SteveStreeting.com

I’m the kind of person who likes to keep busy; not in a ‘mad about DIY / the garden’ kind of way that tends to be the most socially acceptable form of being a ‘project oriented person’, but I always have a bunch of things on the go and never seem to have enough time to do them all. I’m always ‘working’ evenings & weekends, but a lot of the time I really don’t think of it as work, because a large portion of the time I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

If you’re anything like me you’ve had difficulty explaining to your wife / significant other that in our kind of world, there’s really no discrete black-and-white transition between ‘work’ and ‘not work’ that starts at 9am and ends at 5pm every day like clockwork. In fact there are a multitude of subtle levels ranging from ‘definitely work’ (e.g. something I don’t particularly want to do but someone has paid me to do it), to ‘not really work at all’ (e.g. having fun with technology that as a spin-off might help make a living now or later). Unfortunately these subtle graduations are invisible to the casual observer, often leading to discussions which begin with ‘You’re working again!’, ‘Not really…’, and from then on get complicated.

In the end, it’s probably not a solvable problem, but one thing that does help is taking the odd break, where you at least pretend not to think about what others would deem ‘work’ for a while. Holidays are obvious candidates, but also a good trigger for maybe taking a weekend off or something is recognising a milestone, or a cluster of milestones.

OgreSpeedTree and OgreSpeedGrass emerged from beta this morning, with official 1.0 versions being released. I’m pretty damn pleased with the result, and that’s a fairly unusual situation; I normally have a list of things as long as my arm that I consider ‘unfinished’, but in this case I’m very content with stamping a 1.0 badge on them. My attention can now switch to finalising Ogre 1.6, which is currently at the Release Candidate stage.

It’s also 2 years since I made the decision to give up having a regular day job and try my luck as a free agent / start-up. My initial measure of success was not to go broke (either personally or bankrupting the company) in the first 2 years, and I’m pleased to say that hasn’t happened. It’s certainly had ups and downs, and probably given my prior senior tech position I’ve undoubtedly earned less personally as a result, but the company has still grown, I’m still paying myself a wage that isn’t too insulting, and the benefits have easily compensated for that. Besides the flexibility and the satisfaction of knowing I’ve found and earned every penny I’ve made (which somehow makes the money feel more valuable than a guaranteed monthly paycheck), it’s been good for my personal development to mix it up a bit. And most importantly, I’m not bored

It’s also almost 8 years ago that I wrote this fateful message in my (very old, very manual) blog:

“18th October 2000: Exam done! Work on OGRE will restart soon. First, web site revamp to be done.”

Inauspicious, but that was the seed - the time when OGRE as we know it swung into full development and started this whole crazy sequence of events off; if I’d known the significance of it at the time, I wonder whether it would have affected how I did things?

Laozi was right when he said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”. Those words motivate me to this day - that no matter how big or challenging something looks, the most important thing is to start. My experience certainly tells me that genius and raw talent / ability is often not the most important factor when it comes to achieving things, it’s usually more about taking that first step, and having the tenacity or pure bloody-mindedness to keep going for as long as it takes. That’s particularly good for me since even if I might not be as smart as some, I’m probably more stubborn. And that in turn feeds back into what I was talking about at the start of this post.

But, stopping occasionally to admire the view is good too Maybe I’ll do that this weekend.

I’ve had a long-running back injury (a twisted vertebra in my lower back) which I’ve figured out how to manage through experience - a bit of stretching here, avoid certain types of activity etc. It’s a bit inconvenient but after a while you get used to living with it, and it’s not that painful most of the time provided I don’t go nuts.

However about 2 weeks ago, not long after getting back from LA, I was doing something quite simple (moving a coffee table back after a Rock Band session), when something in a completely different part of my back suddenly hurt really badly.  We had guests at the time, so I quickly took some painkillers and did a quick bit of my usual stretching upstairs, but that didn’t seem to work very well - I ended up just gritting my teeth most of the evening. While I don’t like the existing back injury I have, at least I ‘know it’ and how generally to cope with it, but this time it seemed different - like someone randomly knifing me in the middle of the back, just below the shoulder blades (et tu, Bruté?), rather than just by my right kidney like the old injury always was.

