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Found 12 entries.
Yes, I know “commits” are about as informative as “Lines of Code” but it does sometimes help you see where you are in comparison to other days.
Thanks to the terrible Wellington weather I stayed home all day and hacked. It was awesome. It turns out I did 32 commits today to my current project. Correction, I have two projects on the go (one at home and one at the office). This is for the one I’m doing at home. After all that I am (1) tired, (2) chuffed I was so productive and (3) happy!
The most interesting of these of course is (2). I have found that since I quit my job and am doing my own thing, I am almost infinitely more productive. Firstly, I know the ins and outs of the system, secondly I have no interruptions (irc, email, phone, in-person, clients) and finally, all my projects are just so much more interesting than previous things I’ve worked on. And yep, that includes a satellite control system! :)
Labels: hacking
Inserted: 2010-09-02 12:03 (22 hours, 41 minutes ago)
Today was the first Friday in a very long time that I haven’t had that Friday Feeling. It only hit me at about 4pm when I realised that my old work (Catalyst) would be starting their beer o’clock.
For years I’ve had that Friday Feeling and I have usually found Friday afternoons to be less productive than other parts of the week. However, whilst still beavering away at 6pm I realised that I’m so mad busy doing things that I don’t really think of what day it is, or even what time it is. It’s also because the things I’m busy with actually interest me and whilst I’d say I’ve always had an interesting job, doing the things you want to do and how you want to do them make it infinitely more enjoyable.
Going back to weekends. For me now, the weekends are just extensions to the week for two reasons.
Firstly, I don’t have to do housekeeping chores like my washing at the weekend since I’m able to do it when I like through the week. This even means I choose a beautiful day so that my clothes actually have a chance to dry. This is definitely an advantage of the time being your own.
And secondly, I’ll be heading into the office both days of a weekend anyway so it doesn’t mean much to me anymore. Currently I work at home in the early morning, head in to the office for a long afternoon (which broadly covers lunch and tea), then back home for some more late night hacking.
Weekends now just means that the probability of seeing certain friends is higher than on other days of the week. Obviously these are friends who have day jobs and have less ability to mould their own time. However, I also have a number of friends who are self-employed and the probability of me seeing them is higher on every single day :) This is definitely a perk of being self-employed and one I intend to take full advantage of.
Finally, this entry is a kind of “Yep, I’ve quit and the business is up and going” introduction and I promise to keep you more up to date as things progress.
Labels: business, self-employed, catalyst
Inserted: 2010-08-13 11:02 (2 weeks, 6 days ago)
Dear Mr Schmidt,
Your quote on the BBC News article about Google drops Wave because of lack of users was interesting. You said “It’s a very clever product. You never know why it didn’t work”. Obviously you’re not as clever as you think your product is.
When Google Wave launched, the crowd stood up, applauded and the YouTube videos that were released made Wave look awesome. Instant view of what other people were typing, the ability to change your previous comments (and indeed, other peoples), the slider to see the history, being able to upload images and the ability to make lots of bots to run inside the thing.
The problem is, no-one wanted any of these features. Clever – yes. Useful – no.
The slider is only there since the complexity of the conversation was far too great. The complexity was far too great since you could reply to anyone anywhere as well as changing previous messages. This in itself is fairly horrible since the conversation then isn’t linear. Ever heard of why people don’t like top-posting on email? Uploading images are ho-hum, email already does previews for image attachments (and why do we need any more than that). All 'Chat’ protocols out there don’t do the 'show as you type’ thing – mainly because no-one wants it (how often do you type something and then delete it … lots). Finally, bots … more annoying than the ability to change anyone’s message … you get my drift.
Add to the fact that all the features you guys trumpeted as amazing, ambitious and new, was the slowness of actually making it work. And yes, even in Chrome it was slow. Painfully slow. Your whole company is based on speed, decreasing page load times, minimising JavaScript and CSS, having a minimal search page, updating old (HTTP) protocols for new ones (SPDY), making JavaScript go faster and deferring loads of content until after page ready … so why oh why oh why would you think a painfully slow application – such as Wave – should be any different to EVERYTHING your company stands for and yet be sucessful.
