Memoirs of a Roadie

Going For The One

Posted on 11th June 2007

What a race! I watched the Canadian Grand Prix at the weekend and it was certainly a race packed full of thrills and spills. Thankfully, the only hospital casualty, Robert Kubica, only broke a leg. If you saw the accident then you would be amazed that that was all he suffered. It could so easily have been a completely different story. Just goes to show how much driver safety has been put into F1 cars these days. Several cars went into the "Wall of Champions" and the cameras mounted on the walls, gave you quite a dramatic view point. There was one incident involving Nico Rosberg and Jarno Trulli, where the commentators were convinced they'd collided, but on the replay it was like a ballet as both cars merely pirouetted around the chicane.

DanDan and I watched the race, but also thanks to the latest Live Timing from the official Formula One site, we got to watch all the split second timings around the circuit, and got to see who was pitting, who was out and who retired, often before the commentators mentioned it. It certainly added to the whole Grand prix experience.

However, man of the race has to be Lewis Hamilton. It was a little obvious he really was pulling away from the pack, and he'd amassed over 20 seconds before his first pit-stop. He did it again later on in the race too. All this despite the safety car being brought out 4 times. His team mate, Fernando Alonso, must have been really infuriated with himself, as after the first corner he appeared to have done some damage to the underside of the car, and never really managed to get the momentum back, despite clocking in the fastest lap of the race in the later stages. The 10 second penalty didn't help either. If there was a second man of the race, I think it would have to go to Takuma Sato, who had a great drive, and help to add to the excitement as he took on some of the big names.

Lewis deserved the win, and I was amused by the comment of one of the commentators, who said that Lewis has yet to have the experience of others drivers who don't finish the race heading for the Parc ferme, as in all his 6 Grand Prix races, he's finished on the podium. While there were initial stats about drivers who have done better after their first race, I don't believe any other driver has ever finished this well in their first 6 F1 races. If this is what he is like now, he is going to be a force to be reckoned with in years to come. About time we had a great British driver again, who actually won races :)

It was quite an interesting race for DanDan, as it meant that I had to explain a lot of what was happening, what the penalties were about, why two cars got black flagged, what the safety car was for, etc. You don't normally get all that in one race! It was also interesting for DanDan, as the dad of one his classmates is a rally driver, who happened to come through the karting scene alongside Lewis Hamilton, and they know the Hamilton family. It's always nicer to support someone you know, even if they are a friend of a friend :)

The most unusual casualty of the race though, was an as yet un-named beaver. Anthony Davidson managed to hit it on his way around the circuit, and had to make an unexpected pit-stop so his pit-crew could wipe the blood off the car!

File Under: formula1 / hamilton / motorsport / racing NO COMMENTS

Working On The Highway

Posted on 8th June 2007

Wheelchair man gets highway ride!

The guy was wearing a bright red shirt in a wheelchair with bright yellow bars. How much more obvious could it be? If you're driving a vehicle, especially one weighing several tons, you are expected to be aware of other road users and pedestrians. It's called driving with due care and attention. The fact that the guy was physical unharmed is something the driver should be extremely thankful for. He might otherwise have lost his job, his license and quite possibly have been severing jail time by now.

File Under: accident / road NO COMMENTS

This Property Is Condemned

Posted on 8th June 2007

I spotted the story of Julie Amero on the BBC News site this morning. While I'm glad there has been some sense to provide a second trial, with more appropriate evidence, I'm also disappointed that this should ever come to trial in the way it has. While I totally agree that minors shouldn't be exposed to the kind of images these sites promote, I also don't agree that a single SUBSTITUTE teacher should be held accountable in the way that she has.

Firstly she's a substitute teacher, meaning that her knowledge of the computer security systems is likely to be extremely limited at best and more likely non-existent. Did the school fully brief her on the security measures they have in place? Perhaps she should be suing the school or the state for not reasonably putting in place security measures to prevent children being exposed to this sort of thing in the first place. However, that perhaps also isn't fair, as in far too many cases the school or the local governement don't have any idea about computer security. It's why there are specialist computer security companies that are called in to investigate and secure companies and organisations.

I work for a company called MessageLabs. We work in an industry where stopping malicious content is part and parcel of the job. When you consider that in email alone we stop over 70% of mail as spam, virus, inappropriate content or illegal images and are also seeing increasing numbers within our web scanning and instant messaging serives too, computer security is a huge and very specialised business. MessageLabs are the largest company of it's kind in the world, and as such, every minute we stop hundreds of messages with the sort of payloads that would cause this kind of content to be popped up on unsuspecting computers. Are you really expecting a substitute teacher to have that level of knowledge and skill?

