Closed system. This is the very opposite of what your customers care about. The percentage of your customer base who make a buying decision based on the openness of a system (in terms of system-level customisation options, use of open source software or otherwise) is vanishingly tiny. They’re very vocal, certainly, but commercially they’re irrelevant. Pandering to this segment will most certainly damage your penetration into the market. Be extremely wary about sacrificing large-scale appeal for the sake of a tiny but noisy technical minority. The tablet space is in no way designed for or aimed at such users.

Italic bolding is mine. It’s so very true – anyone else seen “open” handsets doing well? Android is starting to get there, but it’ll never be open enough for some. Nokia has opened up a little, same with some of the others. But in general: most users don’t give a shit. Make it work. Give me a phone that rings and lasts 5 days. KTNXBAI.

Up until now, I’ve been using Git (with -svn) to manage my code. This has worked well, mostly. I can check in locally (and hold changes so I don’t disrupt things like customer builds etc), have local history etc. All good. Some of the down sides are around how git-svn works on windows – it’s slow, to say the least. With a patch from Josh Robb, it gets quicker, but still – a check in that takes maybe 1-2 mins in subversion takes 10-15 mins using git-svn, and maybe 5x that without the patch. To check out the whole source tree, with around 2 weeks of history (we have around 2000 revisions in subversion, I’m getting the last 100 or so), takes 8-12 hours, even if I’m on the same lan as the server.

So, I’m looking at what I need, rather than the accepted use of the tools. I was reading this very entertaining post by Rob Conery about using Git as a backup client, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I dont really need git-svn. I need svn and git.

I have two distinct “methods” of working. For my own stuff, I have a remote subversion repo at dreamhost. I use this as an offsite backup for my code, as well as a nice, big undo button. I’m the only developer on this, so I can chop and change between tech here as I like.

The other case is the work with ComArchive. I can’t change the back end (tho we did move from https to http, which sped things up a lot too), but I can do whatever I like on the client end, as long as it works and doesn’t break others. But the main drivers here are that I need to work within the timeframes of the main team (aka Thomas), and I need to make sure my code is backed up incase my VM frys itself. Also, chewing up a work day getting the code down isn’t really viable.

Case 1: Moving my personal stuff to git

This one is easy. Just export from subversion to a local folder, then git init / git add . / git commit, setup a remote git repo on my dreamhost hosting, and push to it. This is well documented pretty much everywhere – it’s normal git processing.

Case 2: Using git as a backup and versioning tool for a local subversion working folder.

This one is not quite as obvious. Git’s main focus is on versioning a set of objects (usually files). A subversion working folder is a set of objects.

So at the top level, I’ve just made a git repo, added all the files in the subversion repo into it (including the .svn folders), committed it, and then pushed it to the remote folder, just like I would with any other git repo.

git init
git add .
git commit -am “message”
git remote add backup git-url-goes-here

then, when I want to push out of the building:

git add .
git commit -am “message”
git push backup master

When I need to, I can just do a subversion commit to push back into the main repository. Git is none the wiser – it’s just a bunch of files. Subversion, more importantly, is none the wiser.

This way, I can use subversion for what its good at – being able to work with just the tip locally, and pushing and pulling things very, very quickly over the wire. And I can use git for what it’s good at, too – a local versioned repo, an offsite backup I control, branches (maybe) etc.

Win win. I hope.

I’m actually wondering if I start using git more as a backup tool. I have a load of business stuff that needs to be kept safe. It doesn’t change often, but if we lose it, and get audited by HMRC, we’re screwed (the whole “keep stuff for 7 years” thing).

Is anyone else using git like this?

I had two projects earmarked as learning projects, which is always the problem for me – get an idea which isn’t something I want to put up on the store (ok, maybe…), but meaty enough to make it worth while doing. A tip calculator does NOT pass that test. These two I did do.

First app I did was a small earthquake lister. USGS provides a RSS feed for all of the earthquakes worldwide which are over 2.0 on the richter scale. The idea – stolen, I thought, from the Android samples – was to get the list, show it in a list on the phone, then when the user drills down, show more info and a map.

I found out later that this is a sample that Apple ship, too, so I purposefully didn’t refer to it, so I kept my learning a little cleaner.

In general, it was rather easy. Cocoa has native classes for downloading from a URL (and there are easier ones than I used), XML parsing, as well as all the visual components that you expect to see in an iPhone app. I had a bit of fun with the memory management (thanks James and Shaun), but that was easily fixed once I got the retain/release/autorelease thing sorted.

I learned afterwards that I didn’t need to make a custom UITableViewCell, as the default one has what I needed, but it was good for learning. I wish I could do offline maps, but thats for another time / app.

