Retro Blogging

Posted on March 29, 2008 by Harry Wood

I’m planning to flesh out my embryonic blog a little, by importing some blog posts from the past, or bits of writing which could be blog posts but originally were not. I guess I’ll set the posting timestamp to a false value indicating approximately when I originally wrote it. This will mean they disappear into the archives, which is right, because it’s stuff I wrote a long time ago, but it’s wrong because nobody will know what I’ve most recently added to the site. So I guess I’ll add some links to this blog post, to reference the new old stuff.

It’s also very tempting to set false timestamps on posts when I’m catching up on events from a few weeks back. Is that cheating? Making it look like I wrote a blog post on the day I got back from my weekend away, rather being slow and disorganised and posting several weeks later? Maybe yes. I guess I will refrain from doing this.

Another thing I could do, is write brand new blog posts about previous things that have happened to me many months or years ago. It seems like there’s some interesting memories which should have been blogged, and would have been if I had just got on with it sooner But I could get quite carried away with this type of Retro-blogging . Trying to catalogue all the key events of my life to form a complete time line (lifelogging?), and basically writing a lot of stuff about ancient history which would disappear into the archives and never get read. So I think on the whole, if a memory is worth dredging up, then I will write it as a current blog post about a past event.

…but I do have some old bits and bobs and blog posts which I’ve written in the past, which I will be fudging the timestamp on.

New old stuff :

2007/07/22 – Drive by contributions – The typo that never got fixed
2007/04/18 – A bundle of fun with Google Reader
2006/08/08 – Munkyfest/
2005/07/20 – Google moon
2005/06/10 – Technological order and chaos
2004/04/29 – Upperthong weather station
2004/04/19 – Me being nosey and prejudgmental
2004/04/15 – London Friday Night Skate
2004/03/31 – MS Outlook – Ctrl Enter
2003/10/02 – Disco Ball

These are mostly from older versions of beezly.org.uk where I used to add blog posts occasionally. The newer new old stuff was buried in my previous attempt at a bliki. And that disco ball one was buried in some old experimentally hand coded attempt at bliki system.

Cant wait to be… in Northampton

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Harry Wood

Went to visit Nick in Northampton the other day. We went paintballing and then had a look around Northampton the next day.

Paintballing was a lot of fun. It’s the second time I’ve done it, but the previous occasion was an indoor place in a dark warehouse somewhere near Kings Cross. This time it was the proper outdoor stuff. We drove over to Cambridgeshire to apocalypse paintball . I found paintballing gave me a good adrenaline rush. More than I expected. It was also quite scary at times, crouching behind a log as gunshots pelted the trees above me. The last game was a “free for all” in quite a confined area, which was comical. Maybe I should have moral objections to running around with guns simulating war… but it’s fun. I also thought that the stories of paintballs being very painful, is a bit over-egged. You certainly feel it when you’re hit, but it’s not agonising or anything. Maybe only if you cop one at point blank range. They were pretty careful about safety, bollocking people for removing their masks etc, unlike the experience Stuart had doing 4×4 driving

Northampton was… interesting. We visited the bus station, which was voted one of the worst pieces of architecture in the country. And we visited the Northampton museum, which was all about shoes, but also featured a video display with hilariously cheesy opening music. The only line I could remember was “Cant wait to be… in Northampton”, so it took me a while to find what this was, but actually I need look no further than the wikipedia Northampton article “The Northampton Development Corporation produced a single that was released nationally by EMI, entitled 60 Miles by Road or Rail, by Linda Jardim”. So now you know.

Show us your spreadsheets

Posted on February 29, 2008 by Harry Wood

I went along to a ‘pub standards’ meet-up last night. Actually it was a ‘sub standards’, the mini one which happens in between the monthly pub standards meet-ups. On upcoming.org I spotted that muz was attending this, so decided to gate-crash at short notice.

The pub was hopelessly crowded, so didn’t mingle with everyone, just chatted to muz, and one other guy. ‘Chris ???’ from Yahoo. Some very interesting conversations, so I’ll be tempted to go along again I think.

Muz made an interesting point. “Show us your spreadsheets” is a good thing to say, to kick off an investigation into how an organisation’s data is flowing in ways which could potentially be more efficient (i.e. when seeking potential IT development projects)

MS Excell spreadsheets are so pervasive in many organisations. Often spreadsheets are where the information is input, stored, processed, and output/reported, so perhaps they should be the first place to look when figuring out what a new application could do for them. What’s more, spreadsheets are extensively misused and over-used in situations where terrible cock-ups can ocur by people failing to, for example, email a spreadsheet to a certain person, save a spreadsheet with a certain filename, in accordance with various interwoven human-enforced processes.

On the flip-side, it has to be said that MS Excell is pervasive for a reason. It’s extremely intuative to learn and use, and incredibly versatile as information management tool for taking on almost any task. Can’t remember which friend once said to me “Excell is the only software that microsoft really got right”. It’s easy to see why people who work at a desk with PC and do nothing but stir information around, would choose to learn MS Excell, and stick with it for every task. If these people would learn to program, or learn how data driven web applications are architected, they would no doubt see the world differently …but that’s our job.

