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August 29th, 2009
05:47 am - Limbo ...
Thursday night I got taken out for a proper meal by the managers of the team I was visiting. I may get around to writing it up, for reference sake if nothing else, but yes, I did eat mollejas along with many other pieces of meat, including beef tripe, which was nicer than sheep's tripe (to be fair, I've only had andoulette des Trois before, so it could be that it was that particular dish I didn't much care for, rather than the fact it was tripe).
Currently, I'm in the bowels of Madrid airport getting bored. It turns out that they don't open security for transfer passengers until 7.00. My flight got in a 6.00. I'm supposed to be at my gate for 7.15, but I'm sweltering and desperately thirsty, so that ain't gonna happen.
Edit to add: Hah, the cock suckers thought they had me beaten. All the shops were close, and none of the vending machines take notes, but I beat them. I persuaded the nice lady at the Buereau de Change to break a note for me, and now Fanta Limon, you are mine!!!
(I didn't get much sleep on the first plane, in case you can't tell.)
Current Location: The transfer passage, Madrid Airport (Barajas)
Current Mood: irked
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August 26th, 2009
03:03 pm - Eating out in Buenos Aires
Take two: LiveJournal also likes to eat. In this particular case, it ate about 20 minutes of writing. It was much wittier than this version, obviously ...
So most of you are probably oblivious to the fact I'm in Buenos Aires at the moment (he says pretending people still read this). It's a business trip, and my first time in South America, so I felt the urge to put something down about it.
Now the Argentinians, you will be told, like meat. A lot of meat. You will read that, nod to yourself and think you know what that means. Possibly you will consider yourself to be a lover of meat, and think you eat a lot. I'm sorry, but unless you've been here, you just don't get the scale.
They really love their meat.
To try to give you some sense of scale, on Monday, for lunch we went up the road to a restaurant that does take out. We ordered some food and brought it back to the office to eat (it's much cheaper that way, and there's nice facilities in the office). I ordered Asado. Steak and chips, to you, although a very different cut than you'd find anywhere in the UK. What I got (for 17 pesos, less than £3.00) was two good sized steaks, and chips. Yes, two. And yes, good sized - either would have been sufficient. I didn't even bother with an evening meal on Monday ...
So last night I decided to brave central Buenos Aires in search of a meal. I waited as long as I could (they apparently go to dinner at "about 11") and strolled into the night. Found a pedestrianised shopping road and wandered along it, looking for a bar that served food, probably one showing some sport, so I wouldn't stick out too badly as a lonely foreigner. Setting aside the fact that I found three MacDonalds and two Burger Kings on my wandering, I eventually found where they hide all the restaurants - oddly where I'd been shown the night before by my native guide.
Now, in foreign countries I always try to eat the local food at least some of the time (unless it really is appalling, which it seldom is - if it seems that bad, it usually just means you found somewhere shit to eat, although there are exceptions). Thus it was that I found myself in a restaurant with this picture in the window:
I'd been told the mollejas (sweetbreads) are an extremely good dish, and was very tempted, but there's always mañana.So it was I had the suckling pig crucified around an open fire. Well, it'd have been rude not to. Actually, the nice waiter had persuaded me not to go with a full portion of pig, but only to have half a portion, so I could have half a portion of roast kid (crucified around an open fire). Sadly our communication skills weren't exactly top notch. His English was a lot better than my Spanish, but still not that good so he didn't understand when he persuaded me to go with his suggestion (I'd pretty much refused the menu and asked for advice - a risky strategy, but one that can have astonishingly good results). Still, I got a couple of lumps of truly excellent pork (and a meat pie of gloriousness too).
All that, along with half a bottle of a very nice Cabernet Sauvignon (Argentinian, of course), water and (generous) tip, came to 110 pesos - less than £18 ...
Tonight I have no idea where I'm going. Later (much, much later), one of the I'm working with is going to phone me. I will be given a secret destination, get into a cab, and be driven somewhere "nice". Ok, perhaps it's not really secret, I struggle with the names - I just don't have the ear for them.
This post brought to you by the words "Copy" and "Paste". If I remember to copy the text before trying to preview, LiveJournal is very good about not losing what I've written. If I foolishly forget ...
