juliansimpson.org

Back once again

2012-09-22T17:18:00.002+01:00

14 years
1 wife
2 kids
9 jobs
1 limited company
inestimable number of kebabs

After 14 years living in the UK, I thought I'd never leave. But I am, with mixed feelings.

Our possessions are currently on a container ship in Antwerp, en route to New Zealand.

Tomorrow, my family and I fly to NZ. I'll be back in a few weeks to complete my work obligations in the UK, flying back to NZ before Christmas. Now's a good time to organise catching up.

Dear Andy Pitt

2011-06-10T11:28:00.003+01:00

Andy,

You're the Managing Director of South West Trains. You just issued an apology for ruining this week for thousands of commuters:

On Thursday evening, further major signalling problems in the Waterloo and Woking areas resulted in a significant amount of delays. We are aware that many of you will have spent several hours on trains last night while Network Rail engineers worked hard to rectify these major signalling faults.
As you may already be aware, the cause of the major signalling problems last night have now been confirmed by Network Rail as a deliberate act of attempted cable theft. We are extremely angry and frustrated that mindless and irresponsible vandalism meant that many of our passengers had a terrible journey last night.

But you missed the point, didn't you? Most people would accept that the theft of cable from the railway system is out of your control - it's Network Rail's job to provide track and signals. The point is that your company displayed a staggeringly poor incident response:

People who use Twitter were more informed than your staff. For about two hours the guard on my train had no information for us. What ancient technology do you use to communicate with the on-train staff?
People left trains because they were afraid of spending the night on a train. People needed food (and in some cases, insulin). Do you have a contingency plan in place to distribute food and water to people stranded on trains? What if people had been stuck overnight? We were lucky enough to have a canteen on our train, but that emptied fast.
The response of your staff to the threat of people leaving the train was to threaten them with arrest by the British Transport Police. Nice one. They left the train because they were concerned about spending the night on a crammed train (like the pregnant lady). Do you have contingency plans to evacuate vulnerable passengers? Do you expect people to remain on a train when you can't keep them informed of the situation?
At the end of a four-and-a-half hour train journey that should have taken thirty minutes, your station staff were outnumbered by police - and there weren't many police. Your people should be handing out refund forms and making sure that there was medical attention for those who needed it, like the guy who needed insulin, or the pregnant women who had to endure this journey.

You have a duty of care to ensure that we travel to and from work safely. You failed. I don't think your bland apology cuts it, do you?

Security Books giveaway

2010-09-12T20:26:00.002+01:00

It's time to shed stuff. I'm experimenting with ways to do this.

There's 5 or 6 security books here. The oldest one I bought was in 1996, when I was joyfully discovering TCP/IP and Unix. I could give them to our local charity (Woking Hospice), but I thought I'd see if I could shift them direct to the geeks. If you want them, you're welcome to them (each of them is available for a penny on Amazon.co.uk, plus P+P). Here's the rules:

Winner takes them all
That person collects them in person, arranges to meet me somewhere, or pays for postage
You have to at least pretend (to me and yourself) that you'll read some
Leave a comment if you want them. Thanks!

News

2010-09-12T18:07:00.001+01:00

I had a stag do:

And then got married:

And had a honeymoon.

All very nice, but I guess you had to be there.

Free as in lance.

2010-03-12T14:07:00.004Z

I no longer work for Enrich Social Productions Ltd or any of it's subsidiary companies (in the Republic of Ireland or the UK).
I do work for my own company, The Build Doctor Limited.
While I can work with Ruby, .NET and other technologies, I'm loving my return to Java projects.
I really enjoy helping people deliver software projects more effectively. It's worthwhile and fun.

Checklist driven parenting

2010-02-02T22:02:00.003Z

I'm notoriously bad at getting my kids to school on time. It's an ongoing gag that you're only late to school if you're after me. My eldest daughter had suggested a checklist to help get get organised; so this morning we made one. So here it is. Most of the bad handwriting is mine. The kids added an item to the bottom of the list; and they scrupulously ticked each item off.

The result: we were on time, and I didn't nag anybody. One daughter is often last out the door. She was zooming up and down our driveway on her scooter, while I was the last one out. Perhaps I should write one for me next.

Win a copy of Atlassian Bamboo

2009-06-17T18:32:00.001+01:00

I'm running a give-away on my other blog. Atlassian are giving away a license for the Bamboo Continuous Integration server. There's also 10 Bamboo T-shirts up for grabs. Just write a few paragraphs about your best or worst build experiences ...

http://www.build-doctor.com/2009/06/16/atlassian-bamboo-giveaway

Play to your strengths

2009-02-16T22:42:00.002Z

This session at Agile 2007 was very interesting. Mainly because I learned about the Gallup organisation and their focus on playing to your strengths for success.