Stubborn git that I am, I gave it a couple of days of fairly frequent hot-poker agony before giving in and making an appointment to see the osteopath. I cancelled it once because it started feeling a lot better before the appointment came up, but then I wrenched it again while doing the grocery shopping of all things (damn you BOGOF offers, you basket-filling temptresses). Luckily I remained on my feet and avoided shouting the foullest obscenities in my repertoire at the top of my voice; no doubt the years of Brit cultural training to avoid making a scene at all costs - stiff upper lip and all that, what? - helped in that regard

Anyway, I finally made it to my second osteo appointment today, although again it had started to recover quite well so I felt a little bit stupid; “that used to hurt like hell” doesn’t have quite the same impact after all. Luckily as a professional he could still tell what I’d damaged even without me yelping, so next came the expected ‘manipulation’ - which basically means ‘beatboxing with your bones’. This time the targets of choice were the Thoracic vertebrae and the attached rib heads, and they can clearly make some quite interesting sounds when properly motivated.

I’ll be sore for a while but with a bunch of new stretching exercises it looks like this one probably won’t be a long-term issue. It’s likely to be linked to the number of hours I spent hunched like a troll in economy class in the last month so hopefully it’ll prove to be a one-off.

My wife mentioned to me a week or so ago that one of her work colleagues had recently had a hard drive crash on her laptop. Having replaced it, she wanted to try to get some of the data back from the disk, because she had a lot of family photos on there which were not backed up (I’m sure this experience has informed her future back-up plans).

However she had taken it to a local store, which I won’t name, who quoted her £600 to recover the photos. £600! They could be excused some element of estimate padding here, since you never know how long these things might take, but £600 really is taking the p*ss. Even if it took them a couple of days constantly sitting at the machine to recover the data, that would be an inflated rate for this kind of work. At the least they could have done a quick initial test and told her how difficult it was likely to be.

I was disgusted when I heard, so I volunteered to take a look at it. It took a while to process everything, but most of that was a machine chugging away in a corner without me having to do anything. I connected the drive up to a Linux machine, so I had the option of using free tools (like PhotoRec and ddrescue) to try to manually scan / repair the disk if it was too badly damaged, but it turned out that wasn’t necessary; even though some of the blocks were certainly damaged, most of the disk was in good enough condition to get the most important data back.

I felt embarrassed that someone in ‘my’ industry tried to take advantage like that, especially of an individual over their precious family photos. Quoting the price of a new laptop to recover some data? Maybe they just didn’t want to do it, so quoted a silly price to get rid of her. Maybe they were paranoid about getting bogged down in a messy data retrieval task, although that could have been mitigated with an hour of staff effort (and a few hours of unattended machine time), which they could have required as a minimum, and should have cost less than a tenth of that price. Or maybe they just didn’t know what they were doing. Worst case scenario would be if they deliberately quoted a stupidly inflated price because they knew the photos were irreplaceable and that she’d pay whatever they asked, but I’d prefer not to believe that.

Shameful, either way.

Bruce Byfield wrote an interesting article (discovered via Matt ‘Alfresco’ Asay’s blog, which should be required reading for anyone in this field) about the sometimes unsteady alliance between open source and business that, on the whole, I agreed with - within a given context. I do think, however, that his context was weighted towards the larger players in market that are fusing open source with business opportunities though, and wanted to share some of my experiences and conclusions from the perspective of a more individual player in the business.

Apologies for the length of this article, I had a lot to say

Read the rest of this entry »

Urghh.

I appear to have come down with a nasty cough / chest infection and I’m pretty sure I can blame it on sitting through 6 flights in 3 days. Planes these days are breeding grounds for illness, I remember hearing somewhere that flying is actually less healthy since they banned smoking on board, just because now they can get away with recycling the air lots more times and won’t spend money on decent air filters.

My wife almost made me to go to the doctor today about it, something I very rarely do since I generally figure they can’t do anything for viruses anyway so why waste both our times, although I must admit I was starting to consider it this time since secondary infection did seem likely. However, my fever seems to have broken and my lungs appear to have stopped being highly efficient fluid factories as of a few hours ago so I think I’m on the mend. I’m in no state to do anything today though, which sucks because I have a ton of things I should be doing.

