Bagel Belly Blog

The longest day

After several weeks of talk, a small team finally got together to do some serious writing. I have to say, I don't think we'd have been able to pull off what we did without three things: a bunch of powerbooks, subethaedit and one long window.

Paul has the details, but while numbers tell part of the story, what they can't describe is the amazing feeling you get when technology is enabling rather than disabling (as it became later in the day, when we had to wrestle with Microsoft Word, which reduced three of us to gibbering wrecks).

Picture this: five people all working on the same document at once. Not five seperate documents, but the same document. You can see other people typing, and where they are in the document. It's liberating, exhilarating, and just plain powerful. Seldom has so much been achieved by so few.

I don't think it's unfair to say that if this thing pans out in the long term, it will change the world in interesting ways.

I can't finish without my heartfelt thanks to my four co-authors, and to the guys that assisted with helpful input and moral support via IRC. I learnt so much, not just about how to put together something like this, but also about group dynamics and the power of Pair Programming multiplied by 2.5 ;-)

Currently listening to You Make It Easy from the album Moon Safari by Air

Swarm

The Daffodils

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Ok, so they weren't as continuous as the stars that shine. This host amounted to little more than a dozen, but when I spotted them on Monday they still made my heart sing. Spring has sprung!

This morning, it's -7 outside. We have reinforcements joining us in Norwich from Italy and London, and remotely from Germany. The stage is set. The deadline is clear. It's going to be a rough few days (and a rough few months). Let's do this thing.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Free Software Fascism

Leo Simmons urges you to "not use the GPL or LGPL for software you write". He gives some reasonable justification for his policy. Not sure I agree, but he has his reasons. One of the comments below his post is the funniest thing I've read in a long time, though:

"How many succesful Open Source businesses do you know are based around ASL licenses?"

I point the poster to Orixo for a start.

There's been too much discussion as a result of FSF "denouncing" the ASF license. All incredibly dull - I say let the evangelists and pragmatists do what they like - but I will link to one more denouncement of FSF before trying not to take sides. Adrian writes: "the Free Software Foundation has redefined the term "free" to suit their purposes", and follows up with a beautiful and entertaining rebuttal of a certain well-known hardline Free Software person.

Anyway - all this talk of licenses is too boring. It's enough to send you to sleep, isn't it?

Update: *sigh* the dangers of posting late at night after a glass or three of wine. The above "FSF person" statement has been modified to better reflect the truth.

Word rant

I love Microsoft Word.

If I try and insert Autotext "page X of Y", the entire Autotext menu is for some reason in German. None of my other menu items are in German, mind you. In what twisted, screwed up, Microsoft world does this make sense?

The only way I could get round it was to insert the German equivalent, and then edit "Seite, von" to "Page, of". And here's where it gets really screwy: the tooltip that Word pops up over the German autotext is in English.

How does this make any sense at all?

Before you ask, I have to use Word for this particular task. It's imposed by external requirements. Yes, I'd love to sue Bill Gates for damages to my mental health as a result of this. Anyone up for a class action lawsuit?

Update: uh, yeah, just changed the image file names so they get through content filters ;-)

Something wicked this way comes...

Run away, run away. Paul is getting into this whole blogging thing. Find him at his temporary site of http://paulrussell.dyndns.org/blog/ for now.

So as one old friend joins the 21st century ... bumped into another old friend last night in a pub in town, completely out of the blue. Which was very good, and brought back some extraordinary memories from three or four years ago. Has it been that long?

Ah, happy days.

Mac toys

Yet more of the what's on my powerbook? since Gianugo has also made the switch. Here's that I can't live without this week.

First and foremost, life is great and it's Konfabulator's fault. Thanks to stega for pointers to that. Konfabulator gives you widgets, such as the weather one on the right. I also recommend easyKal, iPod remote, Internet health monitor, iChat bezel, and analogue clock.

Next: SlimBatteryMonitor, via Ted's Mac tips and tricks.

