cottee.org - wabi-sabi in Chester

Goodbye wabi-sabi

Thu, 1 May 2008 01:32:00 GMT

Right. This blog is closing. I never get time to rewrite it and I find the fact it keeps dying and I have to keep restarting it is becoming a pain in the arse. This will remain here for the old articles but all new posts have gone to the evil empire of google. Blogger hosted

blog.cottee.org.

Ladies and gentlemen – adjust your bookmarks please.

The Hardy Heron

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:13:00 GMT

For the last six months I’ve been using Ubuntu 7.10 (The Gutsy Gibbon) on my main laptop. My main laptop is a knackered Dell Inspiron 630m which technically is knocked into a cocked hat by my sony vaio but has the big advantage that it’s lightweight and has a battery that will still hold a charge for a couple of hours. Gutsy gave me my best working environment ever and removed my Mac lust (for the moment).

When the next release of the Hardy Heron came out I wondered whether it was wise to destroy that environment for the sake of something new. I didn’t ponder it very hard for I’m a sucker for something new and sure enough, Gutsy was wiped (I don’t like upgrades, I like to do things cleanly) and the Hardy Herson (aka Ubuntu 8.04) was installed.

It’s very very nice. Feels snappier, looks prettier (but that default brown look has to go) and has all the apps I want to use.

It uses Firefox 3 which hasn’t crashed on me so far, whilst Firefox 2 would hang regularly. Firefox 3 gave me two problems however. The google bar doesn’t work with it but as I only use it’s ability to force the google search country (useful for times like this when I’m in Japan but want all my google searches to use google.co.uk) I found a google lite toolbar which does that. Secondly the delicious plugin which I use everyday doesn’t work. Instead I signed up to Diigo. That allows me to move my delicious bookmarks over AND also keep Delicious in sync with Diigo should I ever want to go back to it. Diigo has a FF3 addin which does work.

I also have started sending all my mails for both my work and personal domains to a new gmail account. Anything I send back to you now comes from gmail. This solves my searching problems, my speed problems and my access problems. using gmail has forced me to work in a new way. Rather than just have a large inbox with the recent mails at the top I just keep everything out of the list unless it’s something I need to act on. That gives me a todo list for free (virtually all my todos come from mail). Trying to find email in gmail is just simplicity compared to fumbling around with Thunderbird’s search facilities. It also gives the problem of spam a simple solution.

Additionally, this evening, I’ve been playing around with keeping chats in gmail. Using Jabber you can hook your aim accounts through to gmail. I’ve been playing around with that this evening and so far it looks very promising. I’ll let you know how I get on with.

Nagoya - Day 1

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:05:00 GMT

We arrived back in Japan last night. Left Chester at 9am, drove to my friend John’s and left our car at his house, taxi into Heathrow, Heathrow to Narita, Narita to Nagoya, Train into the center of Nagoya and then a taxi to my parents house. Quite a trip with three kids, more so when one of them is Alisa.

To anybody on the Heathrow to Narita flight on the 21st April I’m sorry. Yes that was my youngest child repeatedly screaming. And apologies to the man who left us and went to the back of the plane. I understand completely.

I’m up this morning in my new work environment – two laptops and an external monitor – and noticing the first effects of hayfever. This time I have medication – we’ll see how we get on with that when I can find it (i.e. when Akemi wakes up).

Infocom - Fascinating Article

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:34:00 GMT

Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This is great stuff. I have fond memories of Infocom. In the early days my good friend Mike Taylor had a C64 with a disk drive (incredibly advanced for the time – 1982’ish I’d guess). Typing in a command would be met by much disk whirring before a response was given (especially if this was a new response) and it all added up to the excitement.

Reading behind the scenes of how it all fitted together is wonderful. And the complaints, rants and frustration offered here by the Infocom developers don’t seem that far removed from what I see in everyday work life.

Slowly Dying

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

I’ve blown 40% of this project’s budget just trying to get xxx to talk to zzz.

Thus spoke Andy at work today – technology names hidden to hide the guilty. I’d watched him and various colleagues slog through getting these two items to converse. One was open source, one was Microsoft. They progressed slowly – each small victory being followed with a new attack from an unexpected direction. Except by the end of the day they were not unexpected. It was like one of those slasher horror films at the 70 minute mark The villain is supposed to be dead but you’re looking at the watch and thinking there’s a lot more shit to come before this is over.

When I was about 25 the word on the street was that traditional programmers would mostly be extinct, replaced by fourth generation languages which would allow the technically unsavy to whip up a database in half an hour. Now, fifteen years later, we’ve binned that dream and instead expend our energies on desperately trying to sort out the existing messes and get them talking to the new bright young things on the block.

Ted Nelson was a man who wrote one of the greatest books of all time (Computer Lib). The book speaks of a simpler time and has the hope of a better future scattered through its pages. Little did he know how bad things would get instead. Even so, his wikipedia entry speaks of his wisdom.