Part of the problem is education, and that isn't meant to be ironic. In Julie Amero's case, if the prosecution wins, then we are now expecting every single person to be accountable for ensuring every single aspect of their work environment is not going to get them arrested. By implication, we're also now stipulating that every single individual MUST be come a security expert. That ain't gonna happen. In my opinon this focus is totally misplaced. The responsibility for protection at the workplace lies solely with the employer. In this instance the school or state should have taken reasonable steps to ensure that all computer security measures were deployed to ensure that the desktop computers were adequately protected, and that their network was also appropriately protected, both from intrusion and in restricting the sites that can be viewed by any computer in the school. But whether you take action against the individual or the school or the state, you are still prosecuting the victims.

Taking a step back, the law basically stipulates that minor should not be exposed to this sort of imagery, which I agree with. However, as the law is very bad at being able to hold those truly responsible accountable, they go after easy prey. Although I do believe the law could be better written to make this sort of thing virtually disappear over night.

This kind of promotion is typically from the pornographic, gaming and drug industries. None of which a minor should be exposed to. What if the law found the owners of those sites personally accountable for the distribution of harmful matter to minors? What if institutions, such as schools, colleges and libraries, or businesses, such as internet cafes, and maybe even individuals in the right circumstances were able to prosecute the site owners? How quickly do you think that this sort of invasion would disappear? Unfortunately, those three industries are extremely big business, and can employ people to ensure that bills don't get passed that would effect them in this way. As such the justice systems become corrupt by allowing victims such as Julie Amero to be held up as a scapecoat.

I really hope that the prosecution's case fails, as otherwise the kind of precedence it will set, really isn't something I want to think about.

File Under: education / law / security / technology NO COMMENTS

Where's Captain Kirk?

Posted on 6th June 2007

I've just seen the unveiled logo to promote the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Hideous is one word to describe it, although there are several more I've read. It does amaze me how companies and organisations place so much trust in marketing and advertising companies, when their own staff or the general public are often only too willing to help and suggest much better alternatives. The Daily Mail has a gallery of reader logos and in the paper there are several more that are far better than the official design.

I'm actually quite surprised that this wasn't opened up to a public competition, perhaps run by Blue Peter who have a history of helping to create classic images for this sort of thing. It would have been cheaper for a start, a prize of a few thousand pounds would have been far less than the £400,000 spent on the effort a "professional" company could produce. I'm off to sign the petition at gopetition.co.uk, not that'll do any good, but hopefully someone will see sense and realise that such a bad wave of criticism is not good, and will likely mean a distinct lack of support from the very people who are supposed to be benefiting from the event, the British people.

The other thing that gets me, is that it is now unlawful to use our capital's name and the year the Olympics will be held there, together in anything that consistutes public material (e.g. a website). Read their rules to see how far they take absurdity. Technically then I cannot legally promote the games, mention the website or even link to it. So maybe I should remove that last link and hope you can find it! Idiots. I can understand why the branding should be for the sole use by the sponsors for merchandising, promotion and to label products, but to say that unless I gain the permission of the committee I am not allowed to mention the name or use the logo to link to the official site is just too daft to mention. But then again I'd not want to advertise the current logo anyway :)

File Under: design / london / olympics / rant NO COMMENTS

History Never Repeats

Posted on 5th June 2007

It's always handy doing backups, but getting into the habit of doing them is another thing. I've mostly just used a simple bash script, run manually when I need to. Which isn't what I should be doing. Today I decided it was about time I organsied soemthing to officially backup the databases. At the moment I'm only backing up the MySQL databases, but will add the one postgresql DB once it's been rehosted.

Originally I was going to use automysqlbackup, which may well have worked, but looked a bit too much work to do a relatively simple job, only supported MySQL and didn't enable me to backup via ssh to multiple servers. As the data potentially contains private information, sending via email is not an option. So I wrote my own. The result is a program a tenth of the size of automysqlbackup, it's written in Perl, backs ups multiple sites to multiple servers and the only non-core module is Net::SCP :)

Once I've added the necessary PostgreSQL support and written some documentation, I'll put it online somewhere.