This one isn't strictly software per se, but a collection of mighty useful iTunes scripts.

Finally, through clenched teeth: Remote Desktop Connection. Some actually rather good Microsoft software. I've used this several times to administer a Windows XP Professional machine remotely, and I have to say: it works. Useful for fixing things on the parents' computer when it goes wrong.

Carp

So, long queue of blog posts to make, and serious lack of time in which to make them in (or rather to polish them into coherent sentences). The short version: writing up something for something that's covered by an NDA, whilst waiting for details on two something elses for someone that's also covered by NDA. Meanwhile, reading documentation on third thing that isn't under NDA but quite possibly should be.

I remember back when we first started. We were so proud of our very own NDA, as provided by our big scary bad lawyers. We would wield it like some kind of talisman. In turn, all those that dealt with us smote us with their pages of legal mumbojumbo. One actually signed ours, then dashed to the photocopier with it and did some manipulation, before returning with it on his letterhead for us to sign in turn. All very much a case of start-up fever. (See Cult of the NDA.)

These days, the NDAs seem like reasonably valid tools to protect some commercially sensitive stuff. Which seems fair when you have multi-billion pound turnovers, and when the slightest slip about technical direction or mention of business indiscretion could send your stock price tumbling and have your shareholders clamouring after you.

Did I mention that the place we have our offices has Japanese Koi Carp? Some of them are huge, and they all live in a pond maybe 12' x 12'. Speaking of which, it's a bloody big pond we appear to be swimming in now.

Eclipse, Cocoon, Ant

This one's for David. Building Cocoon projects in Eclipse from the build.xml making use of Cocoon's XConfPatch task, you need to:

• Right-click on build.xml, select "Run Ant"
• In "Classpath", select "Add Folder..." and navigate to /path/to/your/cocoon/tools/anttasks
• Optionally set Ant Home to /opt/local/java/apache-ant or wherever it is
• In "Properties", add a property with name "cocoon.home" and value /path/to/your/cocoon

You probably also need to add a few Jars. Right-click on the project, in "Java Build Path" under Libraries, click "Add JARs...". Add whatever you need (such as commons-lang or junit) from /path/to/your/cocoon/lib/core/, or /path/to/your/cocoon/tools/lib, etc.

... wonder if there's a better way to do all this?

Accessibility

Trying to access the English Heritage web site earlier using Safari on the Mac, I got this deeply amusing (in a "that's so annoying you have to laugh" kind of way) error message:

If you are a Mac user with Safari, you get diverted from http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/ to http://accessibility.english-heritage.org.uk/. You don't get a choice in the matter.

I'm sure it's entirely coincidence that the people stupid enough to do this were also stupid enough to run Internet Information Server. And to screw up one of their headers to point to an internal (10.255.255.255) IP address.

telnet www.english-heritage.org.uk 80

Trying 194.164.61.131...

Connected to www.english-heritage.org.uk.

Escape character is '^]'.

HEAD / HTTP/1.0



HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0

Content-Location: http://10.0.1.2/index.html

They are in good company, I suppose. NatWest still ask me to trust Internet Explorer Version 4 or above or Netscape Navigator 4.08 to 4.78 (inclusive), which gives me warm fuzzy feelings knowing how insecure my banking data is.

Windows fun

I'm finally removing Windows ME from my parents' computer and replacing it with Windows XP. (What I'd really like to do of course is sling the stinking Wintel carcass out and replace it with a nice shiny iMac, but I don't have the spare cash for that option right now.)

I have copied their entire disk onto my laptop using ssh and rsync, and I'm in the process of figuring out what data is where, so that I can copy it back onto the fresh install. This is not aided by Microsoft's "spray it all over the filesystem" policy.

Some documents are in "C:\My Documents". Apparently Outlook Express stores mailboxes in "C:\Windows\Application Data\Identities". Some files have wound up in the owner application's directory within "C:\Program Files". Urgh.

