nd April 2006. These are known as anniversaries (from the latin for "return yearly"), and are typically excuses to celebrate events that occurred in the past on the same day of the year as the original events.

People, it seems, are suckers for an anniversary. We celebrate the anniversaries of our own births. We celebrate the anniversaries of the births of our friends and families. Some of us celebrate the anniversaries of the births or deaths of people we've never met. Some of us even celebrate the anniversary of the passing of an entirely arbitrary point in space.

Say what you like, we're big on tradition on this little rock.

Men tend to suffer under this harsh regime of date management. While both we and the fairer sex are obliged to remember all of these days and events, it seems it is usually men who more easily forget them (though it is all much easier since the invention of synchronised online calendars). Not only do we have to remember them, but we are encouraged to buy cards and gifts for people to help them celebrate. It seems it is never enough just to remember - you must provide evidence of your remembering.

This practice of celebrating the number of orbits a marriage has lasted or a person has lived has always seemed a little arbitrary to me. Why hang your hat on that particular astronomical curiosity? Why put special emphasis on multiples of ten of these particular planetary pirouettes? Why not celebrate other milestones?

I feel it is only fair to warn you that things may get a little geeky from this point onwards.

The most astute of you may have calculated by now that the 22nd April 2006 was exactly 1,235 days ago, making yesterday 1,234 days since my wedding. Well done to you. This is, I hope you will agree, a Major Event. It is 3.38 times rarer than the traditional annual anniversary. Our pi-versary (every 3142 days), due in a few years, is far rarer - a pi-versary happens just once every 8.6 years.

I celebrated this latest occasion by buying my wife a 1,234th anniversary card. Similarly, 235 days ago I bought her a 1,000th anniversary card. She, sadly, forgot both of these landmark anniversaries. This may prove useful, should I falter with a later anniversary myself.

By no means are these mathematical anniveraries limited to those specific numbers, or wedding anniversaries, or even days or years passing. My 12,345th birthday will be on the 29th April 2014. My 50th wedding lunar-versary is going to be the 16th January 2010. The list of opportunities to celebrate (or to be offended at friends and families for missing anniversaries, if you prefer) is nearly endless.

Maths and physics, indeed, are full of interesting numbers, sequences and constants. Pi, e, the square root of 2, the golden ratio, square numbers and higher powers, the Fibonacci sequence, the gravitational constant ... all worthy of celebration.

It would be silly to expect you to calculate these anniversaries manually. Therefore I have created a tool to aid you. Please enter the date you wish to commemorate, and click the button to generate a list - extensive but by no means complete - of significant dates to celebrate. The list will be shown on the next page, and you will be able to download the events to your chosen calendar if you like.

Day	Month	Year

New Opera Logo

dave@addedbytes.com — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:38:42 GMT

I've long been a slave to the underdog browser known as Opera. While its market share may not be the greatest (though it does very well with alternative devices), it's served me well the last few years, staying fast and featured-packed.

The logo sucks though. Really. It's terrible. Firefox has a great logo, designed by Jon Hicks, as does Safari, Konqueror, Chrome and even IE. But Opera's has always been an also-ran logo - too lopsided to hang out in the dock, too simple to invogorate the imagination, too un-browsery to evoke thoughts of zipping down the information superhighway consuming content at breakneck speeds.

People have talked about it before. Some have suggested and designed alternatives. (I use this one in my RocketDock / OSX Dock / AWN Dock.)

However, the people at Opera (now including the aforementioned Jon Hicks, who credited Oleg Melnychuk with the new icon design) have listened and finally released a new logo. It's still not the greatest logo out there, but at least it isn't lopsided in the dock any more.

Hat tip: Joen @ Noscope.

Personal Development: To Do - Revisited

dave@addedbytes.com — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:58:27 GMT

It's been almost a year since I posted an entry titled Personal Development: To Do, in which I talked about being disorganised (because I am) and wanting to get my house in order. To that end, I wrote up a list of things I wanted to get done.

A year on, I wanted to revist this and update it as required. To start with, here is the list from August 2008:

Keep on blogging!
Keep on making cheat sheets!
Move AddedBytes (set up server).
Thin out project folder and pick 2 to work on until finished.
Write a web service.
Write SVN Statistics app in Python (learn Python).
Rewrite site management VB app in Python (learn Python).
Learn Objective-C and Cocoa by writing a Useful Small Mac App (decide on what app!).
Learn a new PHP framework.
Get involved in an open source project.
Update and release more code from AddedBytes.com under open source license.