Here’s hoping I can get well enough for the next flight I have to take on Saturday to LA, and not come down with some other strain after that.

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic for both myself and my wife, with weekends and evenings frequently acting as extensions to the regular working week as much as anything else, and as such the trip we’d booked to Paris a few months back kinda snuck up on us - pretty much before we knew it, we’re sat in a cafe blinking at the sun, frantically trying to excavate memories of school French lessons buried under 15 years of neglect.

Our ‘planning’ consisted of remembering to pack in time, and rushing about to buy a new camera the day before, since ours suddenly decided that it wanted to pursue a new career as simply a pint-sized viewer of existing photos, rather than actually detecting and recording anything new (translation - le CCD est mort). As such we mostly winged it, alternating between ‘doing’ the major sights and just wandering about aimlessly to see what we’d encounter. Luckily Paris is a perfect city for that, easily walkable with great public transport, the architecture and layout is interesting in itself, and the smaller streets are peppered with curios shops, art galleries and cafes that will sell you delicious coffee and heaven in a pastry casing every 20 feet. A perfect environment to point randomly in a direction and decide to see what’s over there.

It reminded me of Rome in that regard, with the exception that if you suddenly realise you’re an hour’s walk from the hotel with flagging feet, there’s always a Métro station nearby to come to your rescue. We’d been warned that the Métro could be confusing, but once we tried it we struggled to know what the fuss was about and used it all the time. Maybe it’s familiarity borne from my frequent use of the London Underground in years gone by, but it really couldn’t be simpler - even the busy hub stations were pretty easily navigable provided you kept your wits about you. All in all, hugely convenient and much less claustrophobic than the London equivalent, since the trains are larger and both directions typically run next to each other, rather than in separate tunnels like in London, which makes the stations roomier and less stuffy.

Culture abounded of course, we spent most of my birthday in the Louvre and still only covered about 2/3rds of it, and even then not in a level of detail that could be considered any more than ‘passing’. Expecting crowds, we headed to the ‘big hitters’ early to leave time for more leisurely exploration later, but it’s perhaps telling of my psyche that whilst gazing at one of the most celebrated paintings in the world I was easily distracted by how our new camera’s face recognition algorithms locked on to the Mona Lisa’s face from way across the room. Somehow exclaiming ‘cool!’ and tinkering with a new gadget in the presence of a 500 year old masterpiece seemed disrespectful, but I couldn’t help myself. So I’m a geek and a philistine.

The only issue we did have was that on our return flight from Charles de Galle didn’t go particularly smoothly - on arrival the airport didn’t seem to have any record of our return flight, and for a while the check-in staff were all Gallic shrugs and ‘come back in 15 minutes, maybe it will show up then’. Eventually they figured it out and it turned out the flight did exist despite never showing up on the departure boards, just as I was trying to phone the airline myself (this was a brand new route on a budget carrier, so it was feasible they’d reorganised it without telling us). After that we got to stand in a passport control line for 40 minutes, rather bizarrely since we were leaving rather than arriving, while 2 bored-looking officials flanked by huge lines of unoccupied booths (I assume everyone else was on lunch) processed the hundreds of people all gazing repeatedly at their watches wondering if they would make it to the gate on time. It certainly convinced me that if I was looking for an alternative international hub to go through for future trips, Charles de Galle would not be high on my list. Gatwick and Heathrow might be chaotic cattle markets, but at least they exude an air of efficiency most of the time, which was entirely absent here.

On the whole though, a great short break - just long enough to unwind a bit, but not too long as to let things pile up too much If you sent me an email or something in the last week, rest assured I’ll be catching up in the next few days.

I’ve been having a bit of a crappy week, with a particular project taking way longer than I had expected and causing me to explore the darkest crevices of my mind looking for new and creative ways to swear at it, with only mixed success. Cue long hours, too much coffee and Red Bull, and some seriously knotted shoulder muscles. That’s why it was an especially nice surprise this morning to find a box on my doorstep, containing an unexpected gift from a friend & long-time Ogre user in France (tuan kuranes) - a bottle of Champagne and also a bottle of a local speciality, Chartreuse.