It's not a very PC message: just do what you're really, really good at, and don't put too much time into rounding off your skills. If you're a monster programmer, don't take a detour into project management. Just keep sharpening your claws.

Anyhow, I'm taking their advice. After spending a frustrating year trying to get a bunch of developers to write .NET software more repeatably, I'm playing to some of my strengths: Unix systems administration, Ruby scripting,and dicking around with open source apps.

My new role is at Enrich Social Productions. Among other things I'm in charge of production systems, which means I get to use Puppet. In a year's time I'd like to be doing most of my admin using TextMate.

Our first project is One Click To Fame, an online talent competition. Really enjoying digging into the guts of the site and understanding the dependencies.
It's also nice to work in media again.

2008, the headlines

2008-12-30T15:08:00.001Z

January: I left ThoughtWorks after almost 4 years. Mixed feelings.
February: I started my new job in the City.
April: Took a holiday in Scotland. Scotland is good.
June: Had vasectomy. My advice: take at least 3 days off to recover. That's all you need to know. Oh, and don't make small talk in the waiting room. Just bury your nose in the gadget magazines like everyone else.
July: Lesley started working again. I take the kids to school 2 mornings a week. Discover new meaning to being organised. Lovely to do, though.
August: fantastic holiday in France. Unless exchange rate moves it could be Bognor next year.
October: Did my one conference of the year - CITCON. Had to pay for it myself. Worth it.
December: Left my city job. More interesting things to do. More on that later.

Funny old year. Didn't ride my hybrid bike much (see June). Barely rode the little bike in London at all, unlike last year where I caught the tube about 5 times.

Next year will be new job, scary times and hopefully the chance to do more of what I want to do. Which is write and mess with Puppet.

Bring it on.

Farewell to the world of insurance

2008-12-23T10:33:00.001Z

No longer am I something in the City. I have mixed feelings about this. Insurance seemed to be a safer occupation to have in interesting times, and I liked wearing the suits. I liked the guys I sat with, and the business in general was very interesting.

Wasn't my bag though. I can do Microsoft work, falteringly. There's a time and place for that and I don't want to be a platform zealot. But my approach is very Unix-like. I'm all about the command line, even on Windows. That wasn't a perfect fit for me, and it probably wasn't for anybody else, either.

Anyway, I learned a lot and if I can safely convey some of those lessons on my other blog I will. I'm very shortly going to be doing some interesting things with a media startup and getting my hands on production again. Without a GUI tool in sight.

Balancing the books with your schedule

2008-12-18T16:44:00.001Z

I used to run my own business, fixing people's Macs and PC's. Invoices would be made in my office using a book keeping package on my Mac IIsi. Which was never where I was. Invoices would leave my corporate HQ in desperate bursts, rather than a steady flow.

If the accounting software would have supported it, I'd have used the shiny new Applescript (hey, it was 1996) to allow me to generate invoices from where I was, rather than when I got back to the industrial area where my corporate HQ was.

12 years later (and thanks to @timharding) I think I've found what I wanted. Freshbooks allows you to generate invoices and track expenses. You can buy postage credits and they will generate snail mail invoices. PDF invoices are free. If you have one or two customers, it's free.

I'm also reasonably happy with the expense tracking. It's not as good as something like Xpensr, but it works for me in the UK. Xpensr say that changing the default currency from US dollars is their most asked for feature, but it's not there yet. When they implement that I'd be very interested in using it - they lookup exchange rates at IMF rates, and automatically convert.

Blinksale was quite appealing for all this two years ago, but the competition is looking sharper all the time.

[N]Ant Refactoring

2008-12-09T23:25:00.001Z

I just started a new series on the Build Doctor: Ant Refactoring.

What? Oh okay. It'll work for NAnt as well, if any of you .NET guys are still using it.

The unofficial beer of the Ruby community

2008-12-09T19:07:00.001Z

I'm playing with Blogo's drag and drop and I'm liking it. I bought this Leffe Ruby in the supermarket on holiday. I think I'll stick to Brune.

Build Doctor: normal service has resumed

2008-11-24T15:00:00.003Z

In October, I made 3 posts to the blog. One of those was a guest post as well. Things have been busy. Far too busy. That's about to change, but I'll announce that soon.

In November however, I seemed to find my blogging mojo again. Here's some new projects:

The Build Rosetta Stone, a reference of build tool commands,
An RSS feed of Build and Deployment jobs in London,
An occasional comic
A series of posts around the CITCON CI Cage Fight. (build-o-matic, CruiseControl, Hudson)

Whew.

Child: why do we have firework displays?

2008-11-02T22:41:00.003Z

Me: Well, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up parliament and he didn't succeed so uh, we celebrate him not blowing it up by umm .... blowing things up ...

