I am a software programmer working at RealVNC with many interests including singing, and am a Christian. Many of my friends remember me as a Part III mathematician at Peterhouse. Find out more or contact me!
A programmer is a machine for turning cake Friday into bugfixes, and on Monday he makes sure he’ll have a job next Friday.
Why is it just so hard?
On one level, there’s the actual difficulty of doing it. Some things are hard to get right, and design is one of them, or fiddling with tricksy APIs, and so on. That’s not really it though.
Or again, maybe it’s a problem of motivation. I find writing swathes of PHP intensely boring, and put it off because of that. Or the time. Those have to include at least some of it.
The CICCU website has been batted from person to person for about two years now, with the next big iteration always promised. I’ve had it now to do since Christmas, which isn’t the longest anyone has sat on it, but it’s still quite long. It is genuinely hard to get down to finishing what I did in Easter and pushing through the final bit. I will have a basically complete deliverable for the end of the week, which is reassuring. I’ve had enough prodding to get that done so it can go up for the freshers, and the few remaining features which won’t be switched on until term I can spread out over the next month.
My old home church website is also getting some final elements refreshed, soon, which have been long promised. It will happen, but it takes a year for the most committed person to do it because I’m just not that committed.
Perhaps it’s as simple as that I don’t own the site, don’t feel like I have a stake in it, as well as ordinary sloth. In any case, I pity the churches and CUs who have to put up with me, and former generations of webmasters who’ve done less or put things off longer.
I updated my apps to use the new Tumblr API v2; fine but annoying that I have to do this to get decent service. I only noticed it had come out when I got some error messages from slowly returned results using old API. On plus side, get more information back.
HELP ME: I can’t get the FB Graph API to work as it used to. I currently can’t post anything to my wall. I have a super access token with every permission and no expiry, and it still ignores my privacy request with no error message. Everything I post is private only. Very frustrating. Any ideas? Nothing in stupid FB forums, full of n00bs and stupid answers. Next stop: SO.
Update: It’s an issue that hit lots of apps, including official Tumblr app. Facebook now has a tweaked privacy structure and new way of handling app authorization and per-post privacy settings. Unfortunately they flipped the switch on it on the Graph API two weeks before rolling out the UI to let users turn it on and query it. Lame.
Very neat methodology. Seems rather well thought-out. Obscure words a pleasant mix of familiar and very unusual.
It’s been three weeks since the last update. Rather a lot has happened. Without much time to punch out strenuous detail, I’ll scribble a rough outline. The first three weeks of August were the first three weeks of my new job at RealVNC, a big change. It’s been going fairly well, doing work on Windows device drivers (groan), learning the annoying features of Win32 my life was missing, and having fun building my toolkit with some great guys at work. So, that’s going well.
Week one of work was spent on Rob’s floor (thanks for fun week!), waiting until we move in to our new house (three friends sharing), which we did at the weekend. My mega-logistics had a few shortcomings, but stocking up on the contents of a house and unpacking was mostly successful in two days. Still to be sorted are the furniture, which I now realise I strongly should have ordered from Ikea before we moved in, since they are so slow our beds are arriving next week, and also a few rooms still to tidy and make homely. It’s an excellent house.
I went to the first weekend of the proms, which was brilliant, just before coming to Cambridge for work, and have done quite a few since then. I’ve been on a buying spree, and have all sorts of lovely new things, like an HTC Desire S (I caved in). I finally have a comfy pull-up bar, which is killing me. This weekend, I have Sarah and Jon’s wedding. I’ve been reading a book or two each week recently as well, and have churned through, among others, Le Comte de Monte-Christo, Persuasion, and Anna Karenina. Getting much more into techie news now that my new co-workers keep me up-to-date on all the latest developments; now adding back some feeds to my stream I had dropped and following the latest chips and software again (Xeon E3-12xx is officially the only thing you can buy >10 W range, and Solaris is still king, but no-one in the office quite agrees with me on either of those yet; all that remains is to actually buy a Xeon and run Solaris on it). Cooking is mega-fun. Suet: one pack down, more to follow.
