July 2008 Archives

SpaceShipTwo is nearing completion (reports The Register), and the era of commercial spaceflight beckons. I've tried to be cynical about it, but I just can't. It's a huge step in the right direction.

Anything that inspires people to look beyond the last 30 years' dreary lack of ambition in space is welcome. I live with my partner's two teenage children, and it's not exactly easy to prosthelytise the dream of space travel when all you have to offer them is a flying bus that occasionally explodes, and a space station that does, well, nothing really.

NASA have managed to make space travel less interesting than the Schumacher/Ferrari era of Formula One. I realise that they are bounded by funding, but the International Space Station is just the most boring and pointless object. We wanted a moonbase, we got an exercise in international diplomacy poorly disguised as a science and engineering project.

We're seven years past 2001, and Arthur C. Clarke's vision looks pitifully optimistic - an embarrassment, since predictions in almost all other technology areas have been so spectacularly exceeded.

I pray that Project Constellation pans out. I doubt that it will; certainly it will be delayed if Obama wins the presidency. (For the record: I want Obama to win; I just wish he'd get the money for his worthy programs from somewhere else. I'm not anti-McCain, but I am anti-Republican on their recent record.) I lack faith in the politicians to spend that much money something as intangible to voters as 'inspirational value'. 'Scientific benefit' has been oversold by NASA for decades and is even more laughably unlikely to win votes. People vote for money in their pockets, and anything above that requires Kennedy-like vision. An Obama victory would be a good thing, but JFK he ain't.

So bless you, Richard Branson. Make some money. Open people's eyes. I don't care if it's a tardy for-profit reenactment of Al Shepherd's spam-in-a-can ballistic flight on Mercury-Redstone 3 - Send 'em high, bring 'em back, make 'em beg for more. Anything, anything to reignite people's imagination.

I've been having a great time setting up my new Blackberry Curve 8310, and I'm so impressed with it. The push email is just fabulous, and now that I've moved my email stuff to Google Apps, delivery to the handheld typically occurs within five seconds of arrival at Google.

I use it for more than email, though. Google Calendar Sync works great most of the time, lots of other Google apps work really well (although not all of them work with Google Apps yet), and I even have an English-Italian dictionary on there.

Or at least I had.

I set a password, since we're going on holiday soon. I thought I was typing it in right, but I obviously wasn't. I got it wrong too many times and now the bloody thing is wiping itself. I have to start again.

Except I don't. I'm just going to restore from backup. Yay me! I only have to go back a few days, which isn't quite such a fucking disaster as it would have been to go from nothing again.

Moral: Make sure the password is right.

As good as the Movable Type rich text editor is, it's not good enough - it's intensely annoying to have to use the mouse to select italics and other basic effects.

It seems the de facto alternative text editor is FCKeditor, and that's what I've installed (via its plugin page) at my LivingDot-hosted site. It's lovely! I'd have it just for the ability to embolden, italicise etc. with keypresses, but it does a whole lot more than that.

After suffering months of hardware reliability problems with my server machine, I've finally decided that I care enough about my blog to host it off-site.

Based on a recommendation from the SixApart website I decided to go with blog specialist LivingDot. It's working out fine so far, I was annoyed to have to wait while stuff got set up but when it did it worked pretty well.

I had to mail support to get Movable Type added to my account, but the response was swift, again it works pretty well so far.

This is my first experiment with commercial hosting. I'm curious to see how it works out. I have my MoinMoin wiki as well, and it'd be cool to be able to host that here too.

In my previous post 'The slow, relentless crushing of the spirit', I mentioned that I'd worked at bad places before and that I recognised the signs. Another sign is flashing in front of me this evening.

It's Sunday evening and I'm pissed off. Downright cranky, in fact. Nothing else for it: I'm dreading work.

Now to a lot of people that's every Sunday. Not me - I like what I do, at least I like the core of it. I get to play with expensive toys and occasionally do stuff that's cool. I get to work with some smart people, which really does make up for working for so many dim people. I don't exactly jump up and down with joy at the end of the weekend, but normally it's not too bad.

I suspect, however, that my being filled with bile and loathing before the week has even started is a fairly good sign that things at the office are not all they should be.

God, I hope a holiday - soon now, very soon - is all that's required. This is a crappy time to be looking for a new job.

