SteveStreeting.com

The Guernsey Festival of Comedy was great last year, and so we snapped up tickets to this year’s local stand-up event, since the only other way we’d get to see acts like this is to travel to a major city. Paul Tonkinson was headlining this year which made it a no-brainer, we’ve seen him on the Comedy Store before and he’s always excellent.

As expected it was a great night, Paul didn’t disappoint in the slightest and thus crowned the evening off perfectly, but the other acts were really good too. In particular Janice Phayre, whom we hadn’t seen before, but who I can best describe as a hyperactive ball of slightly filthy Irish comedy energy. Great stuff.

There were actually some empty seats this time around which was surprising, and I hear that they still have some spare tickets for one or other of Saturday’s performances (Friday is sold out), so if you’re local and you haven’t been yet, I highly recommend it.

And just on a weird tangent, while searching for an image for this post I randomly came across The Bezathon. Awesome

I’ve often bitched about my connection to the intertubes being pretty slow compared to what is generally expected in the current times. As average download speeds have increased, I’ve found myself going to sites that assume faster download speeds than I have, and thus having to pause & come back to videos when they’ve buffered more to avoid an irritating stop-start experience (note to flash players that only allow buffering of a little bit of a video - shame on you). I jumped on the broadband wagon in 2001 at a downstream speed of 512k/s, and until now, in the intervening 6 and a bit years, the speed has only increased once to 1M/s. That’s pretty piss-poor, but the reality is that we’re an island, and even though we’ve been getting increased capacity via fibre-optic cable links to Europe, our shores are clogged with offshore finance businesses and gambling websites from other juristictions (hosted here for regulatory reasons) who are quite willing to soak up all this extra bandwidth through dedicated circuits at incredibly inflated prices, so the average consumer has been mostly forgotten.

Well, we’ve been tossed a bone finally and my downstream speed has now increased to 2M/s (unlimited), which is certainly welcome, but incredibly late and still below par considering I pay £22 per month for it - in comparison in the UK O2 will do 16M/s (unlimited) for £15pm. A quick test at SpeedTest.net (off-peak) indeed reported a decent performance, slightly off the max reported by my router:

I’m not sure why it thinks my ISP is in Slough, but there you go. The important fact, something I’ve banged on about for some time to our intransigent infrastructure supplier (Cable & Wireless, now rebranded as ‘Sure’ locally, which ironically is my exact response whenever their PR dept claims they’re building a ‘world class telecoms system’), is that we’re still running at about half the average speed of the UK and Europe, which is still pitiful. Yeah, I know there’s the island aspect, but that cuts both ways - the cables never have far to go here, certainly compared to the UK/Europe averages which include distant rural areas - even my parents can get up to 6.5M/s where they live, and they’re in a tiny village in rural Cornwall.  Plus, there’s also a captive market locally sloshing with shedloads of money from rich finance houses and related high-value services, which can easily fund investment - if there’s one place you could build a modern telecommunications infrastructure, it’s somewhere like this. But, they either can’t, or they’re not interested in doing so (for consumers), given that they can make their sackfuls of money from business links, and consumer services are small beer. That’s also why it’s almost impossible to rent a server cost-effectively over here, they’re only interested in (gambling) companies that will rent several racks at a time, small customers are irrelevant to them. Luckily that market is global - I can host pretty much anywhere and get a deal 10x better than I can locally - but when it comes to my local internet connection, I’m stuck with what we have.

I’m holding out for one of the competitors to put up a few high-speed wireless transmitters covering the whole island (not that difficult), using the bandwidth from the extra optical cable they’ve brought ashore in recent weeks, and completely bypass the physical cabling system that ‘Sure’ controls - maybe that will finally shake them out of their torpor and make them appreciate the consumer market again. But, my cynical mind thinks it’s more likely they’ll also chase the business customers first anyway since it has a greater return. Hmm.

I reprised my former role as ‘wizened business software guru’ last night by giving a presentation to my local developer community on Hibernate, the Java-based object-relational mapping system (ORM). I really like Hibernate; not only has it got an enormous amount of features, and performs really well, but it’s also built on very sound design principles. As someone who has used several ORMs in the past, and written a couple of my own going back a decade or so, I can appreciate the thought that has gone into it.

I think it went down pretty well - I discovered I had a bit too much to cover when I did a timing dry-run so had cut a few things out at the last minute, but I still had to get my skates on to keep it at around an hour - I hope people didn’t feel too bombarded. I really just wanted to get across just how mature frameworks like Hibernate are; most of the local developers are .Net-oriented and thus being a fan of Java for business software I sometimes feel I have to defend it, now that it’s no longer ‘trendy’ - it may not have all the latest language-level gimmicks, but in terms of robust, tested and feature-laden frameworks it still leads the pack - if you’re building something non-trivial I don’t think there’s a better place to do it. I think it’s easy to concentrate too much on low-level language issues (which .Net scores very highly on indeed), and not enough on the wider supporting ecosystem - language tricks and tool integration make a development environment feel more productive, but there’s simply nothing more productive than not having to write the code in the first place! Java still gives me the most confidence that I can just use plenty of existing standards and frameworks and assemble a decent sized application without hitting things that aren’t finished yet. Plus, I like that it’s fully cross-platform with a huge amount of open source support of course. I briefly covered NHibernate (.Net port of Hibernate) at the end of the talk, which like most .Net ports of Java software lags behind the original and misses a few features, but is still probably one of the best ORMs you can get in that environment at the moment. LINQ to Entities may eventually squash it of course, once it matures enough - again I have to shake my head at Microsoft’s ‘Not Invented Here’ attitude that will cause them to have to recreate all of NHibernate’s features, and thus put their users through a year or more of shaky maturation, compared to if they just adopted, wrapped, enhanced, or provided support for NHibernate. But we know they don’t play well with others

