graham.reeds/

Time gentlemen please?!

Time. Our lives run by it and we can’t get away from it. We have chopped time up and named the slices from a billionth of a second to pauses that last billions of years. We can accurately measure one rotation of the earth, and the journey of the earth around the sun to a millionth.

So why is it, that in this interconnected world, run by clocks that are accurate enough to measure the distance light can travel over 1 metre that we can’t synchronise all the clocks in the world?

I understand that time-zones bend around national borders and not all countries run to the gregorian calendar but with blue-tooth and Wi-fi becoming commonplace why isn’t there more devices that automatically correct their time? My PC does it (but only because I wrote a script to force it to do so), but I have to set my watch to roughly the same time on the screen. My horrible LG U8380 has an option to automatically set the time and daylight saving hours but doesn’t work.

You visit the bus station and their clock is different to yours. Go from there to the train station (two places that rely on time to run services) and the time is different again. I would imagine if you went to an airport they too would have their clocks set to a different time also.

As far as I can see, and this is only back of an envelope musings, there needs to be standard (maybe as an extension to an existing one), that allows anonymous connections for purpose of retrieval of time. Maybe there is one, a quick google didn’t reveal much. Also there would need to be a push version that would allow the international jetsetting playboy to step off the plane and have his watch/phone automatically updated to the local time. GPS is a possibility as that already gives you the current time in UTC, but energy concerns (and space that an additional receiver would add) manufacturers would probably go with Bluetooth/Wi-Fi.

Until then I will have to perform amazing feats of mental arithmetic and manually update all my electronic devices.

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More meat for the meat eaters?

Being our anniversary I decided to take my fiance to the local vegetarian restaurant which, unfortunately, started out as complete shambles.

Having booked the table previously – and only just being able to book it – I expected to be seated in a crowded restaurant. I didn’t expect to be seated at a back of a very small gig. I was a bit disappointed at the seating arrangement – it was our anniversary and I didn’t particularly want to share it with 20 other people plus band – but was content to put up and be quiet: Anything for an easy life.

Not my Lou. She marched up to the guy who showed us to our table and basically told him that if we weren’t reseated then we would have to pass for another time. Fortunately for us (and them) someone had just finished their meal and vacated their table. Huzzah – our night was saved.

Having been seated and picked our meals, we were promptly served our drinks. The starters followed fairly swiftly and was very nice. However there was a rather long gap to our main course. Also they tried to pipe the country and western gig through to the main serving area which overloaded the speakers, making pleasurable chat next to impossible. Fortunately for us (and the speakers) they turned the gig off in our area leaving me to gaze longingly at my fiance in relative silence.

The main course was finally bought to us but who I presume was the cook, the interval drinks was bought to us by what appeared to be a cooks hand. This again was very nice.

So what did we eat? Glad you ask.

I had

• Baked Mushroom and Honey Roast Shallot Pate followed by
• 3 Cheese, Spinach and Petit Pois Pancakes with
• Fentimans Lemonade.

While Lou had

• Hummus and Hot Bread with
• Wild Mushroom and Goat’s Cheese Roulade washed down with
• Peppermint tea and an Elderflower spritzer.

Was it nice? I found mine to be very nice, but Lou is a fussy eater and found the Wild Mushroom to be overpowering. Having tried her’s I have to say that the hummus was quite bland compared to my starters and the wild mushroom was at odds with the Roulade. Seems like I had the better meal out of the two.

So the final rating? Well I would eat there again. The service was abysmal, but you could blame most of that on the band, so I will recommend avoiding Sunday evenings if at all possible. Lou wasn’t particularly pleased with her meal but she is quite a fussy eater.

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Anniversary

I’ve been dating Ms Louise Bain now for 1 whole year!!

Congrats to us!

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Abysmal Software

I write this at work, while I am supposed to be working. However I can’t because the server that houses SourceSafe has crashed (again).

I’m always amazed that the software that we earn our lively hoods on is so bad and that we put up with it.