Current Location: Hotel El Conquistador, Buenos Aires
Current Mood: anticipatory
Current Music: The hum of the air conditioning
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August 21st, 2009
04:13 pm - The "testing makes me slower" fallacy
Don't get me wrong, I love the big fluffy warm feeling I get from having a whole set of tests telling me the code works and it's safe to ship. I will even (in certain places) use this as an argument as to why you need to write tests - mostly when talking to people who just don't see the value in test code (also known as stupid people). It's not, however the reason why I so enthusiastically adopted TDD (Test Driven Development, or Test Driven Design - you decide which I prefer).
I've had conversation with skilled developers who confidently assert that they'd love to write good test code, but they don't have time to. The deadline looms, they have working code, they just don't have time to write the tests before they ship it. Then the next set of work needs doing, so they never write the tests for the last set, and strangely, the next piece of work also goes without tests. Then the defect rate starts to climb. The code complexity is on a steady increase and suddenly (often not very far into the project) even relatively simple changes become painful. Every possible implication of each keystroke has to be considered - often exhaustively. This sort of behaviour is often associated with people who make their code overly complicated, and that's often the reason given for why they start to go so much slower, but it's just not the case. They slow down so much because they spend so much time working out what might go wrong.
Compare this with the chap who's written his tests first. He has good unit tests in place, and better functional tests. Faced with the same change, they've clear documentation of how the code is expected to behave. If they change it, they get immediate, direct feedback if they've broken it in some apparently unrelated area. Not without having considered the implications before making the change, obviously, but without having to have a deep understanding of the whole system, they can make sweeping changes if necessary.
This afternoon I spent an hour making some fairly hefty changes to the way the app I'm working wires itself up. That's it, an hour. This morning I knocked up a handy little class whose responsibility it now is to know in what order things need to come together, and this afternoon I reworked the builder so that you no longer had to explicitly work this out every time you used it. If I was doing this in an environment where the app hadn't been properly covered with tests, I'd still be at it well into next week.
Testing your code doesn't make you slower, it makes you faster. Sure the product is better at the end, and that's important, but the end comes sooner, and that's pretty important too, because if you never ship it, it's not worth anything to anybody.
Current Mood: slightly smug
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June 23rd, 2009
09:03 pm - Magic Blue Ponies
A short glossary of terms you may find useful to understanding the following (paraphrased) transcript from work today:
- Customer
- The person who has obtained funding for a project, and therefore gets to decide what is in and out of scope
- Stakeholder
- A person who has an interest in the work done for a project. They have things they want done, and can lobby a customer to include them
- Inception
- The beginning of the project, during which we do what Ron Jeffries calls Release Planning: "the Customer presents the desired features to the programmers, and the programmers estimate their difficulty. With the cost estimates in hand, and with knowledge of the importance of the features, the Customer lays out a plan for the project" (He says it better than me ...)
- Pony
- A feature (or set of features) that somebody (normally a Stakeholder) really, really wants. Normally, but not always, something that is outside of the original agreed remit of the project
The scene:
We are well into Inception. We've have a good idea of what the Customer wants (and the Stakeholders), plus we've estimated the work for about half of it. We're feeling pretty good, because we just came up with a very elegant solution for a problem that gives one of the Stakeholders a Pony. We invite the Stakeholder who will actually work with the Pony in and explain it to him, he is ecstatic: clearly Christmas has come early. He wanders off, and we move on. He then returns: his bosses have not understood it, possibly he's explaining it wrongly, could we explain it to them. "Sure" we say, bring them in ...
( Executive summary: somebody doesn't get it ... )
Fortunately, for the sanity of both me and my team, eventually he had to go add his valuable input to another meeting. Strangely, the customer was unimpressed with the idea of building a Magic Blue Pony.
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March 27th, 2009
10:22 pm
There's just no way I could be aware of this and not share it with everybody I know ...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/mely/lemonfaces/bigeye.gif) amused
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March 21st, 2009
11:36 pm - Woah
Hard to respond to this in any way other than "Holy fucking shit!".
Why did nobody tell me we'd arrived in the future already?
Ferrofluids, that's some wacky shit ...
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March 10th, 2009
09:01 pm - I'm in a fighting mood
It's been one of those days, and so I'm about to positively channel my frustration into trying to persuade Amazon's customer service department to see sense.
I was well aware when I ordered a hard drive from them that there was every chance that it would show up in an anti-static bag and thin cardboard wrapper, but I was in no rush for it, the price was good, so I ordered it secure in the knowledge that if it did show up like that, I'd merely contact them and arrange for them to replace it with one sensibly packaged.
