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.

Thanks John for the reminder to investigate S3 as a business media hosting service, it works like a charm!

Now that I have far fewer bandwidth worries (max $0.17 per GB), the Torus Knot site includes a nifty dynamic selector so you can pick low, medium or high quality - the latter is at a higher resolution too, clocking in at about 100Mb. I may well use S3 for future public commercial downloads in the future too. It’s altogether more convenient than the block bandwidth allocations you get with regular hosting packages, since it scales dynamically at a very fine level of detail depending on demand. And don’t be fooled by ‘unlimited’ bandwidth offers, all hosting companies have to pay for bandwidth and there’s no such thing as ‘unlimited’ resources; you’ll actually find your bandwidth being throttled or cut off via a ‘reasonable use’ clause in the small-print; ‘unlimited’ is simply a marketing lure. If you want truly scalable guaranteed bandwidth, you have to pay for it.

Getting S3 media hosting working wasn’t that hard, but did require a few discrete steps. Firstly, you need to create a bucket in your S3 account which is all in lower case, is globally unique and is DNS-compatible; so for example I created a bucket called ‘media.torusknot.com’.

Then to make it all look nice you need to create a DNS CNAME entry to map a sub-domain of your site to that S3 bucket; in my case I mapped ‘media.torusknot.com’ to ‘media.torusknot.com.s3.amazonaws.com’. That allows me to access any files I upload to that S3 bucket via ‘http://media.torusknot.com/somefile.jpg’. You do just need to set the ACLs on the files & the bucket to make sure public access is allowed.

Finally, if you want to stream video files via a Flash player from S3 to another domain, you also have to tell Flash that it’s ok for the content to be pulled in from a different domain. Create a file called ‘crossdomain.xml’ in the bucket, with these contents:

<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="all"/>
</cross>

That allows the media to be accessed from anywhere - you can be more specific if you want but this is the simplest approach.

Once again I’m using the excellent FlowPlayer; my only issue with it is that the ‘buffering’ animation seems to not work all the time (so be patient if you’re viewing the high quality version).

Gotta love this cloud computing business

One of the problems with doing most of your business internationally is that you’re at the mercy of currency exchange rates, with the ever-present possibility of losing money just because the market changed. In the last couple of years the Pound has steadily got stronger against the Dollar, meaning it’s not a case of whether I lose, but rather how much. It has also meant that for new work I either have to stick to my Pound rates and risk being less competitive, or just accept a lower & ever-depreciating Dollar rate in order to secure the work.

Over the last month though, things have suddenly changed. The UK housing market is in free-fall, and most recently the Chancellor gave a rather unexpectedly candid interview in which he basically admitted that the UK economy is up a certain creek without a certain paddling device. Nice of him to be honest about it, but the markets aren’t used to such lack of spin and reacted quite badly (being as they are twitchy, caffeine-overdosed sheep suffering from chronic panic attacks) - and promptly leaped off a metaphorical cliff, as did the exchange rate. Perhaps the Chancellor’s honesty is attributable to those eyebrows - I’m guessing they make bluffing considerably more difficult

Lots of people are now lamenting on the news & talk panels about how this will affect the price of imports, but there’s never a shortage of people to go on these programs declaring that we’re all doomed and we might as well throw ourselves under the next passing bus. Personally I find it rather ridiculous because these are the same people that were lamenting when the rate went up in the first place, because it would cripple all the exporters in Britain (and we might as well throw ourselv….you get the idea).

Personally, I’m glad - the Pound/Dollar rate has finally returned to about what it was when I went into full-time business in 2006 ($1.77 ish), having dropped over 10% in a month. I wouldn’t mind if it dropped a bit lower - I was quite happy when it was about 1.6 personally. Sure I’ll pay more if I buy something from the States, but far more money comes in my direction from there than the other way around.

So, to the Chancellor: thank you, Darling!

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.

I’m finally back at home and beginning to return to normal, trying to iron out the wrinkles in my sleep cycles. I’ve done 12 flights in the last month (I’m trying not to think of my carbon footprint, although at least I rarely drive back home) with a time zone range of 10 hours and I’m certainly feeling it - I’ll be happy to be settled in one place again for a while!

Siggraph was fine, very hectic with some long hours on the booth and some very late evenings at the office - as such I was lucky if I got to check my email for 10 minutes in the day, never mind trying to cope with the OGRE forum. I managed to meet up with a number of people from various companies in between working for my client which was great (such as AMD, NVIDIA, IDV, FMX), and even got recognised a couple of times by people I didn’t know which was kinda cool. On a personal level it was also great to finally meet Andres Carrera, aka Lioric, oFusion creator and long-time OGRE community member & GSoC mentor, who turned out to be a really nice bloke who was a lot of fun to be around. He doesn’t like to travel much and getting a US Visa from his home in Argentina is stupidly difficult so I was really happy to get the rare opportunity to meet him. I was also very happy to run into Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD and BZFlag again, which I always seem to do whenever I’m in the US!

It might have been nice to have some leisure time in LA, but there really wasn’t any time prior to or during the show, and I literally went straight from the closing of the show in the afternoon to the airport for my overnight flight, because I needed to get back in time for my cousin’s wedding yesterday. Luckily I made it, although a combination of sleep deprivation and jet lag meant I needed precision doses of coffee and Red Bull throughout the day

So, I plan to catch up with my email today and perhaps brave the Ogre forums tomorrow, although ‘catching up’ with those is probably impossible - I’ll skim and try to pick out anything important. My focus for the coming week will mostly be OgreSpeedTree and getting Ogre 1.6 even closer to RC status. The Google Summer of Code also finishes this week so I’ll be on hand for that if any organisation assistance is needed.