File Under: backups / database NO COMMENTS

Silver Dream Machine

Posted on 3rd June 2007

This week is the Centennary of the TT Races. To be honest I had even forgotten that they were still on. Once upon a time the races featured quite heavily in the news and the media, this year I only got to hear about it because I happen to flick through the cable channels looking for something to watch.

It's a shame that motorbike racing doesn't get anywhere near the same kind of coverage as other motorsports. Personally I prefer speedway, although I haven't been to a race meet for about 10 years, but it does seem that the media don't give motorbike racing much of an airing anymore.

When I was living in Holmes Chapel, my next door neighbours used to ride in junior scrambling meets around the North West. Their dad was an ex-rider of the TT races, and Nicks first scramble bike was built from his dad's Honda. I used to love going to watch them at the meetings, an occasionally I'd get to along to the practice sessions too. At one such practice I got to do a circuit once, no jumps or anything dangerous, and had a great time. It's been the only time in my life I've even rode a motorbike.

I probably won't see any of the TT results on TV, so I'll have to remember to check the site later in the week. Though, I still have no idea who any of the riders are anymore. Gone are the days of Mike Hailwood and the like, but I remember Carl Fogarty racing in later years. Maybe it will get a bit more coverage this year, being the centennary and all, but it would be nice to see a bit more of motorbike motorsports on TV.

File Under: motorsport / racing NO COMMENTS

The Frayed Ends of Sanity

Posted on 1st June 2007

XWiki would seem to be in dire need of some sanity. When I upload a file, I expect to get an appropriate error message if it fails, or better still tell me before hand if it's likely to be too big. I don't expect there to be a two huge great Java exceptions thrown back at me. Thankfully, I'm a technical user and can decipher the program (the image was too big), but other users might not be so understanding.

This goes back to what I posted yesterday, don't send users down broken paths. If there are constraints tell them!

However, there is also another issue with sites that upload photos like this. If you have a limit on the size of the photos, resize the image. It isn't hard. This is what Labyrinth does, so although your original image might be 1280x1024 and be over 1MB, it will get saved as something like 800x800 or perhaps 150x150 for thumbnails all automatically, without the user having to worry about it. Why make the user jump through hoops, when you can so easily add a feature like that yourself?

The problem here though looks like the XWiki (or at least this installation of it) uses the database as a file store. The Java exception errors are from JDBC finding the data too big to store. Why is an image (or any media file) ever stored in the database? I've come across this idea a few times before and have never understood the point. Use the filesystem of the OS to store files and databases to store your textual content. You aren't going to search the content of the data block in the database, or if you are then I seriously doubt you get any benefit over using tools dedicated to accessing and interrogating files at the OS level.

Maybe it just comes down to the fact that Java programmers seem to want to try and do everything themselves. I've come across this several times when I was forced to use Silverstream many moons ago, also written in Java, and seem to be a mantra of Java in that it's the only tool for the job, even if it isn't.

File Under: design / usability / web NO COMMENTS

Don't Come Around Here No More

Posted on 31st May 2007

Recently I joined the Facebook community. Seeing as several coworkers were prompting me, and it looked to be a more social version of LinkedIn, I thought I give it a try. For the most part it is a fun site, although there are a few dodgy parts, but you kind of expect someone is going to try and push the barriers of taste on a site like this.

However, there was one aspect that really irritated me the yesterday, that although I found it on Facebook, I've come across similar things on several sites over the years, and is a failing of the web designers to actually understand their audience. In web design there is a lot of emphasis on usability for a very good reason. It is absolutely pointless having a beautifully crafted web site if your potential users can't use it. Now most designers do get the idea of keeping the navigation clear and easily available, and generally layout has gotten less busy over the years, but usability is more than just understanding where everything is.

Your site needs to be functional, even if that means you only have static pages that provide other ways for your users to interact with you, such as providing a contact address. To me, functional means doing something useful and not irritating your user base.

The part of Facebook that fails this part of functionality, and irritates the hell out of me, is taking your users on a trail that is a pointless dead-end and completely wastes the users time even bothering to follow it. If you have ever clicked to 'Add a friend', then you will most likely be presented with a box that requests you to enter the CAPTCHA. Just above the box is a link that implies you can forego this CAPTCHA if you verify yourself. So I thought I do just that. The next page then asks you for your mobile phone number. As I didn't want to give them my personal mobile number, I thought I'd use my works mobile. Unfortunately I'm very bad at remembering phone numbers, so it took me a few minutes to find it. I entered the number and click to get verified. I was then presented with an error message which to me, reading between the lines, said "no you dolt, an American mobile phone number, because you know, obviously ONLY the interesting people are in America". No it doesn't actually say that, but it might as well have.