I used to work at a company that used Borland Builder 5. There was a limit that when you went passed 137 files in a project you’d get strange errors creeping in due to a linker error. We upgraded to BB6 and that retained the bug and introduced several more – the main being that opening BB5 projects in BB6 would cause BB6 to convert the files so that they were unreadable by BB5 but also would fail to compile in BB6. You had to recreate the project from scratch, but the documentation failed to mention it, but it turned out to be common knowledge on the Borland newsgroups.

I now work at a software house that uses Visual Studio 6 and will do for the forseeable future. Large projects crash at random when compiling – no error message, VS just disappears. STL is unusable and that is after 5 service packs.

We also used SourceSafe at both companies. Another bug-ridden disaster that barely got updated (4 times) in 6+ years. Deleting a file in your project doesn’t remove it on the server (fixed in VSS2005). Heaven help you if your source safe database corrupts – the tool provided by MS to fix it doesn’t work and breaks the DB even further. Sharing files between projects barely works – no detecting when files get updated.

I propose that the only reason that it did get an update is because integration of open source efforts like AnkhSVN were at a point where they are actually as good as MS inhouse efforts and were causing the Redmond gorilla to lose market share.

IE6 is a bug ridden 5 year old beast – but the entire world used it until Firefox started eroding it’s userbase. Now it is getting upgraded, but this is again due to opensource being better and highlighting its flaws.

Bugs that are part of the software should be fixed in that version – not left until the next major release.

The server’s back online, so I should get back too.

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My love affair is over…

My romantic bliss with Java is just about over – at least for the web.

I wanted to make a web-based game that ran in the browser. I had several ideas about the game and about the site itself, based on my experience with similar ideas and seeing where they went wrong. As a Java aficionado I wanted a java based blogging system, a java-based forum and the game itself to written in Java.

My first great shock was finding out how little blogging software there is written in Java. You basically have a choice between 3: Roller, Blojsom and Pebble.

• Roller requires an approximate 30mb download after all the pre-requisites are added in.
• Pebble uses XML for post storage, a small user base for fixing problems, and incomplete documentation.
• Blojsom seems to be the best of bunch: Small, lightweight and supports multiple users with an active mailing list.

So I went with Blojsom for it size, active mailing list and version 3 was being actively worked on (M2 had been just been released).

As per usual I installed it to localhost so I could iron out problems first, following the instructions. I made the necessary modifications to get it to work with MySQL4.1 (Blojsom is written for MySQL5+) and then set about changing the config to work with how I wanted my site to be laid out.

My site layout, in my opinion, is pretty standard. I want a folder for my blog(s), forums, user-accounts and the games themselves. Not difficult and certainly not uncommon.

While waiting for Blojsom to come out of beta, I found that to get my desired layout format of //site/forums I would need to install blojsom to root. Not good – I could forsee this as being a big problem down the road.
So I checked out java based forums. The big daddy in this arena is JForum. Installation was a snap – just needed my host to register the .page extensions to be handled by Tomcat and I was away. Again I installed to what I thought would be the ideal location – /forums and again I was frustrated by the general message from the development community that I need to install to root to have access to forums.

Now I think I could patch/configure it so it will work, but I want solutions that work out the box: Patching/manual configuring makes upgrading difficult (which is necessary in this day and age of security scares).

So I looked at WordPress and phpBB. WordPress was a breeze – a bit of configuration later and you are now reading the result. Likewise for phpBB.

So I am now in the process of learning PHP and will start converting my small collection of Java classes over to it.

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I’ve passed…in theory

I passed my driving theory and hazard perception earlier this morning despite today being Friday 13th and I used computer number 13 for my test.

For the multiple choice section I got 33/35 (30 needed to pass) and for the Hazard Perception I managed to get 50/75 (44 needed to pass).

Ironically this is the first time I have passed the theory and hazard perception: When I have practised on the home CD version I have passed the hazard perception and failed the multiple choice, and only tried the hazard perception twice.

Also interesting to note is the fact that I passed the multiple choice with a higher score than any of my practise runs and my hazard perception was the lowest I’ve had – previous practise runs were 60 and 63!

Now to get some practise in a real car and pass my actual practical test…

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Test

Hello

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