As for the things it was hyped up to do: Productivity – nope, it was too slow. Wiki(ish) – nope, it was too complicated. Conversation – nope, it was too surreal (after all, when have you been able to edit other people’s past conversation?).
Finally, it was immediately obvious to myself and the majority of my friends (that is, only two thought Wave was any good) that Wave wasn’t what Google trumpeted it as. It was in fact, a gimmick. A fun game that kept us occupied for exactly one afternoon, after which people said “Now I’m done, don’t think I’ll do that again”. Kind of like playing a new game only to realise that it has no longevity. No usefulness. No future.
So if it was painfully obvious to the rest of the world (ok, 98% of Wave users) that it was annoying, why wasn’t it obvious to you and your team. After all, you do champion measuring what your users are doing. If 98% aren’t logging in much after the first day, surely that’s a sign it’s not going well. I’m surprised it took you a year to figure that out.
All the best,
Andy
Inserted: 2010-08-07 11:53 (3 weeks, 5 days ago)
It’s been a while since I posted but this particular news item today has definitely made my ears prick up. Of course, I’m presuming what this also means for the future and I hope I’m right.
RackspaceCloud and NASA (of all people) have started a joint initiative called OpenStack. Basically it means that there will be an open source solution to cloud servers and other web services. Yes, I know about Eucalyptus but I think this means much more than that.
From what I understand, they will be open sourcing the code that powers their Cloud Servers API and in the not too distant future, the code that powers their Cloud Files service too.
If I extrapolate with hope, then I can only imagine that they will also be adding more services in the future, such as a queuing system, a notification service and possibly a distributed DB service! Yes, these are all examples of the wonderful (but proprietary) services that Amazon Web Services already provide.
Anyway, today is looking like it could be a good day for the future of cloud computing. Being able to run a free and open source operating system inside a virtual machine which is running a FOSS OS, using FOSS services for your own FOSS software can only be a good thing. If I didn’t say FOSS enough in this paragraph, let me say it one more time – FOSS!
Oh, and the other great thing about this is that it opens up competition and freedom to move providers. If you don’t like the provider you’re using, then due to the nature of the services being open source, you’ll be able to switch to other providers you do like! This is very much in contrast with the Amazon model where you get locked in using their services.
Finally, it seems that today also marks the first day of OSCON, and seeing as how RackspaceCloud’s API is much more RESTful than Amazon’s, and how they seem to say they’re an open source company, I can only assume that they doing the right thing and doing it well. Let’s hope they keep to their promise and deliver.
Of course, with Rackspace being a far 2nd in terms of numbers of servers to Amazon’s own EC2 offering I can only say that even if they didn’t make this decision because of those stats, it can only help it along :)
Well done Rackspace!
Labels: rackspace, foss, cloud
Inserted: 2010-07-19 09:50 (1 month, 2 weeks ago)
If Google can’t get their WebM license right, then who can:
I did wonder why they didn’t just go with GPLv3 but I figured that Google usually like the BSD-style licenses. They have answers on their Licensing FAQ but still, it makes you wonder.
For example, I wonder if this is essentially the BSD license with the patent clauses from the GPLv3. That would be both interesting and cool, though I’d still prefer GPL over BSD.
Inserted: 2010-06-04 22:58 (3 months ago)
The first is pretty obvious. Now that I can watch YouTube using HTML5 features that means Flash is one step away from being chucked out forever.
And after reading this blog entry about the Google Maps API v3, Flash – as far as I’m concerned – is now out of the window. I didn’t realise but hidden in amongst a lot of other text are the words The most significant change is that Street View is entirely implemented in HTML....
I thought “No, surely not”, so I kept double clicking the map until I was sufficiently zoomed in to see 'Pegman’ and I moved him onto the road. Sure enough, in my non-Flash versions of both Chrome and Firefox I could see Street View. After twisting the view around, clicking up and down the street I was wondering to myself “I have no freakin’ idea how they did this, but I’m glad they did”. If you haven’t noticed already, I think the Flash version of Street View had two levels of zoom, well this one seems to have 5 or 6.