I’m not much of a drinks expert, despite this not being the first time I’ve received locally-themed alcohol from people using / benefitting from Ogre, so I looked it up, and it has quite a history - originally developed (or learned / adapted from an earlier alchemical recipe, details are sketchy) in the early 17th century by Carthusian monks as an ‘elixir of long life’ and all-round healing potion.  Even though it’s produced on a larger scale now it’s ingredients are still only known by 2 monks at one time, allegedly. It’s also incredibly alcoholic, at 110 proof (55%) - guaranteed to put hairs on your chest. Or remove the hair from your entire body - it’s probably 50:50.

All in all, very interesting stuff. I immediately thought of Absinthe when I saw it, but it’s mostly the colour and strength that they have in common I think. I’ve tried a little already with some ice as advised, and its very, very unusual. The best way I can describe the taste is if you imagine grazing on the more herbal elements of your spice rack and then gargling with lit paraffin. I’m sure I can taste oregano and thyme in there, as well as the more obvious anise - but there are 130 plants in there somewhere according to the site. It certainly does taste medicinal! It’s a bit much for me undiluted, I’m going to experiment with mixing it later - orange juice and hot chocolate seem to be popular options. It’s apparently good to cook with too, in small doses.

In any case, it’s great to experience unusual local produce like this; I always like to try local food / drink when I’m away on holiday or business, and I’m grateful to Paul for sending a little bit of France my way, brightening my week, and generally spreading the Ogre love. Kudos for picking something as green as the big dude himself, too

Grr. I hate it when departing politicians, particularly unpopular ones, decide to do a ‘farewell tour’. They’re an unmitigated waste of time, resources and news coverage - Blair did it and I found it grossly distasteful then, and now it’s Bush’s turn. The very act of touring countries shaking hands, getting all chummy with the native leaders is so undignified - the personal relationships they’re seeking to form / rejuvenate serve nobody but the individuals themselves, since once the administration changes it’s a total reset. Thus, I see these tours as self-indulgent ego stroking - no change there then for Mr Bush. He’s doing his trademark brash smirk / swagger combination in Downing Street today, and no doubt getting on the tits of most British people he meets, even if the crushing weight of his ignorance won’t let him recognise it.

Bush is already a has-been, with his only remaining notable acts likely to be a few last-minute pardons or favours for his chums before his sweaty hands are prised from the tiller of the economic powerhouse of the world. He’s clearly thinking about his legacy - but having presided over arguably the darkest period in American politics since at least Nixon, and in all likelyhood surpassing even that, this man has absolutely nothing to be proud of, except perhaps spawning an unintentional bi-product - that he has hopefully reinvigorated the more intelligent citizens of the USA to get involved in politics again to try to make sure that an administration like this doesn’t get their hands on power next time.

So, sod off Bush, you swaggering, arrogant, bigoted, egotistical ignoramus. Please do let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, assuming you can figure out how to open it in the first place.

I’m not a heavy user of eBay, in fact until about a year or two ago I’d never used it. Unlike some people who routinely buy tons of DVDs & games etc that they want to offload later, I tend to mostly buy stuff that I want to keep, and anything that I finally want to get rid of after a few years, I give to a charity shop. I did however find it useful to sell off my laptop last year, and I’ve since used it to sell a couple of bits of PC hardware I didn’t need anymore - they weren’t the kind of thing a charity shop would really find a use for, I can’t imagine a Granny picking one up there and thinking ‘oh yeah, I could really use a Mini-ITX board to run that media server I fancied building’.

However, I’m now getting rid of all my PS2 hardware, since its remaining raison d’etre was Guitar Hero which has now been ruthlessly usurped by Rock Band. Since it’s all only a year old and I’d quite like to offset some of the significant financial outlay for Rock Band, I naturally turned to eBay.