I was pleased to see a couple of people from our local Mac store came along too, who had apparently done some Java coding before. I actually did the entire presentation (including demo) on my MacBook Pro using Open Office and Eclipse - gotta love cross-platform, open-source software. I developed both the code and presentation hopping back and forth between Windows and OS X, depending where I happened to be on any given day - I love that I can do that seamlessly with these tools. And of course Eclipse is a delight to use, one of the few tools around that can beat the living daylights out of Visual Studio.

I managed to squeeze in a few bits of from-the-trenches design advice along the way to explain why I’d advise doing things certain ways - and I was quite surprised at the number of blank faces when I brought up things like the Law of Demeter and the n+1 selects antipattern. I guess I’m a bit of a design geek anyway, but this is the sort of stuff that really does affect software quality and performance in decent sized application, so I hope the nuggets were useful to someone.

Anyone who wants to look at the slides can do so here. To recreate the entire experience, just imagine a short bearded guy talking way too fast and waving his arms about.

Well, yesterday was an absolutely glorious day here in Guernsey, I don’t think we saw a cloud all day and there was just the lightest of sea breezes. We’d already booked to watch some outdoor theatre up at the castle so we made a day of it, echewing the car and taking a stroll down to our picturesque seafront town, grabbing a spot of lunch at a terrace restaurant and generally kicking back.

The theatre in question was Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, which I’d never seen performed before but is believed to be one of his first. It was pretty good - the players in question were the irreverent Oddsocks who never take it particularly seriously so it’s always good for a laugh. My personal favourites to see are still Much Ado About Nothing (simply because of the inspired banter between Benedick and Beatrice, which has to include some of the most finely crafted insults ever written - and Kenneth Branagh / Emma Thomson’s version is superb), and The Merchant of Venice, but it’s all good. I used to hate Shakespeare when we were forced to read it at school, but I found it absolutely transformed when performed well - which is after all how it was supposed to be experienced anyway, not studied in stuffy school rooms.

The only downside was that the play was performed in a sun-trap of a section of the castle, where none of the sea breezes reached and away from the shade so we were basically grilled for the two and an half hours (not counting intermission). I now have the typical shorts-and-T-shirt-masked tan just from that. My wife can never believe how fast I tan, she’s expecting me to change nationality by the time we come back from Thailand later in the year.

So, a good day anyway. I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on today and if I’m lucky might have some time to continue to experiment with scripting the build of an OSX SDK, since once I’ve done that I want to get OGRE 1.4.4 out the door.

We had a very good night out last night - this week has been the very first Guernsey Festival of Comedy, and being regular watchers of shows like the Comedy Store and Live at Jongleurs we snapped up the opportunity to see a number of live acts locally for a change.

As expected, given the talent on show, it was a superb evening. The major headliner for us was Mitch Benn, who is consistently hilarious with his blend of musical comedy and fast-paced, often ranting satire, and he didn’t disappoint. Ronnie Edwards we’d also seen before and was very good, but in many ways it was the middle act, Lloyd Langford, who stole the show. We’d never seen (or heard of) him before but his set was really, really good - kind of laid back (difficult to be anything else with a Welsh accent I suppose) and disarming but with a really sharp wit and sense of timing underneath it. Great stuff.

The festival seems to have been well supported, with tickets quite hard to come by (hence why we went on a Thursday and not Friday or Saturday night, which sold out first), and has brought some great acts over - we missed Rob Deering at the Dog House earlier in the week due to other plans, which is a shame because he’s good too - so here’s hoping it comes back next year. It’s not quite the Edinburgh Fringe, but still great entertainment nonetheless, and it beats having to travel to London or Manchester to see great live comedy.

As you probably already know, I live on a tiny island just off the French coast. Many of you might not realise just how small it is - about 78 square kilometers in total and about 62,000 people. The upside is the quality of life is a lot better than many places, one of the downsides is that a small population and a significant economic skew towards financial services means there aren’t that many software development people about. I know that I’ve often felt rather isolated and wondered how many other people worked in this field locally - I knew a few, and I luckily got to work on larger teams in the UK mainland fairly regularly in my previous job, but overall the perception was that our profession was quite marginalised, with most IT demand being for network / server administrators, desktop support and managers. Certainly when attending local BCS meetings the subject matter was mostly oriented to that. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate the Internet so much, since there I can be a active member of a huge community.

Last night however I attended a meeting of the Guernsey Developers User Group, which was actually quite well attended. I knew a few people there already but there were quite a few people I didn’t know, and a larger group than I expected, so that’s a good sign. And best of all, the presentation subject matter has a good chance of actually being relevant to our developer existences I’ve volunteered to get involved to help it keep going, and started posting things on their site, as has Damien, and hopefully it will continue.

Due to the local emphasis on financial services I get the impression the vast majority of attendees are using .Net/SQL Server on various business projects, and as such what I do is likely to come across as a bit, um, weird (unless they’re busy making “3D Investment Growth Planning Warrior” and I’m just not aware of it - it could happen). But all the core skills are the same, as I’ve learned transferring my skills from business development, so I expect it will be a useful forum.