Then their customer service department dropped this pearl before me:
"The packaging methods we use have proven over time to protect 'Hard drive' effectively."
Oh dear. The reviews for the specific drive I ordered are split 50/50 between people who had it delivered in sensible packaging, and people who returned it because the packaging was shit. All they had to do was apologise and make sure they sent me another one that was packaged properly, but no, they had to poke the bear when he was feeling grumpy.
My riposte is mainly a reference to their own user comments, but with the pithy addition of the manufacturers requirements for returns, which far exceed Amazon's delivery packaging, obviously.
Game on ...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/mely/lemonfaces/pred.gif) predatory
Current Music: The final session of the last Test in the West Indies
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February 27th, 2009
09:54 pm
Much as I didn't want the French to win (now I have to admit my error to the Frenchman I was belittling at lunch time), if the Welsh had stolen that, it would have been particularly unjust.
Wouldn't have stopped me laughing on Monday, mind, but I'd have felt bad about it. Roll on tomorrow, not that I'm terribly hopeful, but if it were to go the right way, it'd be interesting.
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February 22nd, 2009
11:01 pm
Back from the bog country, and it's time I wrote up a reply to the 5 things ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wulfboy set me. If you'd like five things to write about from me, I'd be surprised, since everybody else did this last week, but ask and you shall receive ...
( Baa )
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January 2nd, 2009
09:22 am - Start the year as you mean to continue it
I am in work, though very few other people are. This means I will get things done, in spite of the fact that
there is a trebuchet kit on my desk. Later, there will not be. Later there will be a trebuchet and terrorised colleagues ...
The season of excess seems to be over and I appear to be 4 kilos heavier than at the beginning of December. This cannot be allowed to continue. Fortunately the first two kilos should vanish as soon as I stop trying to eat myself into a stupor, the second two may require trips to the gym, but this is acceptable. By Easter I am hoping to break the 90 kilos mark.
I may even write more on Livejournal this year, but to be honest, I wouldn't rely on it.
Have a good one, folks.
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December 23rd, 2008
11:47 pm - The world conspires against me!
Slightly melodramatic, perhaps, but it does feel like something doesn't want me to have a good Christmas this year.
I am calm and serene and defeating the obstacles placed before me though (well, serene might not be entirely accurate, but the bastards aren't going to beat me this time).
( Work tries to get me down )
( Internet retailers try to get me down )
( Several purveyors of fine food try to get me down )
I will not let the bastards win. I am going to enjoy myself, and if somebody has to die to see it happens, well then so be it.
Current Mood: knackered
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December 9th, 2008
09:36 am
And when Bagpuss was asleep,
All his friends were asleep.
The mice were ornaments on the mouse organ.
Gabriel and Madeleine were just dolls.
Professor Yaffle was just an old wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker.
Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old, saggy cloth cat,
Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams,
But Emily loved him
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/mely/lemonfaces/annoy.gif) sad
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October 28th, 2008
11:17 am - TANSTAAFL
Or maybe not. Linux and Mac users, Codeweaver are offering CrossOver for free if you register today here.
It's like WINE, only done professionally. Now you can play Windows games on your real computer. One less reason for booting into Windows. Hell, you can even run real apps, but we all know that we only use Windows for gaming these days, right?
The servers are understandably busy mind. I got my code damn quickly, but trying to complete the process is becoming painful.
update: the slashdot effect in action (although they're blaming Digg). Codeweaver's site is now down to the bare minimum static holding pages. You can still get your free code though, and the deadline to register it has been extended.
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August 20th, 2008
12:03 pm - Mmmm, shiney
Obviously I'm still planning on building my own when I can sort out the time/money, but for those of you who want the joy of a Lotus 7, without the hassle of making it yourself, or the overhead of paying the nice chaps at Caterham to do it, they're doing their first ever 'preowned sale' until the end of the month.
Look here if you're interested or just want to drool ...
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June 22nd, 2008
10:22 pm - Bundle of stress?
That was not the most relaxing week ever. Wednesday had us due to head up to Manchester (via Belper to ditch the kids) to see the Police. I strolled in on Tuesday night as Viki finished telling her mother we'd be there for lunchtime. "How are we going to manage that, I'm working the morning ..."