An article in the Times today (as linked by slashdot) describes how an aide to Our Beloved Leader appears to have had his Blackberry stolen in a Chinese honeytrap.

It pleases me that, in this age of high-tech espionage and counter-espionage, the most effective way to steal secrets is still the oldest profession.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7511671.stm

I don't think it's fair to single out giants this way.

Sometimes when you have a bad day at the office, you know it's just a bad day. Not the first, not the last, not the end of the world.

Other times, you know it's time to get your walking shoes cleaned up and ready for action.

I wrote an email to a colleague today, and I'll extract it here. The background is relatively simple: Last week I absolutely hit my marks, and did a whole load of great stuff so far beyond the call of duty that it was a bit silly. One of those great weeks when you just get it right.

My boss came back from a work trip and failed to notice. Well, to be precise he dismissed one of the changes as 'not ideal' and failed to comment on the other. Then, when we submitted the stuff to be deployed on customer-facing systems there was a tiny, tiny error. The operations guy mailed 21 people to say it was broken.

Here's what I wrote.

Why send this to everyone? Is it your intent to make us look bad?

I went to the wall for you guys last week. Without my efforts, [project A] would certainly have failed when we turned up [company B]. It still might; it's just less likely. I went to the trouble of checking everything with [expert at a technology vendor] (not really down to me, but I did it anyway); and when it didn't work, I patched [our server software] to make it work. In case it's not obvious, that is a non-trivial amount of work. Without it, we'd have all had a really shit day with [Company B].

How long do you reckon it would have taken [our vendors] to fix that problem? Weeks? Months? I did it in a morning, because it needed done.

Then, when you and [another operations guy] gave me access, I spent hours tracking down an elusive [software] bug. [It's] not my job, I just did it because no one else was doing it. I could have stalled, or passed the buck, or just not done it. Instead, I got my head down and sorted it out.

How long do you think it would have taken the [software product] team to figure something like that out, if they'd even accepted the challenge? Weeks? Months? Never?  I did it in an afternoon, because you asked me to and because it needed done.

How are my efforts repaid? Yesterday you caught the result of a very minor bug, and mailed a big red FAILURE to 21 people. The result was that [my colleague] and I look like idiots. Why would you do something like that?

Unlike others in the past, I'm not using my abilities as an excuse for being arrogant and condescending. I'm not keeping myself entertained with irrelevant side projects and taking months over simple changes. I'm trying to help, respecting operations' workload, and genuinely trying to make stuff better. We have worked together many times before, and got a lot done. What's changed?

This has completely ruined my day.

I've worked at spirit-crushingly bad places before, and I recognise the signs. You have three choices: Dumb down to their level; eat it up; or ship out. I think I'll ship out.

The abomination that is the 2008 Beijing Olympics has had one useful side effect: It shows that when money talks and cowards fear to speak the truth, there are still some musicians prepared to stand out. Better yet, when they do, the powerful still fear them.

After Björk's cry of 'Tibet, Tibet' at a concert there in March, the BBC report that China are cracking down on artists who 'threaten national sovereignty'. And Björk is such a tiny little thing. Maybe they're worried that she'll scream the wall down.

What a lovely thought.

I'm playing through Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Wikipedia link) on the PS3. Like everyone else, I was feeling that it's a little too cutscene-heavy. Nonetheless, I am finally getting the hang of the controls, and as a result the sneaking-around-rather-than-guns-blazing mechanic has grown on me. I've been playing for about a week, and I'm about half way through. I was enjoying it, but it wasn't a revelation.

And then it happened.

The cinematic at the end of Act III is the most amazing piece of drama I've seen in a game. Forget the ludicrous, complex, and overwrought storyline; forget the gratuitous T&A shots; forget the unconvincingly dumb end-of-act bosses. That twenty minutes of cinema was quite astonishing. It would have been excellent without the surrounding game. The fact that I'd spent days working towards it made it all the more compelling when I got there.

Suddenly I get it. Like it or loathe it, Kojima-san has a vision. Gotta respect a man with a vision.

It was one of those very rare gaming moments, when I was truly taken away by the scale and ambition of it. Even the villain standing on the deck of his boat, laughing like all villains laugh, wasn't out of place. It was great entertainment.

It now shows the time on the XMB. 21 months since launch, but finally, there's a clock.