Looking at it, I am glad that I've managed to tick a few items off. Moving Added Bytes is almost done, but for a couple of small issues and some indecision. I've thinned out my projects and am working on one or two things at a time, which is good. I've made a few new cheat sheets - not as many as I would have liked, but a few.

About a year ago, I started work at Active Parity, which gave me opportunities to develop and work on several systems I had wanted to spend time with. I've written a couple of small-traffic web services. I've learned my way around the Zend framework, MODx, Joomla and a variety of other CMSes and systems. I've released more code under open source licenses (not much though, and mostly for MODx).

The rest of the list has not gone quite so well. I've not written a great deal this last year (partly due to not having much in the way of topics - anything I have started writing about, or considered writing about, seems to have been done in exhaustive depth already). My plans to learn Python, Objective-C and Cocoa have made little progress. And although I've been playing with MODx, I've not really got involved with the project itself, or any other open source project.

I'd say I've managed about 50% of the list this year, which I'm ok with. Certainly, my "unfinished project guilt" has been reduced, which was one of the main aims. I'm more motivated that beforeand finding it easier to spend time on specific things.

I also took on a couple of extra items that weren't there. The largest of those, in terms both of time and how valuable I feel it's been, is that I've started working towards a physics degree with the Open University. I've completed two courses so far, with a few weeks left on my third course, which means I'm about a third of the way through according to the OU's points system.

The OU work is a major time commitment, and has that's left less time for me to dedicate to working on other projects. On the other hand, it's been really good for my brain. I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone considering something similar - returning to academic learning after 10 years of dissolving my brain with beer was among the best decisions I made last year.

I'm glad I made the list last year - it helped me to focus my energies better. So I'm going to update it for the next year. This time, I'm going to break it into two parts. One is ongoing things I want to do - things that will be on the list for the forseeable future and that, more importantly, aren't ever really finished. The second is specific things I want to do in the next year. Some items from the original list, though not done, are on the back burner or now fall under the umbrella of a different item.

Ongoing To-Dos

Keep on blogging!
Keep on making cheat sheets!
Keep projects list to two at a time.
Release more code under open source licenses.
Improve server administration skills.
Continue learning with Open University.

Specific To-Dos

Move AddedBytes.
Move projects from Google Code over to GitHub.
Use Drizzle in a project.
Master database version control.
Write site management app in Python (oh yeah ... learn Python).
Get involved in an open source project.

Trust Not Granted: A guide to what you can and can't do with XBAPS

dave@addedbytes.com — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:21:50 GMT

I've done poorly at updating these last few months ... still moving the site to a new server but work is relentless at the moment and leaving me with little enthusiasm to carry on with more of the same when I get home!

Fortunately, I have friends and colleagues who are not so similarly burdened at the moment, and one of these is Allan Wenham, .NET developer extrordinaire. He has put together a guest post - a short guide to non-permitted actions in XBAPs. Over to you, Al:

So you're going to make an XBAP application, lucky you. First thing you should consider is the limitations imposed by the security model and importantly the framework itself.

Rule 0: You must have at least framework 3.0 to run an XBAP, 3.5 SP1 is highly recommended.

Rule 1: You can't run an XBAP on any other browser then IE in with .net framework 3.0. 3.5 SP1 of the .Net framework supports Mozilla Firefox; sadly no other browsers are supported at this time.

Rule 2: There are many things you cannot do with your XBAP in partial trust mode. Here I will provide what I hope is a fairly comprehensive list of non-permitted actions that will give you the dreaded "Trust not Granted" error. Main because as the time of writing I couldn't find such a list!

Opening up a new browser window
Directly connecting with a database
Any File IO
Talking to a WCF services that is not on the same hosting server
Talking to a WCF service that has any other binding apart from BasicHTTPBinding
Most standard dialogs (as well as input box)
OS driven Drag and Drop
Bitmap Effects- although these are deprecated in .NET 3.5 SP1
Shader Effects

Al works for Venture Finance PLC doing .Net Programming. When he's not building websites, he's writing about Turkish Delight (Fry's specifically). You can email him with questions at wenhamton@gmail.com or leave comments below. Thanks, Al!