I'm trying to decide what AntiVirus solution to install on this machine once it's up and running, too. I have tried Norton AntiVirus and McAfee before, but I've found them both irritating and invasive. Paul recommends AVG because it's small and light. It's only £17.60 (at today's exchange rates), and virus definition updates for two years, which is nice. Kaspersky looks interesting as it uses heuristic analysis, so will hopefully spot mutations even without definition updates. It has an attractive price - £23.95 - though this includes only one year of definition updates.

Another productivity killer

I don't know how you'd categorise this, other than a really enjoyable waste of time. (Via Simon)

Lust

I want this (via Alan). And these (but then you knew that already). Can't wait to try this. With one of these.

Currently listening to Talk About The Passion from the album The Best Of R.E.M.: The IRS Years by R.E.M.

Cocoon and Eclipse

I've been taking yet another look at Eclipse, as I'm growing increasingly dissatisfied with JEdit under Mac OS X. I know there's some irony in swapping one bloated java memory hogging editor for an even bigger one wrapped up in an IDE, but I have good reasons, honest.

Being a bleeding edge kind of fool, I'm running Eclipse 3 Milestone 6. It seems to be behaving now that I've got this bugfix which cures erroneous additional icons in the dock.

The first two things I've tried to sort out in Eclipse were finding a decent editor and getting Cocoon building and running within it. I've had moderate success so far.

For editors, I'm giving <oXygen/> a whirl. They ship a version that runs as an Eclipse plugin. It's full-featured and compares well with JEdit, and at $74 it's significantly cheaper than BBEdit which seems the only viable alternative and is double the price at $149.95. I'll see how the 30 day trial goes.

As for Cocoon, well, I've got as far as getting it to compile. After doing the initial work of creating an eclipse project following the notes on the Cocoon wiki, I needed to replace the default copy of Ant (1.5.4) with Ant 1.6. I did this using the excellent, fantastic and generally brilliant fink-beating darwinports ... sudo port install apache-ant.

I then had to tell Eclipse about the new Ant. Here, the Eclipse documentation really impressed me: it had a section on using a different version of Ant (link should work if you have Eclipse running locally). Nice. Basically, I set the Ant Home to /opt/local/java/apache-ant. (Yes, I know, I should probably use the version of Ant that comes with Cocoon, but I'm with the bileblog on this.)

And then I finally just saw what I was looking for:

webapp:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 18 minutes 9 seconds

Now I'm trying to figure out how to launch Jetty from within Eclipse. Once I've done that, I'll tidy up the notes I pasted into the Cocoon wiki page from the mailing list.

Currently listening to Us and Them from the album Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd

ecto

I love ecto, I really do, but there's a couple of annoying problems:

• It won't remember that by default I want comments open and for it to convert line breaks and allow trackback pings. I have to keep changing the settings each time I start it.
• Similarly, it forgets my default settings for uploading images. I want them aligned right with thumbnails by default.
• It would be great if it would auto-complete my HTML, for the times when I actually type tags in. At the very least, it could warn me about invalid markup.

I suppose I should go file feature requests, since I'm a paying customer. Ok, feature request: the ability to request features via my blog ;-)

All is well

A couple of weeks ago when I was talking to Lauren through iChat, she asked me if I was being "a geek in a pub". This was when I was sat in the Maid's Head taking advantage of the free wireless. My response was to snap this photo using my mobile, and to paste it into iChat. I guess that means I was being a geek in a pub ;-)

Yesterday was another day of early starts, time spent on trains, tubes and taxis. I heard last week that during the summer, this journey will no longer be possible as the track is being closed at Ipswich for major engineering works. (See advance engineering, "Ipswich rail tunnel closed for rebuilding the railway track".) Suddenly I feel like I should appreciate the luxury of London only being two hours away...