Happy Mac

2008-11-01T20:02:00.006Z

Success! Gigabyte of RAM in Fox, one of the mighty engines that drive The Build Doctor. It's an old G4 PPC based Mac. Most of the articles that I have written for the blog have crossed this little Mac's desktop. Fox only had half a gigabyte of RAM. That wasn't really enough to load the operating system and the applications. Camino (my main browser) itself was taking up hundreds of megabytes of RAM on it's own.

The one thing that stopped me from upgrading earlier was that damn case. You don't unscrew it, you prise the thing open with a palette knife. My palette knife is rusted to bits and wasn't going anywhere near Fox. After reading up on it, I ordered a plastic spatula from Amazon in the hope that I could use it to prise the lid open. No deal. It turned out that I had a plentiful supply of what I needed - table knives. Push the knife into the crack between the lid and the case, gently slide along to release the first clips, and then lever out. Repeat on three sides:

Once you have the lid loosened you can proceed with the upgrade. This guide was very helpful ( courtesy of @nasrat). Here's the machine with old ram out and new ram in:

The case doesn't seem to be scratched. Was it worth it? I think so. The UI is snappier and I can run iTunes, iPhoto and a browser. Which used to take some patience.

Thanks to @nasrat and @indietim who sent encouraging tweets.

New post on www.build-doctor.com: six tips for automated releases

2008-10-15T12:51:00.003+01:00

The cutover to WordPress is almost complete. There's a few broken Urls that I still need to redirect. Amazingly (and courtesy of my friends at YouDevise) there's a new post:

Link

Unmade road: 1 Dahon: nil

2008-10-13T21:36:00.006+01:00

I did get my money's worth out of my Dahon Mariner in 2 years. It won't be traveling all that far now, with the broken frame you can see if you look carefully at the photo.

You can conclude that it is indeed a road bike.

Today I did ride it to the train station, and then from Waterloo to the office. Because I forgot my lock. I took the scenic route along the South Bank and the Millennium Bridge.

Playground accident

2008-09-07T22:20:00.002+01:00

Today we went to an NCT event: two solid hours of field testing climbing frames. It's all good fun until someone gets hurt.

(No children were actually harmed in the making of this image, honest!)

blog retrospective

2008-09-03T21:22:00.003+01:00

I meant to do this at three months. Then at six. I kinda missed the boat at nine as well. Finally, here's the first of two or three posts on my how my other blog, Build Doctor is doing.

Link

I'm going to enjoy eating you, little chillies.

2008-07-26T11:28:00.003+01:00

We have about 8 chilli plants. All cultivated from seed, which I'm proud of. Some were bought in a packet, some were scooped out of a chilli that I was de-seeding to cook with.

Last night, I dreamt in code ...

2008-07-25T12:32:00.002+01:00

... and the code was Perl. It was slightly disturbing; it's not like I've written any Perl in years. What does it mean?

Debian on my eeepc makes me happy

2008-07-15T22:59:00.004+01:00

I ruined the Xandros install on my Asus Eeepc weeks ago. So I've just done my second Debian install on it, this time using an 8Gb SDHC card to host the OS. There's a tangible lag sometimes because the SD card is connected via USB2, but not enough to matter. Mostly I just write stuff using Vim, if I get a seat on the train.

Blimp over London

2008-07-14T22:36:00.003+01:00

Taken from London Bridge this afternoon. I'd write something funny but I burnt my finger cooking poppadoms.

Radiator construction at the Guardian - a guest post at www.build-doctor.com

2008-06-23T20:55:00.004+01:00

(click here to skip my introduction and go directly to the post)

The last project I did for ThoughtWorks was at Guardian News and Media, working on the redesign of their website. It should have been a dream project: I used to read the newspaper cover to cover, I'm really interested in media, and it's a chance to see what running one of the biggest websites in the UK is like. I was a bit shocked when I got there.

Like any software project, there were issues. The developers were doing their damnedest to meet some aggressive deadlines, the testers were writing automated tests like their lives depended on it, but something really wasn't gelling. It didn't seem to matter that the automated build that ran the functional tests was broken for days at a time. ThoughtWorkers the world over are capable of amazing amounts of discipline in software engineering. It felt like we weren't hitting that level and it wasn't clear why. What I did to try and fix this?

In the project room, there were 32 inch TV's on the walls to display the state of the website. It was just coincidence that the developers were housed next to the Guardian's excellent systems operations team. The developers had a Wi-Fi rabbit. It was no contest. Something had to be done. In the very first guest post on The Build Doctor, Michael Brunton-Spall picks up the story of how we built an Extreme Feedback Device called the Build Radiator.

Link