Archive for March, 2012

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard that some councils are planning to place restrictions on fundraisers. I’m very much in favour of this, so I write to my local councillor to voice my support.

Dear Elizabeth,

I am a resident living in your ward. As you may have heard, several city councils have proposed restrictions on “chuggers” raising money for charities on the street. I am writing to you to voice my support for similar restrictions in Leeds.

I walk though town on a regular basis and often feel like I am “running the gauntlet” as I walk up and down Briggate or Lands Lane only to have people madly waving their arms at me and block my path.

Worse still, as a trustee of a local charity based here in Leeds, I am familiar with the industry and know that these people are almost always professional fund raisers that are primarily funding their own salaries, and taking money away from local charitable causes. This to me seems dishonest, as when people give to charity, they expect that money to actually end up in the charities pocket.

Therefore, given they provide benefit to neither charities nor residents, I would strongly support any move to reduce this nuisance.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Worfolk

I would encourage you all to do the same.

If you need to get a break down of how much space each directory is using, you can do that using the du command. Using a few choice options it will produce a list of all directories in the current folders and how big they are.

du -sch

Last weekend saw the start of the 2012 Formula One series.

I wasn’t quite prepared for just how disappointing it was to not be able to watch it live. While the BBC’s extended highlights were pretty good, there just isn’t the magic of watching it live as it happens.

Never the less, it was a good race. It will be interesting to see how the season pans out – I hope that it doesn’t turn into a bunch of cars following two McLarens round a track, though Vettel’s strong performance suggests it won’t, and the rise of Mercedes looks promising too.

I had an interesting experience at this month’s Wendy House.

A girl, who as far as I could tell, nobody knew, joined our circle on the dance floor and began dancing with us. More specifically, she seemed to be dancing and making eyes at, me. I thought I was just imagining it at first, but two of my friends later independently joked to me “I think you’ve pulled”, so I wasn’t the only one thinking that.

I’m in a long term relationship so I couldn’t do anything. Or could I?

I could have totally misread the situation – maybe she was just being friendly, maybe she was friends with someone in our circle, maybe she was even friends with me and I didn’t recognise her (because that did happen last month, sorry Charlotte!). But she apparently walked off as soon as I went to get a drink so I’m just going to asume I was correct, as the exact truth is irrelevant to this blog post.

In these situations, you have to do the maths. Well, you don’t have to, you could just reject the idea out of a blind policy that you’re in a relationship and that is the end of that, but if that is your line of thinking, how do you actually know that you want to be in the relationship and are not just sticking with it out of blind faith? It’s a rhetorical question; you don’t.

So I did the maths. On the pros list – if I did make a move and she was into me, we could go off and have a bit of a dance, a hug and a kiss. That’s always good. On the cons side, I would have broken the trust of the person I love most in the world and potentially ruined a hopefully lifelong relationship.

Obviously, the cons outweigh the pros. It never scares me to do the maths because I always know that is is going to come down on that side – Elina is always going to win, unless our relationship hat deteriorated into a state where neither of us wanted to be in it, and that certainly isn’t on the horizon (I hope lol…).

But the problem with this method of thought process is just that – it involves a lot of thinking. You have to make a rational decision and reject the instant gratification in favour of the greater long-term payoff.

Both engaging rational thought on the subject and being able to restrain myself for the long-term payoff are not something that I personally particularly struggle with. But I can’t imagine that is the same for everyone.

Compound on that the fact that most people are severely intoxicated when they commit such acts of infidelity and suddenly you’re on very rocky grounds for decision making.

I wrote about a similar issue back in December when I commented that the lack of protection used during one night stands is not acceptable, but is perhaps understandable.

The chances are that a lot of people don’t put quite so much rational thought into their actions or have the self-control to wait for the long-term payoff. As a result, is it any wonder that some people do end up making silly decisions and cheat on their partner? Not acceptable, but perhaps understandable.

I’m currently re-reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

They are a fantastic series of novels and it’s brilliant to see the way Asimov carefully laid out all the story lines and concepts and weaved them in and out so that you never really know where it will end up, yet it all seems so obvious at the end.

I also find a lot of amusing parallels between the concept of The Tech-Men and work. Carefully tinkering around to try and fix systems we don’t really understand but somehow manage to keep ticking over 😀 .

Last weekend, I joined my parents for dinner at Escobar, which bills itself as “Mexian restaurant and live music venue at the heart of Leeds.”

Despite only three or four of their twenty tables being occupied when I turned up, they seemed somewhat startled that I had turned up, but a quick double check against my booking seemed to pacify the situation. “We’re short staffed tonight” the waiter explained.

The menu was reasonable, it offered a good selection of fajita and fajita style products, though not much else. I decided to go for a burrito, which was enjoyable and more than I could eat (you should now have playing in your head the phrase “wow, this burrito is delicious, but it is filling.” 😉 ).

Not a bad place to eat, but I’m not in any hurry to go back.

I recently requested an evaluation of Go, an agile release management tool from ThoughtWorks Studios.

I filed out the form but unfortunately it insisted I hadn’t filled out my city, even though I had. So I sent a support request to them and a few hours later, someone emailed me back asking where I was based so they could direct my query. I told them, but never heard back from them.