One of our meetings yesterday was with the fine folks at BBC R&D, to follow up on some work we did for them, and to decide what to do next. Looks like we're edging closer to the seriously fun stuff. The next project will most likely take advantage of the best new stuff in Cocoon.

Kingswood Warren is a seriously amazing place. It's a fairly sizeable campus, with a curious gothic mansion at the centre. Combine that with the scarily intelligent people working there. I can't help but enjoy myself when we visit, and both times so far I've come away feeling inspired. This is the side of the BBC that you don't see when people are bitching about taxpayers' money, political independence, etc.

While I'm on the subject, the BBC are deploying camera phones as a way of catching breaking news. Nice.

And finally. The last four weeks have been a more stressful time than many that I can remember (for reasons I don't want to go into). But this article (and the problems being at least temporarily fixed) reminded me to stop complaining and get on with life. All is well, and here's the secret: saying it makes it so.

Here comes the flood

We've been having a little bit of rain here recently, and combined with the melting snow, it has led to some fairly substantial flooding.
The cross-country route to work is under about a foot of water (a rise in river levels since the summer of around 5 feet).

The weir nearby can't even be seen.

You even need to be able to swim in order to get to the life rings now...

Comment spam

I've just been hit by several hundred comment spams. I've been getting two or three every couple of days, but this is the proverbial straw that broke this camel's back. Excuse me while I (a) upgrade movable type, (b) delete the spams, (c) go after the spammers with a blunt knife. Possibly not in that order.

Words can't describe the anger, irritation, sheer rage at someone defacing my site like this. As if it's not bad enough to receive several hundred spam emails a day, you have to start screwing with my web site too?

Update:

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Six Apart, I salute you!

De-spamming results

• 158 of 158 comments were successfully deleted.

MT-Blacklist, I salute you!

Smack the Bool

If you haven't seen smack the pingu already .....

And for this loss of productivity, I blame Adrian. Thanks mate ;-)

(He told me he got 587, so I felt obliged to try and improve my 450ish score. Best so far: 593.5)

&%£$%^^%$@ IT Support

We're based in a research park, and so we piggy-back on the UEA network for our external connectivity. For the most part, this works just fine for us - JANET is a pretty good network, a lot of our customers are based in academic institutions, it's cheaper than paying the BT Broadband tax and it's a devil we know well, having been consumers of the service for 11 years now in one form or another.

Every now and then, however, UEA ITCS do something so incredibly, unbelievably stupid or annoying that it's simply breathtaking in magnitude. Like, say, today. Today we are unable to send emails via our server.

We don't bother with the local institutional mail server, since we figure it's fairer for us to use our own resources. It also means we can use additional security features like sending mail over a secure connection. As an added bonus, we can use this configuration from just about anywhere, so we almost never need to tweak our mail client settings.

It transpires that UEA's swift and assertive response to the MyDoom virus was to block port 25 on their routers. This means that email can only be sent through their smtp server. Unfortunately, they neglected to tell anyone.

In fairness, apparently over half the campus is currently infected with the virus, so this is probably a kindness to the outside world. But you'd think that significant modifications to external connectivity might warrant some kind of warning, wouldn't you?

So - if you're wondering why you don't hear anything from me today, it's because I can't safely and securely send emails :-(

Update: I was talking to Paul in the pub last night, and he said that blocking port 25 is actually a recommended procedure from the AntiVirus vendors. I didn't believe it, but it looks like it's true. Symantec say: "disable or block access to those services". Urgh. you know, their advice would be so much more credible if my inbox wasn't filled with AntiVirus messages that don't have uniform subject lines or additional headers to allow me to ignore them. AV vendors are a significant part of the problem.

Meanwhile, daemon_smtp_port is my friend. I'm running a second copy of exim on a different port, to get round UEA's dumb restriction on port 25. Still don't think I should have to do this though. And how long will it be before viruses runs portscans to find open SMTP servers? Fix the problem. Educate users into not opening attachments, or better yet, dump Windows.