Wednesday was made more stressful by the children turning into hellbeasties and me throwing my back out picking up Jacob. Crescendoed as we were leaving (very late) and Viki's mother phoned up to make sarcastic comments at me about the time we were leaving and I was more than a touch rude to her. It was about this point Viki announced nearly abandoning the trip.
Still, we made it. We were late to the hotel, but strangely, things got a lot better after we grabbed some food and a couple of margaritas.
The concert was very cool. Obviously it rained, as it's Manchester, but I was impressed with the Metro. Driving home on Thursday was made less pleasant by the back ache, obviously.
This evening, however, Viki decided to finalise the child minder arrangements for when Samuel goes to school in September (we need somebody to drop him off at school). Unfortunately we'd left so long between talking to the child minder we liked and telling her, that she'd given the place to somebody else. Cue several hours of stress, lightened by the fact that one of the local child minders we sent an email to this evening has already replied to tell us she's going to university next year, but will still be dropping her own child off at the same school, so would be happy to take us on.
Much relief to be had ...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/mely/lemonfaces/smilec.gif) relieved
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May 23rd, 2008
11:02 pm - You cannot be serious
And no, the subject is not a reference to the fact that I've actually deigned to make a post.
So, I missed Heroes last night, for the eminently sensible reason that I was playing cricket (first match of the year I've made, I still ache). No problem, I think, it's bound to be on Virgin Media's Catch up on demand feature, which is quite handy. So, after watching the Pink Floyd documentary I somehow missed the first time round, I go searching.
Not there. "Hmm", think I, "that's a trifle unexpected, still, that's what IPlayer, that spangly BBC thing they keep going on about is for, is it not. Never fear, I can watch this week's episode." and off I wander to the computer ...
Ok, IPlayer is turning up a bit of a blank, so I turn to the power of google to search BBC's web site. "Ahah, a page dedicated to Heroes offering me the chance to catch up!" Click, click, watch. "Hey, why did it stop after the 'previously on Heroes' section? Arse!".
Ok, I don't really approve of these sites where people upload films we really ought to be paying for (or sitting through the advertising for), but it's being shown on BBC and I pay my licence fee, I think I remember lupercal or somebody posting a link on their site to some cool site which gave you access to vast amounts of TV and films, I shall trek back through huge amounts of LJ entries and attempt to find it.
So I did. Not much in the way of success, although I did notice a few people have recently added me to their friends lists, in spite of the fact I never have anything interesting to say, and frankly, with one exception (hello _purpleflower) I have no idea who they are, so hello people, feel free to tell me who you are. Or not, as the case may be.
Anyway, lupercal, if it was you, or whomever else it was, I would be obliged if you were to see fit to tell me where the hell I can pseudo-legitimately (if only in mine own head) watch this week's episode of Heroes. A slightly drunk, quite tired man feels in need of a bit of escapism ...
Current Mood: perturbed
Current Music: deafening silence. Noticeably the absence of the Heroes theme tune.
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February 12th, 2008
03:35 pm - Too bloody early, by far
There really ought to be some law against having to get up at 4am to catch a flight. At least it was from Luton, so could have been worse, but it's just not right.
Transylvania is sunnier and more flat than I imagined. Also there aren't enough brooding forests. On the plus side, the drab Eastern European tower blocks seem to have scared away all the vampires and werewolves. Well, hopefully, since I'm going out tonight. Still, we won't be paying them for the work their doing if I turn up dead so the locals will look after me, right?
Flew wizzair which was less exciting than the name suggests. Fortunately it was that rarest of things, a comfortable budget flight. The seats weren't too thin for me, and (admittedly I had an emergency exit seat) seemed a reasonable distance apart. Even the ones that weren't over the wings. Never eat one of their sandwiches though. I didn't realise it was possible to let bread get that dry.
Romanian food is fun though. I had polenta and a stew of mixed meats for lunch. Oh, not forgetting the pickles on the side. I may be able to walk without waddling by dinner time ...
Current Location: Cluj
Current Mood: full
Current Music: Nineteen - Paul Hardcastle
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November 16th, 2007
04:40 pm
Ok, off and on I've been trying to write a post for over a week now. I've clearly not managed terribly well, so I'm going to keep it pretty simple.
Tomorrow morning (hah, more like tonight), I shall be getting up at about 3 am to catch a flight to Poland. Sadly, I'm not going to be eating sausage and drinking vodka on a party weekend, I'm going to help bury a friend.