So yes, I’m a happy bunny tonight. Add this to the fact that GitHub also reimplemented their network graph a few months ago using the Canvas element, the future is looking decidedly bright (and very HTML5-CSS3-like).
Labels: html5, css3, gmaps, flash, github, google, street-view
Inserted: 2010-05-21 11:46 (3 months, 2 weeks ago)
I got an item in my RSS feed the other day. It was for my old (hardly used, one careful owner) site www.pie.geek.nz. I have let it lapse since I never really used it, hence DNS broke.
It read:
Your blog is broken: DNS failure. Last change in status was Sun, 02 May 2010 11:28:00 +0000
Great, except it gave me this update on the 19th May. That means it took 17 days for the ismyblogworking.com service to tell me. Hardly a recommendation for you to use it.
For some reason I expect that if I sign up to a service which tells you if your blog is broken, it would notify you a little quicker than 17 days. All good fun.
Labels: blog
Inserted: 2010-05-21 11:09 (3 months, 2 weeks ago)
I’d just like to mention that cil v0.07 has had a belated release. It had a bit of work done to it (6 issues) back in January and February and since it’s been working fine for me since then, I thought it about time to release.
Please see the project page for cil for the download link and other information.
Note, the six issues that have been completed are (generated by `cil summary —is-closed —label=Milestone-v0.07`:
Labels: cil
Inserted: 2010-05-17 10:25 (3 months, 2 weeks ago)
Over the past few days I’ve been playing with NodeJS. It’s been an eye opener to see how JavaScript would work out on the server (notice I didn’t say server-side JavaScript, which I don’t yet think it is suitable for, in liue of a nice templating system).
My initial plan was to write a small queue system, much like AWS’s SQS. In the end, I created one in less than 130 lines of JavaScript though I know that can also get smaller.
It’s been a good eye-opener to see what NodeJS can already do, added to the fact that it’s an event driven language – much like JS in the browser is – so it’s pretty fast. Even though it is an interpreted language, the V8 engine it is using (the one from Google) is heavily optimised and the main developer of NodeJS, Ryan Dahl, is always careful to write non-blocking C code when developing Node itself, or it’s modules.
For my future plan, I intend on writing a couple more infrastructure services. A queue system which is distributed and uses the above simple queue would come in very useful, as would a publish/subscribe system much like the new AWS SNS.
Maybe in the future, I’ll also try out some other things too.
But the purpose of this blog entry is to describe what I’m doing to make sure that the project starts out the Open Source way from the beginning. Usually I add copyrights and suchlike later, but hopefully will do it all properly from the start.
I have (so far) been following two articles, one from my good friend Francois and one from the Gnu site:
To see the result of this, go and have a look at the GitHub repo I have pushed to. The project will be called 'sensi’ and will expand in the near future.
One final point to mention is how I figured the name 'sensi’ was ok. I trawled through the searches of all of the following sites to make sure it wasn’t already used:
Anything else I should do now whilst the project is still young? Any other code related or repository websites I should have checked to see if the name was unique? Any other ideas for (FOSS) 'Infrastucture as a Service’?
Inserted: 2010-05-08 10:13 (3 months, 4 weeks ago)
Over the past few days I had some interesting experiences with nice and nasty bus drivers. I’m not sure what it is about them but they seem to be one way or the other and I definitely saw the two extremes.
Firstly, when landing at Auckland airport, the airport flyer bus driver was quite possibly one of the nicest bus drivers I’ve ever seen. Not only did his companion on the sidewalk help us get our tickets, he was also helping every single person who got on the bus.
“Does this bus go to town?” which I think has an obvious answer.
“Yes” says the driver, “Where are you staying?”
“I’m at the YHA, I think, here, I have a map, just hang on …”
“Oh, that’s stop 4, just opposite the …” etc etc.
Every single stupid question, broken-English mutterings and random words that any of the passengers could come up with, he answered in a mild, calm and extremely helpful way.
Think about the situation, you’re Spanish and speak only a little English. You’ve just landed at a foreign airport after more than 24hrs in the sky, you’re jet lagged and you have to navigate new money in a new country to get to a new city and a new hostel. What would you prefer? Someone who helps you incessantly – which is what I saw on the Auckland Airport Flyer – or a nasty little man who shouldn’t be in a public service job. I’m afraid to say that that is what I saw in Wellington.