All up, it took me about 6 hours to do this, including a load of documentation reading.

The second app is a small twitter app, which scratches an itch I usually have at conferences where there is little or no bandwidth. The goal was to be able to press a button, type in your message, hit send, and be done. No list of posts. No adding new followers. If you want that, you have too much bandwidth and should go get Tweetie 2 – this is not the app for you.

All up, this was also an easy application to write. I had to learn how to integrate someone else’s code – MGTwitterEngine from Matt Legend Gemmell in this case, as well as how to handle errors, lack of connections, how to get editing going in a UITableViewCell, overlays, CoreAnimation, HUDs and the like.

All up, I like the power and focus of Cocoa and CocoaTouch. They give a massive amount of power to the user, even if I’m still stuck managing memory, something which I’ve not used to doing since I left Delphi behind in 2004. I’d put them in the same class as the base .NET libraries and WPF. If you include all the other stuff which is “in” .NET, Cocoa doesn’t have that reach, but for what its designed to do, it does it exceptionally well. I have to keep in mind that I’ve learned .NET over 6 years or so, not a weekend, so the frustrations of “how do I do X” are going to be normal, and with me for a little while.

So, now for the one which might actually get some use.

Well, thats the common format in the UK, and some of the US, and it appears to work quite well. The big networks don’t do it like that, tho.

Take a few of my preferred shows: Californication and Nurse Jackie are 12 half hour episodes. Dexter, Spooks (UK), and Dollhouse are 12 one hour episodes. Even Lost is only 18 episodes this time around. All of them (with the exception of season 1 of Dollhouse) have plotlines that move at a good pace. They dont get bogged down with a “generic” episode, which doesn’t move the underlying plot at all.

Lets contrast that with CSI (all of them), Lost (season 1-4), Heros (which should be killed off), Dollhouse (season 1), Fringe and others: in 24 episodes (or 12 in the case of Dollhouse season 1), you get maybe 10 which actually move the underlying plot. Lost was the worst for this – you’d get maybe 30 mins of actual show in 45 mins, the rest is recap and flashback, and then maybe 20% of that was moving the plot. Luckly, they fixed that in season 5. Heros wasn’t too bad, but with all the cris-crossing plot lines, it was hard to move anything forward much.

The test, for me, is if I can stand watching 4 episodes of a series in a row. All the top ones pass this test with flying colours. All the bottom ones do not. They are, for me, truely weekly shows, each episode is almost independent, with only passing references between them. As soon as the quality goes down a bit, they are gone from my schedule (eg Heros, Desperate Housewives, almost Lost. CSI is getting close, especially Miami, tho Fringe is still good). This is especially the case as I now have a direct financial amount for each season, so not watching a show puts money back in my pocket – or rather, doesn’t take it out (I get TV from iTunes, using the Season Pass feature. Still costs me less than paying for Sky per year).

So, maybe this is how Dollhouse should have been done in the first place – 24 episodes over 6 “seasons”, over 2 years, in the same style as Top Gear does 4 seasons a year.

Once they got the axe, Whedon had 6-8 episodes to finish off 4 years of pre-conceived plot – and I think, so far, he’s done it exceptionally well. There are none of the “echo goes out on a call” episodes, which are fun, but don’t pass the block-viewing test. They are all moving the underlying “Rossum Corp” plot, and it’s made it a better show for that, but I seriously doubt they could have kept up that pace for another 3 years.

With the advent of DVD, Hulu, iPlayer, iTunes and all the other (cough) ways to getting TV shows, short, sharp seasons make a lot more sense than long ones. At least to me.

Iceland’s rift valley, originally uploaded by Nic Wise.

More iceland pics (set on Flickr)

and Leonie’s write up of today.

Managed a couple of HDRs, but to be honest, the light was SO good all day, the non-HDR’s came out just as good!

The main thing I noticed about the experts I’ve encountered is they are into impressing you with their abilities. They are usually incredibly good, but their need for recognition gets in the way of mastery. Everything they do is an attempt to prove themselves and in order to do this they must perform like an actor on stage. There’s nothing wrong with this, and I don’t think the expert can become a master without going through this stage in life. At some point though, the expert becomes comfortable with themselves or fed up with impressing everyone and starts to look inward to the core of their art.

I think this was what was pissing me off when I wrote architects – why business cards need to be bigger and more on architects and titles.

shot from out the back of the hotel. Waiting for the northern lights to come up now :)

also for walking on water if you are a Coot (and there are a few old coots with telescopes here – they take this bird watching thing way too seriously)

Nice way to spend a day, esp as it ended with Christmas Pud and left-overs sammies :)