On the morning of Monday the 5th, I arrived in work to be told that Jarek had been killed in a motorbike crash the day before (BBC news coverage here. Jarek was the first guy I hired when I took on the ops manager role at SpinVox, and even after he abandoned us to go and work in development, always stayed part of the original team.
I'm not exactly great at expressing myself, particularly about this sort of thing. I can rant with the best of them, I can tear an argument apart pretty well, I feel, but I have that core of Englishness that makes expressing deep emotional feeling pretty uncomfortable. This can be annoying, particularly when, as now, I want to say something, to try and make the people I know who never met Jarek understand quite why he was such a nice guy.
So, given my limitations, I'll fall back on two stories about Jarek. You'll have to rely on them, combined with my word on the matter, or talk to maleghast or jimfer, who also knew him. You can see what our colleagues have been saying about him here.
Not long after we took over running our own systems, one night when I was on call we had a problem. One of our asterisk servers went a bit wrong. These are the machines that the actual users' voice messages are left on, so this was a pretty serious problem. I was on call, and ran through a number of things, nothing worked, so I restarted the server, the usual last resort. Things not only didn't get better, the got worse. Significantly. The server restarted fine, but now the app was really unhappy. So I phoned Jarek. At midnight on a Saturday. At 6 am we went to bed, problem solved. (For those who might care, the kernel had been updated, but the machine not restarted, and asterisk wasn't installed properly). At no point did he ever even imply that he wasn't happy to effectively waste his weekend helping me when I was on call.
One weekend, Jarek was going back to Poland to visit his family. As you may do, I asked if he could bring me back a kielbasa if he had a chance. When he got back, I was presented with an entire shopping bag fully of various different varieties. More types of kielbasa than I knew existed. Jarek refused point blank to let me pay him a penny.
Anyway, this is a marker. Tomorrow, Jaroslaw Owczarek, I will be saying goodbye, tonight I remember you, even if I still can't pronounce your name properly.
Current Mood: maudlin
Current Music: First and Last and Always, Sisters of Mercy
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October 16th, 2007
09:13 am - No, I was not in costume ...
Yesterday I went hunting. It was a pretty poor haul, really, given the effort: 3 grown men, 2 ferrets, 1 dog and 4 Harris hawks, and all we managed to bag was one undergrown rabbit, which the birds demolished in little time.
Yes, that's right, yesterday I was experiencing the excitement of one of the most inefficient ways of feeding yourself known to man, Falconry. Chris (no livejournal) gave Tim (livejournal so long dead as to be completely meaningless) and I a day's hawking for Christmas. Being seasonal, and running during the winter only, that meant we didn't get to go until yesterday.
( It was great ... )
So, it was ace fun, but not for the squeamish. My own beliefs rank killing your own food as being better than letting somebody else do your dirty work, so I have no issues with hunting for food (mine or the animals). Word of mouth being what it is, if you have some time (and money) to kill, try it out. If you're squeamish about the killing, but could handle the chicken feet, he does flying days, where there's no hunting involved (unless the birds find something on their own ...)
Hawk on the wild side - go look, then do something about it ...
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October 6th, 2007
07:35 pm - Well stone me ...
That was more than a touch unexpected. A significant amount of the credit must go to Australia's pack, who were on a par with the various Pacific Islanders, but my, what a nail-biter of a finish.
You could say that the place kicking by both sides was poor, I choose to feel that the conditions were obviously less ideal than they looked. Although to be fair, Johnny clearly got a serious pounding, and wasn't looking too clever when he was preparing to kick. Dunno what the excuse was on the other side though, no doubt there'll be one.
I await the whinging about the ref with interest. Clearly the Australian scrum was determined to never actually scrimmage, but no doubt we'll be hearing why we shouldn't have had all those penalties tomorrow. Still, we won, so I won't be grumbling about forward passes and people who should have had 10 minutes to cool down.
France next then. The Northern hemisphere team I'd have tipped to perform best in the quarters, even if I wasn't really expecting them to win. Home nation, though, and already had their wakeup call, could be a cracking match. Could also be rubbish, but I shall be positive.
In other news: I have the lurgy. I was nearly feeling too sick to go to the "SpinVox Founders" dinner thrown by the CEO on Thursday. I went anyway, and received the single most expensive single item I've ever been gifted (save for cash from the parents - they've been pretty generous in their time), vis a Breitling. Smacked my gob it did ...
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/mely/lemonfaces/sick.gif) sick
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