Exotic green birds in London

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Harry Wood

Parakeet in Hampstead Heath Wandering around Hampstead heath, we noticed some exotic green birds in the trees. These were down by the ponds, squawking and flapping around like we were in the rainforest or something. I couldn’t believe it!

Apparently they’re not some londoner’s escaped pets, but a thriving population of ring-necked parakeets.

Underground under Camden

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Harry Wood

To settle an argument I’ve been having for ages, I was looking for a diagram which illustrates what happens to the Northern line at Camden Town. The tube map doesn’t show the details. Wikipedia’s Northern Line article has schematic strip diagram (down the right), which shows where the junction is [UPDATE: since then the wikipedia Camden Town article also has a more detailed diagram on the right]

This prompted a whole fresh bout of web surfing around [useful/strange modifications to the tube map] (owen.massey.net/tubemaps.html is a broken link now). (hmmm I need to suggest a new addition. The OpenStreetMap tube map is the only truly open licensed tube map)

But ultimately the most comprehensive diagram of what really happens below the streets of Camden, came from asking the tube enthusiasts on wikipedia. Actually all the underground diagrams on this very old ‘see how they run’ website (an archived copy of an old geocities website!) …are interesting for Londoners to puzzle over. It’s weird how you can go through that kind of underground train junction every day, and not really have any understanding of its layout.

Blogging …the excuses come out

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Harry Wood

I remember around about 1998 before the word ‘blog’ came along (or before I’d heard of it), the name of the game was having a “homepage” and trying to get lots of hits. I had noticed that some websites had me coming back regularly, because they had little news updates, and I pondered the possibility of doing this on my homepage. News about me. Stupid little things which I had been doing, or thinking, or websites I’d been visiting. Entries would get old, so they would have dates on them, and would gradually disappear off into archives. This would give me a nice space for informal outpouring of thoughts, and the hope was that some of my friends would probably pop back every now and then, and maybe some strangers too. Clever idea hey? ….Never got round to doing it though.

Obviously since then the blogging phenomenon has exploded and really carved itself a place in a new knowledge economy, turning ordinary people into a publishers as well as a consumers of news. blah blah blah. I think it’s great. I’ve always thought it was great, and yet somehow I’ve never got round to doing it. I am actually ashamed of myself for not blogging before, but let me give you my excuses:

I prefer wikis

A blog is a rather self-centred personal expression. It’s a one-man effort. OK you’re forming part of a collective conscious known as the blogosphere, but you’re writing words for your own credit. Nobody else will take the credit or the responsibility for them. What’s more you have to find your own inspiration and your own sense of purpose in any blog entry you write. These things are both good and bad, but in any case very different, from the way wikis work.

On a wiki your words are a “contribution” towards a greater purpose. You are building something together with the rest of the wiki community. There is a purpose to unite around, and the whole effort is collaborative and altruistic. To get excited about participating in a wiki, requires a different kind of psychology to blogging. So there’s my excuse. I am more psychologically predisposed to wiki editing than blogging.

….which seems to be quite rare. Most people knew about blogging long before they knew about wikis, but I think I discovered wikis relatively early on in the adoption cycle. These days wikis and blogging are lumped together in the nebulously defined “web 2.0” or “the participatory web” as I prefer to call it. People are coming to understand the value of wikis, and can sense the power which could perhaps be harnessed (or commercially exploited) somehow, but how many people actually get stuck in a make lots of wiki edits? It seems like self-centred blogging is more popular (and a more prevalant psychological trait) than altruistic wiki barn-raising.

Blogging software choices

My second excuse: While considering starting a blog, I have been boggling my mind with a myriad of complex software choices. On at least two occasions I have gone to the drawing board with a plan to build bespoke blogging software, and I did actually start coding something (from scratch) on at least one ocassion. There’s a number of feature ideas I had at various stages, which were not available, or not available together. ‘bliki’ functionality is one example (fusion of wiki and blogging modes of publishing) The integration can happen at many different levels. I investigated the idea of blogging from within a MediaWiki installation. Still quite like this idea actually. But using a wiki to do blogging is inelegant for several reasons. Mainly I would be missing some more advanced pure blogging features such as ‘trackbacks’ and ‘RSS’ (per post basis) Equally to build a blogging system from scratch would leave me missing these advanced features, unless I spent a lot of time re-inventing the wheel.

I’ve finally shelved all my half-baked plans and just whacked a wordpress installation on here on the basis that
A) I will probably never get time to finish developing a blogging system from scratch
B) I will probably never have time to install/develop/test MediaWiki plugins to acheive decent blogging functionality.
C) If I do finally get around to doing any of that, I can migrate. It’ll cause some URL upset, but it’s not the end of the world. I need to start creating blog content before I worry so much about how exactly to present it.

Obvious really, when I think about it. But then again it seems sad to turn down the opportunity for a bit of fast paced web hackery. Cobbling together something in PHP is an attractive alternative for me.