I didn’t know anyone was making a board like this. It is totally unique, better than any other small server board out there. C206 is the only chipset supporting AMT with the E3-12xx Xeons (“Sandy Bridge”; AMT only on models with on-chip integrated video 12x5/1260L). These new Xeons are the only line with a genuinely low-power server chip (remote management, ECC, high quality storage chips, multiple LAN, etc). There are two small C206 boards, and the other one made by Intel has poor connectivity. So, this is the only mITX Xeon board capable of hosting several drives, one of three boards of any size which can support AMT with Sandy Bridge Xeon, and one is full ATX with a load of junk on board. A step up in size at mATX has no C206 boards at all, but why would you want to? PCIe for a JBOD card if you want it or quad GBe should be enough. What’s missing is frippery, which is why this chap is perfect. Unique, and unavailable. Some guys in a forum did a group buy just last week and ordered a small production run between them, and if I’d known about this just a couple of weeks earlier, I’d have done it. Shame. If I can’t get one, I’ll probably have to wait for Panther Point and Ivy Bridge, at the end of the year. Atom with ECC and server spec has been delayed to 2012. The only machine I would consider meeting all my requirements is still unbuyable, and we should be demanding all the things we aren’t getting from our current setups.
UPDATE: It turns out that this thing will be available at the end of the month. A unique, awesome board costing £250. Bear in mind also that it only takes expensive CPUs (the 1260L or the 12x5 workstation ones), and expensive RAM. Is AMT, 6 HDD without using up a PCI slot, and mITX a combination really worth £200 extra? Not convinced. The $220 price though is very appealing. Next stop would be Intel S1200KP, if those were available.
Yaroo! Broke my target with 29:07 for 1000 (good-form!) squats. Also some 500 batches of press-ups and dips. I’ve only done a few days of exercise in the last fortnight because of travelling, but I’ve been following CrossFit increasingly closely since Christmas, and once I’ve got a bit of space in Cambridge I’m buying some kit to follow it and work more seriously to get in shape.
Long time, no posts. The basic outline of the time between the tour getting back and starting the job on Aug 1 is a three week break. The first was spent at home in Hampshire, after waking the parents by mistake by turning up at 5.00 am on Sunday night without having been able to warn them (oops!). I lolled around at home for a few days, getting a bit of reading and relaxing done, and doing all the househunting research I needed. On Friday 15 I left with a backpack for London and camped out with the parents over the weekend for the first swathe of BBC Proms. I had some awesome experiences there with my arena season pass, getting great places to hear the great music. William Tell and the Brian Gothic were hugely fun and immersive highlights. After the weekend, I went up to Cambridge and kipped with Daniel to do some more househunting. I think we’re almost there now with a place. I also went back to London a few nights for more proms. Over the weekend after the second week, I went to Will’s big party, which was awesome. All sorts of guests swamped the Hess’ house for days on end having fun eating and making noise. It was well worth seeing all the people there. Again without warning I gave the parents a more pleasant surprise by turning up on Sunday evening in time for tea. This week then, I’m watching films, planning the purchase of an entire houseful of stuff and getting reading for job and Cambridge. I hope to end the week by going back to Cambridge with a flat waiting for me and a houseful of stuff in the car.
Things worth commenting on: the books I’ve been reading, my experiences of cycling across London a few times, and the accumulated pensées of several weeks, not to mention a report of the choir tour. Though I have the time, but I’m on holiday from communication, so I’ll spare you all.
A pretty funny anecdote from a psychology book.
Aching all over. I’m reasonably close to my new target of 1000 squats in half an hour, which I finished off yesterday with trying to do.
Got some more Wilson’s first law action yesterday. Everything improves with a bit of lard/dripping/suet.
Shocked by lack of fitness after just a month off since exams. Did 1000 dips and pressups and felt surprisingly tired. More work needed, but have managed to justify two or three days’ downtime before tackling all my tasks.