Ted Nelson promotes four maxims: “most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong”

The motto of Computer Lib was something along the lines of “You can and must understand computers now.”. Unfortunately, as time progresses, that seems a far more unlikely prospect.

In our own work I spend most of my time fighting (both people and technology) rather than creating. Like Andy today, days drag by slowly. Issue after issue eating away at whatever creativity was still hanging around. The words to fear these days are ‘legacy’, ‘maintenance’ and ‘support’. Sure, they’re important parts of IT work but when they become the main aspect of your work they just gnaw away at your soul, leaving you an empty husk, dreaming of better days, dreading the current ones.

Still, there’s always beer.

Belly Button Pus

Wed, 5 Mar 2008 08:44:00 GMT

Attempting to explain to my wife the severity of a friend’s burns, I had to find the Japanese word for pus. I can understand stupid google ads asking if I want to buy pus (kind of). But specifically “Belly Button Pus?”. Click the image to see it in full size. (That Anal Abscess doesn’t look like much fun either)

Pig Farmers of Britain Unite

Tue, 4 Mar 2008 07:52:00 GMT

I’m right behind you brothers and sisters

What you need to know about computers

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:34:00 GMT

Regarding the subject of computers, most introductory texts will say something along the lines of “Computers are very good for handling repetitive tasks. They can be given a set of instructions and they will happily repeatedly execute those set of instructions without becoming fatigued.” Standard textbook computer stuff.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Sorry about that. Been feeling the strain a little and just needed to have a bit of release.

Do you remember Jurassic Park? Not the movie but the book which is actually a damn good book. There’s a moral in there about chaos theory and stuff like that. But the bigger moral is don’t trust computers. Really. Yes, I know I work with the bastards but that’s all they are. Electronic bastards. To a man/woman/generic thingie. And rampaging velociraptors is among the least of your worries when dealing with computers.

Let’s take a computer that’s sat there and has done EXACTLY the same thing, day in and day out, for the last two years. How much would you bet that it will do exactly the same thing … today? Eh? Lots of money eh? You poor misguided fool. Computers know about these sort of things, they sense what you are up to. About the only thing I’d lay money on is that my tape drive won’t turn into a purple unicorn (and even then, I have a slight hesitation).

In our company we have a rule (unspoken but it doesn’t need to be spoken) that you don’t fool around with live systems. You don’t. You treat them with the UPMOST respect and consideration. The number of things you can do on a live system without risk is miniscule. And the number is reducing. For example, I just went onto a system handling EDI functions and did a quick grep for a string. And the machine froze. Er, come again? Yes. It froze. That’s akin to opening your yellow pages and your house catching fire. It’s not what you expect.

Recently I’ve had a number of unrelated incidents with different computers in different places all behaving like asbo’d youngsters on a jolly at Tesco’s bargain bin booze warehouse. You’ll do something like type ‘who’ and flames will pour out the serial port. Even in my EDI example above, I started typing a mail to vent out my frustration and the laptop I was typing on froze.

Quite funny in some ways. Like if you’re a mentally retarded warthog with socializing problems.

Of course, when members of my family call me and ask why their windows vista laptop has crashed I’m often lost for words. It’s not that Vista has crashed which is so amazing, it’s that it’s obviously been working for the month before which is fantastic. I could relate to questions like “Vista has wiped out my entire family, but left the second daughters alive from this and the next generation. Do you think I should upgrade to Vista Business Edition?”. That’s a sane and good question. But questions such as “Why won’t my computer boot” don’t have an answer. Why should it boot? Why has it been booting? Will it boot tomorrow? They are unknowable. All we can do is offer some sacrifices, smoke something illegal and pray the end comes quickly.

Those who know me know that I long for a change in direction in my career and I’ve often expressed a desire to move into pig farming. As an outsider pigs look fairly predictable. They’re born, they eat, they shit, they get killed, we eat them. They don’t suddenly burst into flames or turn into a traction engine or similar. I hear it from good authority (i.e. a taxi driver taking me to Chester station) that there’s good money in pigs as well. Sounds like a good job to me. At least it’s shit you can shovel.

Wikileaks IP Address

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:21:00 GMT

Wikileaks is shut down. Well, the DNS has been removed. So read all about it without that infernal DNS magic.

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks.org_under_injunction

Heroes Happen Here

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:22:00 GMT

I can’t work out what’s odder. This new Microsoft Heroes Happen Here idea or the fact that the first comic strip is exactly what Hugo told his teachers at school that I did. “My Daddy drives an ice cream van”.

Or the fact that I woke up in the middle of the night tonight at precisely the time that a small network glitch hit one of our systems so I fixed it before anybody noticed. Yes, the logs were on a screen by my head. Sad bastard I am.