I arrived in LA either Saturday night or Sunday morning depending on whose watch you believe, and am coping with the inevitable jet lag. Working helps to some degree, since it keeps you active, until you hit that ‘wall’ where suddenly your brain holds up it’s hands and says “I don’t care what the clock says, it’s 3am”, before grabbing its hat and coat and sodding off, leaving you a hollow shell looking at a screen full of C++ going ‘buh?’.

I’m staying in Torrance since that’s close to my client’s offices, but we’ll be heading downtown to get registered for Siggraph today I’m sure. I have a fair few things in my diary for the next few days so hopefully I’ll be lucid enough.

If you’re at Siggraph too and want to say hi, drop me an email (sinbad at ogre3d dot org or steve at torusknot dot com), I’ll check my email as often as I can. Alternatively you may find me on the ‘Works Zebra’ stand on the AMD booth (#323) where I’ll probably be from 3:30pm Tuesday, 12:30pm Wednesday and 1pm Thursday. The company will also have a presence on the Vicon booth (#1101) at times although I don’t think I’ll be needed for that. Bear in mind I’m there for my clients while on booth duty though, so if you want to yak about Ogre & unrelated TorusKnot stuff we’ll have to arrange to meet again later on.

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.

I just got back from my trip to Gotland, I almost didn’t make it back due to delays on the M25 (surprise surprise) making my transfer from Heathrow back to Gatwick rather late, when I didn’t have that much time to spare. I just about made it by sprinting all the way through Gatwick, getting to the gate just as they were about to leave.

It was a good trip despite the travel overhead, I think there’s a good chance we can build an ongoing working relationship and I’ll end up going back again sometime. If all goes well I’ll talk more about it in future posts.

It struck me how much Gotland and Guernsey have in common - we both have about the same populations (despite Gotland being much bigger), and the main town of Visby is about the same size & population as our St Peter Port, although if anything it’s quieter, maybe because there are less cars. We share the same frustrations at having to shuttle through onshore international hubs, and that we one we can get to isn’t necessarily the best one for international connections (London Gatwick for us, Stockholm Arlanda for them), and a culture which is a little different from the ‘mainland’ we have the most direct connection with. Gotland relies most on tourism, and although Guernsey tends to worship the finance sector these days tourism is still very important, so we share experiences such as ‘cruise ship days’, and their harbour is dominated by a marina awash with expensive yachts too. Both our towns are full of history, theirs very medieval, ours more of a mixture from medieval (e.g. our castle), via Victorian and up to the WWII occupation. I was surprised to discover they don’t have an active fishing industry though - I generally assumed fresh local seafood would be a staple in any island community like it is at home. Anyhow, even though the culture & language are very different, there was an odd sense of familiarity about the place…

The hotel I was staying at had no Internet access so I have a bunch of catching up to do again. I’m back for this week, then I’m off again to Siggraph so apologies if I’m rather brief / flighty with my communications. After Siggraph is over I should finally get to settle down for a while again!

Feel free to whistle the very appropriate but highly copyrighted tune that you’re no doubt already thinking of

I’ve wedged another business trip rather hurriedly into my schedule, sandwiched betwixt (oh, you gotta love that word) our recent holiday and my impending departure for Siggraph in about 10 days. It came up at really short notice and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to fit it around my existing commitments, but luckily I was able to organise it to happen over this weekend, which just about worked (although I still have to leave early Friday). This will be my first trip to Sweden, specifically Gotland, so I’m looking forward to it, although my time there will be short and I’ll spend an enormous amount of time in transit. It’s a bit of a tortuous route, requiring 3 flights and a coach in each direction (Guernsey-Gatwick-Heathrow-Stockholm-Gotland), plus a short transfer to Heathrow Terminal 5 on the way out (uh-oh). I can’t really complain though, living on an island myself I know all about having to shuttle through onshore international hubs, you just learn to live with it - but I have it at both ends this time!

Should be good anyway - with luck some business and/or future partnerships will come out of it, but at the very least it should be an interesting trip.

I’ve only been to Siggraph once before, in 2006 when it was held in Boston. It happened to coincide with a trip I wanted to make to see some friends / clients of mine anyway so it dovetailed in quite well - I also held a Birds of a Feather (BOF) meet-up for the OGRE community while I was there, and it was good to meet a few of our users.

I enjoyed the experience but given my small / micro business status it’s hard to justify the expense to get out there, especially with airline prices seemingly increasing by the second. It’s generally just more cost- and time-effecient to cherry-pick the papers I’m interested in afterwards, unless I have a specific business case to be there in person.

Nevertheless the thing I enjoyed most about it last time was meeting people, so I’m glad to say I’m going again this year, as part of the entourage for a company whose project I’ve been working on quite a lot over the past 6 months. As such I’ll be spending a fair amount of time manning a booth, but there should still be sufficient time to enjoy the event and meet up with people. I haven’t decided whether I want to run an official OGRE BOF this time around, or even if I’ll have time for it - I’m actually thinking an informal meet-up at a bar nearby or something instead might be better. If you’re going too and you have any ideas or suggestions, let me know! This will be my first trip to LA but I’m expecting to have some reliable guides