I figured I’d put a Buy It Now option on the PS2 hardware itself, and was pleased when someone took it up. However, I was less pleased afterwards to receive a forged PayPal payment confirmation email, sporting a delivery address in Nigeria. The email was quite a good forgery, they got the layout spot-on and they tried to hide their forged links behind Javascript-laden images, but really the effort was wasted since there were a couple of fatal flaws that even a total moron should have spotted:

1. The address was in Nigeria. Internet scam capital of the world. Duh.
2. They had inexplicably decided to add £100 to the amount (supposedly) paid for no good reason. Clearly the idea was to get people so excited that they would ignore the other issues, but I’ve always been taught that if something looks too good to be true, it usually is
3. The excuse as to why this email was not backed up with eBay / PayPal transactions was frankly ludicrous: “the amount will not show up until you send us the shipping reference number”. Shyeah, right.

This was the first time this had happened to me, but even so I’m stunned that people are taken in by this sort of attempt. Obviously I cancelled the bid and re-listed, but from what I read, people really do fall for this kind of thing; high-end mobiles appear to be very popular in particular. How dumb do you have to be to mail a £300 phone to an address in Nigeria on the back of an email that says that the money will magically appear once the item is in the mail? Maybe greed turns off certain parts of some people’s brains - wave the prospect of way more money than the item is worth in front of someone and maybe they’ll put common sense on hold.

In the end it’s a minor annoyance this one time. I’m actually surprised I didn’t have the problem with my laptop, which was valued significantly higher than the PS2 - maybe it was the Buy It Now option that was the honeypot. At least feel included in the whole Nigerian scam Internet phenomenon now - sure I’ve had the 419 emails for years but those are so impersonal

I feel like I’m becoming something of an advocate for Apple machines these days, which is not something I ever saw coming. I hadn’t even used one until almost 12 months ago, and like many long-time PC users am guilty of having poked fun at them in the past (hur hur, one mouse button, hur hur, poor game support) but now that I’ve had one for a while, I’ve changed my tune. I’m finding that I can heartily recommend them for quite a wide cross-section of users, particularly when it comes to a portable machine.

My parent’s XP-based Dell laptop keeled over and died recently and while they’ve managed without a PC for a little while (!), they’re missing it. They’re faced with being forced (in practice) to switch to Vista if they buy a new Windows laptop, and they’d heard bad things about it (and not just from me I might add, their friends bought a Vista machine recently and have complained to them a lot about it) so were wondering what to do. My parents aren’t particularly technical but know their way around a computer, so long as nothing goes wrong, and aren’t looking for a gaming or power machine, just something that does email & internet, office tasks etc. Someone else in the family ‘knows someone at Microsoft’ (join the club ;)) and suggested to them that if they were reticent about Vista, the sequel would be out next year so they could always look forward to that, but of course that got me chuckling. I explained that not only was Vista several years late, so predictions about the release of a sequel are somewhat premature, at this point we have no idea of what it will be like.

They even asked me what I thought about desktop Linux, since they’d seen it as an option in one or other shop they went into - something that surprised me actually. However with no on-site support from me (since they’re now 3+ hours flight & train time away) I considered that to be a recipe for disaster, given my experiences even with the latest Ubuntu. Great if you’ve got a tech you can call when things go wrong, not so good otherwise, so I ruled that out.

So, my advice? Although they’d probably be ok with Vista, particularly since SP1, given they would have to re-adjust to Vista’s changes anyway, and given the kinds of things they want to do with it, I really think a MacBook would be a better fit for them as very casual, relatively non-technical people. I didn’t recommend this lightly, because they’re not made of money (being retired) and they will have to save up a little more than they would have to buy a budget Vista laptop, but I honestly think it will be better in the long run for them. There are no drivers to worry about, OS X is definitely easier for regular people to use even counting the adjustment from Windows, and in general everything usually just works with considerably less faffing about. The software to do most of what they want is already there as standard, and works in a consistent fashion. I also think face-to-face support is more readily available if they can find a Premium Apple Reseller; they had been shocked at the outrageous prices they were quoted just to *look* at their slowly dying Dell to see if it was economically fixable. Small Apple specialists seem to be better at providing that kind of more personal service if our local premium reseller is anything to go by, certainly more so than unit-shovellers like PC World / Currys.

Simply put, I honestly think people like my parents will have a better experience with a Mac longer term. I’ve advised them to find a decent reseller first and play with one to make sure they’re happy with the idea of making the transition, and that they’ll have some local hardware support to make them feel comfortable given I can’t be there to organise it, but I think if they get over that bump it’ll be plainer sailing for them.