Archive for December, 2015

Pebble in the Sky is the third novel in Isaac Asimov’s galactic empire series. The empire of Trantor is now firmly established and spreading to every corner of the galaxy.

Earth on the other hand is not doing so well. The people of the galaxy have forgotten that it was the original home world of man, and Earth has fallen out with the rest of the galaxy. However, they gave a secret plan to destroy the empire.

Having read the Foundation series, it adds a different perspective. Spoilers start here by the way. This novel ends with a note of hope that Earth will rebuild. However, as those of us who have read Foundation and Earth will know, it doesn’t.

Foundation also benefits from originally having been short stories merged into novels. This means a lot happens and you see the story unfold over hundreds of years. The galactic empire series typically take place on one or two planets, and not much happens. They are still good, but it does not have quite the same effect of the first Asimov novels I read.

It does do an excellent job of constructing the amazing world that makes Asimov’s storytelling so enjoyable though. The far future, and the familiar, blended into one.

In The Code Book Simon Singh discusses the history of cryptography. It is a journey through the first simple ciphers through to the war years and then the computerisation of encryption.

It was not a topic I thought I would be that interested in, but Singh’s writing makes it an enjoyable read.

It was originally published in 1999. Given the nature of the topic, the book is showing it’s age significantly. This only comes into play in the last few chapters, but is noticeable.

The Currents of Space is the second novel in Isaac Asimov’s galactic empire series. The first in the series, The Stars, Like Dust was not one of my favourite Asimov novels but this one is an improvement.

It still lacks that grander scale of lots of things happening, that the Foundation series has. However, it does open it up to the wider galaxy. It might all take place on two planets, but the empire of Trantor is there and on the rise.

The story follows the two planets of Sark and Florina. The former exploits the latter for it’s valuable kyrt plantations. But what length will they to go to protect it?

The Stars, Like Dust is the first in Isaac Asimov’s Galactic Empire series of novels. I had grand visions when I started reading it. It would be the missing link between Robot series and the Foundation series, looking at the growing empire as it expanded and conquered the galaxy.

It was not like that. The empire never even comes into it. It talks about the fighting of a few kingdoms that control some planets. It is apparently set before the empire really arises and while it is okay as a standalone novel, it lacks the grip and brilliance of the better Asimov novels.

It is also a little predictable. Once you have read the Foundation series, you can pretty much guess where the rebellion world turns out to be. They came out at about the same time, so you could argue it the other way around of course.

Modernizing Legacy Applications In PHP is a book by Paul M. Jones on how to bring legacy codebases up to date. Jones is a relatively big-whig in the PHP community, being involved in most of the PSR standards and a contributor to the Zend Framework.

For me, the book was both excellent and uninformative. What I mean by that is that I do not think I learnt anything from reading it. However, I flatter myself that I am pretty good at PHP and have spent many years working with legacy codebases. It was always been an interest of mine, and I have previously submitted conference papers on the subject. I have been doing just what this book describes with my current client.

That in itself shows the quality of the book though. It describes every step I have been going through in a logical and clear order. It explains introducing autoloading, separating out the concerns, adding unit testing and injecting your dependencies. It says you from the tangled mess to a clean and modern application in an easy-to-follow manner. In short, it is pretty much everything I would recommend to someone starting to clean up a legacy application.

It has code examples and some tips and tricks in it, but for the most part it is quite high level. It also deals with PHP 5.0 and onwards. There is perhaps room to expand here. At Buzz I had to come up with techniques to support ancient problems like register globals, and at the NHS I ran into PHP 4.6 installed on their servers. Solving these kind of problems, and the little code tricks you can do, might have been a useful additional also.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who feels the least bit daunted by the idea of modernising a legacy PHP codebase. It is clear, easy-to-follow and takes you through exactly the steps you should follow.

So this is it then, the final Pratchett novel. Worse, it’s a Tiffany Aching novel.

Pratchett comes out swinging for his final work. Perhaps it was his last chance to do something big, or perhaps he was trying to claw back readers from the popularity of George R. R. Martin, but I did not expect it to stat that way.

I did find a surprisingly amount of enjoyment in the book though. I have never been an Aching fan, but this was quite a good one. A nice way to go out on.

At November’s Sunday Assembly Leeds we did two songs, Echo Beach and Stuck in the Middle With You. I also did a solo cover of Closing Time, but my camera died before we got to that. The camera was using a huge aperture, so half the band are out of focus.

Echo Beach

Stuck in the Middle With You

How do we get people more engaged with community groups?

It is something that I imagine most groups are concerned about. Most of the people on their mailing list probably never turn up to any of their events. Some attend every now and then, or come for a while then stop coming back. Few are as actively engaged as the group would like them to be. I might even suggest that is impossible, because more engagement is usually better.

Some may just want to sit on the mailing list and keep an eye on the activities of the group. I know there are people and groups like this on the West Yorkshire Humanists mailing list. Others probably do genuinely intend to go to events, but there is always something else on. I have sat on the Leeds Salon’s mailing list for years and maybe made it to two events.

This was brought into sharp focus for me recently when I was talking to one of the people who run the Finnish language school. It sounds very useful for me. However, it is on a Saturday morning. Saturday morning is when I do Parkrun. And when I have band practice. And when my advanced Toastmasters club meets. It’s not that Saturday is a bad day, I am just busy all the time. But it it got me thinking about getting members to buy in.

“I am busy” is really a meaningless phrase because everyone is busy these days. It is shorthand for “I have other priorities”. Thus it might not be reaching people and letting them know about events that is the difficulty groups encounter. It could be that they are doing all of that, but they are not pushing themselves high enough up a person’s priorities.

At the same time, I was thinking about my host’s address for Sunday Assembly Leeds. I needed to talk about how the group is run by volunteers, and how we need people’s support volunteering. It occurred to me that one of the selling points should be that that is what a community is. If you are not volunteering, you are not really part of the community in the same way that somebody who is volunteering is. This is a whole different circle to get people inside as Rick Warren would describe it, but there is actually where the good stuff is for them as well as you.

Anecdotally I would say that once someone is involved in the group they spend more time thinking about it and are more likely to turn up to events. They feel like they know what is going on. They are part of the community, it forms a cornerstone of their social life and engagement spirals upwards.

That means that these two issues have a common solution. If you can get people to help run the organisation it not only helps the group run smoothly but is also beneficial for them because they fill including and their engagement levels go up in a positive feedback cycle.

Therefore I am putting forward the idea of Everyone Involved. What if you asked every member of your group to be involved in some way? It does not have to be a big way. They could help run things at events. Maybe put the welcome packs out or be a greeter. They could do something from home – write articles, update the website, even just re-tweet the group’s messages. But the idea is that everyone – every single member – would be asked to do a job, no matter how small or trivial.

I am still fleshing out the idea. It in itself is incredibly simple of course, but whether it is a good idea or not, and how it could be practically implemented remain to be discussed.

Thank you to those who celebrated our Leeds wedding with us! The photos are back and here are a few of our favourites.

Last month we made our fourth annual pilgrimage up to St. Lukes in Headingley for Finnish Christmas Carols. Turn out was higher than ever with almost every seat in the small chapel being taken. Possibly due to the recently started Finnish language school based in Headingley.

After, we piled into the church house for food and conversation. Alas we did not win the raffle for the ginger bread house. Better luck next year…