Just before the Mt Vic tunnel, a man with an American accent seemed to be a little flustered. Obviously he was late for an appointment, meeting or social occasion. Trying to get his words out he wondered if he could get off the bus on the other side of the tunnel.
“No, next stop is Courtney Place”, says the bus driver.
“Really? Can’t you drop me just after the tunnel?”
“No”.
At this point, I wonder why the bus driver didn’t explain that it was an Airport Flyer, hence they only stop at certain points, the next of which was Courtney Place.
“Are there any other buses that go this way?” An obvious question from someone new to the area.
“I don’t know” says the bus driver.
Wow. That’s the most unhelpful thing ever. This guy is a bus driver and he says that he doesn’t know if any other buses go this way. Hang on a second, isn’t that a sackable offence, being that dumb to not know if there are any other buses that go this way. Doesn’t he drive with his eyes open (which would obviously tell him the answer). After all, there were about 3 other people at the bus stop not getting on to this bus, so surely there would be other buses. And he knows the route AND he’s a bus driver AND he’s meant to help people. I determine instead that this driver is not dumb, otherwise he wouldn’t be driving buses, but instead he is being pig ignorant, unaccommodating and stroppy.
“Ok” says the man, obviously he’s desperate enough just to get through the tunnel. “How much is it please?”
“Six dollars” says the bus driver. By now I could see he was getting irate but not for any real reason.
“Six dollars?” asks the man, “Six Dollars!” he says again. By now very puzzled and getting even more flustered. Again I figure that the bus driver will explain that it’s also more expensive because it’s an airport flyer. I’m also guessing the man didn’t know this and also doesn’t know that you get those security cameras on the bus, free wifi and nicer seats as well as space for luggage. None of which the man needed since he just wanted to get to the next stop and nothing more.
“YEAH, SIX DOLLARS!” says the bus driver. By now I feel sorry for the guy but also am thinking the bus driver is a complete tool. Seriously, what did someone do to him to be like that. So different to the bus driver in Auckland.
“No, no, it’s okay” says the man and gets off, both extremely frustrated and amazed at the most unhelpful driver.
“Get off!” says the bus driver, just to ram it home as if the guy wasn’t already late, bemused and flummoxed.
It really was a tale of two different attitudes. I bet the first enjoys his job and the second thinks he is better than that and should be doing something else. I don’t know, but it was amazing to see such extremes in the space of two days.
Only the night before I had seen a book in the bookshop titled “Don’t hire Assholes” and I really wish I’d had a copy to firstly show the bus driver and secondly to send it to his employer. It’s sad how someone in a public service can be so wrong for the job. Driving buses isn’t just about driving buses.
Labels: customers
Inserted: 2010-04-01 22:33 (5 months ago)
Wow, I didn’t mention that Lollysite v0.04 was released on the 7th January 2010. So again, it’s alpha software but if you really want to use it, use the Lollysite Git repo and go from there. Seriously, it has lots of features and bug fixes since then.
See the releases page for more info.
At the moment, I have too many things in v0.05 to do, so I’m going to trim it down to a more respectable level. But either way, hope to see you soon for v0.05 :)
Labels: lollysite
Inserted: 2010-02-03 05:54 (7 months ago)
I ended up missing most of the online Koha meeting this morning but I did see one of the resultant products from it.
Within a few hours, a new website for Koha popped up and it already contains some great information, links and a blog too. It’s awesome work in such a short amount of time.
Jo has already blogged about how the community rocks in words I couldn’t put down, but suffice to say it’s a good read.
In other news, Galen has tagged v3.02.00-alpha in Git which is very exciting news for everyone within the Koha community.
I know I’m not yet fully integrated into the Koha community yet but every so often I do a small thing to get closer and mainly for me to get my hands dirty. So to help, I’m doing the website for KohaCon2010 which will happen later this year. It’s done in Lollysite:http://gitorious.org/lollysite so hopefully that’ll improve a little as other people have requirements of it too :)
Labels: koha
Inserted: 2010-02-03 05:47 (7 months ago)
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