If you offer a piece of functionality that is only available to a small sliver of your potential audience, SAY SO! It isn't difficult. At the CAPTCHA they could so easily have in brackets "(available for US residents only)". It would have be midly disappointing that it was only available to a select group, but at least I wouldn't have wasted my time trying to use functionality that I was never going to be allowed to access, or felt insulted by the implication that I should have known this.

File Under: design / usability / web NO COMMENTS

Can't Be Sure

Posted on 28th May 2007

"England my country the home of the free,
Such miserable weather!"

I was hoping to take Ethne to her first music festival yesterday, The Abbey Park Festival in Leicester, but torrential rain put a stop to that. In fact this month could quite easily have been mistaken for March, as we seem to have had much more rain this month than during any other during the year so far.

I used to attend The Abbey Park Festival regularly when I lived in Hinckley, and it was always a great day out. You'd get to see some great bands, usually I would bump into friends and best of all it was free. In later years they charged a nominal fee of a few pound just to help with the costs, but I noted this year it was again free, but visitors were invited to make a donation. Considering that over the two days the festival is on you can get to see about 20 or more different acts, it's a bargain. Many are unknown local acts, but considering that Leicester has had its fair share of unknown acts playing on the bill, who have gone on to make a name for themselves, it's a good opportunity to see some of the stars of the future.

Hopefully the weather holds out a little better next year, and we can have a family day out. Mind you now I'm just going to have to look to see what other family orientated music festivals are happening around the midlands and see whether are worth attending. Our friends Bleeding Hearts are playing a few, so we'll have see if we can make one of those :)

File Under: music / rain / weather NO COMMENTS

Rockin' the Paradise

Posted on 25th May 2007

In June 2006 I attended and spoke at the YAPC::NA Perl Conference in Chicago. It was great to meet up with several people I'd met in Toronto, but it was also a bit odd discovering that I wasn't as anonymous as I was last year. In Europe more people recognise me as I've been to every YAPC::Europe Perl Conference and have been involved in several other activities where people have got to know me. But apart from my appearance at OSCON in 2000 (when nobody bar the London.pm guys knew me), I wasn't expecting to be so easily recognised. It was good to put a number of names to faces though and it was a very enjoyable conference.

There was one downside though. On the morning of the last day of the conference I got called by work. Seeing as I was part of the CPR team, I was oncall 24/7 regardless of the fact I wasn't in the UK. Thankfully I didn't have to worry about it conflicting with my talk as I'd already done it. However, it did mean I had to disappear for a while as I set up jobs to go and do the task I needed to do. I'm rather glad that firstly I used screen and secondly that I'd got all the jobs running that I needed to. As while getting up to plug in the power cable, my laptop got knocked on the floor. Had I powered down and shut the laptop, it might not have been so bad, however, it was open and running. I managed to truly trash the laptop, as later investigation seemed to indicate the bus connector to both the DVD/CD writer and the hard disk drive had been damaged beyond repair. Despite swapping the HDD to another laptop, it also appears I complete wrecked the connectors to the HDD. There wasn't enough on the drive (apart from the photos I'd taken over the first few days) to warrant paying for it to be scanned professionally, so it got binned.

At first I thought that I'd now lost all my photos from the conference and was a little downhearted. As a consequence I didn't take the camera to the speakers dinner event that Josh and Heather had laid on after the conference, and I didn't bother taking any photos the following day either. Thankfully, JJ gave me a program to recover image files from portable media, and got back pretty much everything bar the first day of the conference, which unfortunately are now lost due to me writing over them with pictures from the last day. The lesson I've learnt is that to use multiple media to record photos and don't write over anything until you've had a chance to back them all up safely.

The conference was great though, and I did enjoy wandering around the city. On the first day Cog and I went up to the Skydeck of The Sears Tower, walked down to see The Water Tower and visited The Apple Store, where we caught quite a cool band, called The Ruse. For the Early Arrivals Dinner, we ended up near Wrigley Field, where the White Sox play, while the conference itself is close to ? where the Cubs play. Didn't get to see a game, but I do plan to revisit the city again. I never even took the time to check out any blues clubs, so I owe it to myself to go back really ;)

This year's conference is in Houston, so I'm hoping I can go and visit the Saturn rocket at The Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre while I'm there.

File Under: chicago / conference / perl / yapc NO COMMENTS