A month later I got an email from one of their sales guys asking me how I had got on with my evaluation. I emailed them back saying I never actually had an evaluation because they had never got in touch. He apologised and sent through my license key. However, at this time I was on my Mac, so I had to download the Mac client. I went to the website and this time I managed to register and download the software. Great, I thought.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get time to look at it until I was back in the office and by that time I was back on my Windows machine, so I needed to download the Windows version. I went to the website and tried to enter my email address I had used last time I registered to download.

But I just got an error. So I tried again. Another error, different this time. So I tried to go through the whole registration process again, but this once again went back to telling me that I hadn’t entered my city when in fact I had.

I sent their support another email asking for the direct download links and having been sent them, I was finally able to download and install the server. Huzzah! So I did that, but then didn’t really know what to do. It said it had started the sever, which was fine, but there was no indication of what to do next.

After some googling, I eventually found the URL I was supposed to access the dashboard with and entered that into my browser, but didn’t get anything. I tried restarting the server, no luck. I tried running it from the jar. No luck. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling it. Still nothing.

I decided to boot up my CentOS virtual machine and try installing it there. I downloaded it and tried to run the installer but it told me I needed JDK 1.6 or greater. A quick search through yum and I had it installed. I tried to run the installer again and I got the same error, even though I now had JDK installed.

Eventually, after searching the web for awhile, I found out that they didn’t support OpenJDK yet (you know, the JDK that everyone on Linux uses) so you have to install it using the ignore dependencies flag. Finally, it installed.

It then said that Go Server was up and running and so I tried to access the URL, but it did not work. I tried Apache, and that was working fine, so my virtual machine was working fine, it was just Go Server. By this time it was quite late so I turned everything off and headed home.

The next day I got in early to have a play around with it. I booted up the virtual machine and tried to start Go Server using the service command. All I got was “Error starting Go Server”. I tried googling the phrase, but apparently, it had never before been seen on the internet.

I tried googling some more and eventually found a post that seemed to have the same problem that I had. They eventually found that the problem was to do with the hostname. I couldn’t find any way to change the hostname though, so decided to try the Windows approach and remove and reinstall it. This didn’t work either.

I tried to go look it up in the online documentation, but their website was down again with a 500 error. I waited a few minutes and did a couple of refreshes and eventually it reappeared, but I couldn’t find a solution.

By this point, I had wasted far too much time on this, so I gave up. My advice is, go elsewhere for such software.

I had heard a few good things about 7 Habits by Stephen R. Covey, so I decided to give it a read.

I have to say, I was very much disappointed. I guess there should usually be some kind of flag when the author needs to foreword his own book, though this can be forgiven – after all, our once great leader, now deposed for his crimes against Darwinism on Radio 4, Professor Richard Dawkins, has previously foreworded his own books in revised editions.

The book sets itself up to be the anecdote to the nonsense that has been published in recent times – there is no quick fix, the fads don’t work, etc. But the author then goes on to discuss how he uses many of these techniques, which Penn & Teller have devoted entire episodes of Bullshit to rubbishing, in his personal life.

He then goes on to set out many obvious points which simply don’t offer any value. Perhaps there is some merit in simply codifying already known or obvious values, but then we don’t ascribe any praise to books such as L. Ron Hubbard’s The Way to Happiness which makes valid, but obvious points such as “set a good example” or be honest.

Covey’s constant reference to his religious faith (he is a practicing Mormon) also add a large amount of bias to the book. Indeed, some of the arguments that he puts forward I could only really get my head round by looking at it from a religious perspective – they simply don’t make much sense from a secular perspective.

So overall, not too impressed with the book.

If you use the Unix terminal, you’re probably familiar with grep. It’s a great search tool. But sometimes it is a little slow. Luckily, there is a faster version, with the original name of fgrep, though you might be surprised to learn it doesn’t actually stand for fast grep. But don’t be confused – it is faster.

You use it in avery similar way to the way you would use grep. So for most occasions, simply replace grep with fgrep for faster results.

Last year, ATOS boss Thierry Breton announced he was planning to bring internal emails to an end at the company.

It’s a brilliant idea. As his research shows, most of the internal emails we get at work these days are junk. In fact, up to 85%, perhaps even higher, are messages we didn’t actually need to get. Yet we spend hours and hours every week reading all of them!

That can’t be productive for a business.

That is all on top of emails being a distraction in themselves. One thing Gijsbert has commented on in the past, and that any “how to study” or “how to focus” book will talk about is disconnecting yourself from the outside world and not getting distracted by things like email.

So, over the past week at work, I’ve been “switching off” my emails. When possible, I read them first thing in a morning and shortly before the end of the day. Between then I close my email client and get on with actually doing my job – writing code!

Overall, I’m more productive. I’m not missing important emails either. I was expecting a lot of people to come to me and say “did you read my email yet?”, but nobody has. Nobody! You could almost argue that as it wasn’t important enough for them to come chasing me up, was it really important to send to me in the first place?

Of course, this isn’t the same thing as banning internal email, but what I think it shows is that emails have, on the whole, not become more of a burden than a benefit and the workplace can be made more productive by finding alternative routes of communication.