General

Murphy’s Week w/c 01/09/2008

2 Comments

Monday
Here we are again, on a red-eye flight from Edinburgh to London. It has been a few weeks since my last trip. In that time I have made some improvements to a Visual Basic ASP.NET 1.1 application and added Monte Carlo risk simulations to and existing C# 2.0 application (it’s now up to .NET 3.5 thanks to gratuitous use of LINQ!)

I am in London for two days, Monday and Tuesday. Oddly, I am unsure of the learning outcomes or what we might achieve from these two days – we have a software vendor visiting, so I guess we should tap him for any knowledge that he can spare us…

My usual cabin bag has been replaced for this trip, largely because I am flying into London City as opposed to Heathrow. Flights to London City make use of Avroliner RJ85/RJ100 aircraft – the overhead bins can be a lot tighter/compact on these types of aircraft. So instead, I am carrying a rather aged Microsoft .NET rucksack (hint hint!) and a leather laptop bag. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s not my laptop bag – I am returning it to our London office on behalf of its real owner. However, before you report me to the authorities hear me out! As luck and flight cancellations would have it, the real owner is actually sitting a couple of seats away to my left! Oh, wait, the intent to carry on a bag that was given to me by somebody else was there:doh! Guilty, take me away, lock me up and throw away the key!

Interestingly, the last time I travelled through Edinburgh airport with this partiucular Microsoft .NET rucksuck (the dark blue ones given out at an MSDN Roadshow circa 2000), a chap (MSFT accounts/sales chappie) tapped me on the shoulder and asked in I worked for Microsoft…that was in 2003/2004. Amazingly, whilst at London City’s DLR station *the same bloke* asked me the same question! What are the chances of that happening? Anyway, small world.

Sacrificing the laptop bag doesn’t mean I’ve left my laptop at home. No sir! I use a Targus sleeve to protect the D830 when it’s in my usual Tumi backpack bag – I’ve brought the sleeve along for the return journey. So, all going to plan, I’ll be traveling home rather light…makes a change.

Arrived at London City airport with the usual bang of what feels like a heavy landing but is actually fairly common with these aircraft. Of course, it’s a case of land and get off the runway as quickly as possible at London City, such is the length of runway and size of airport. Expansion work must have taken place as we had to walk a lot further than usual – “baggage handlers al fresco” was further evidence of the ongoing works!

Getting into Marble Arch involved taking the DLR to Canning Town then on to Bond Street via the Jubilee line – both were packed to the gunnels/gunwales (or overcrowded as I prefer to call it).

Tuesday
The return flight home was at 2005, the late one. There are two advantages to this. Firstly, it means that I can get a full day in he office, leaving at the usual time to head out to the airport. Secondly, Heathrow is not so busy after 1830…most of the time…which makes for rapid transit through security to the lounge.

Sadly the flight was delayed by one hour. However the captain boarded us before we knew of the delay. This is a cunning approach that often works – the captain sent air traffic control the “ready” message which gave us a chance at an earlier slot. It paid off as the delay was reduce by 15 minutes. You know, I am beginning to think that BA are my only source of fatty fish oils omegas – I was going to write “sole source”, but I fear @garyshort might shoot me down for bad jokes! Not whilst in-flight at least! Oh, there’s another one, doh!)

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday after a couple of trips to the dentist, it became clear that 15 years of check-ups, cleans and polishing had come to an end. I appear to have a minor infection in one of my left lower molars – the treatment is remarkably similar were it a major infection. Treatments, appointments, pain, suffering and a large bill to follow. I am not looking forward to it – the first treatment was meant to be today, Friday, however due to equipment failure it has been postponed. They say that you can be sure of two things in life, death and taxes. I would extend that to include dental work, despite taking great care to avoid it. C’est la vie I guess.

On the positive side of things, there’s only a week to go until the new Metallica release Death Magnetic:

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Developer Events

Fancy a chance to have Scott Guthrie watch you speak?

3 Comments

With REMIX around the corner on 18/19th September 2008, once again the community is gearing up to provide it’s own unique brand of “entertainment while you learn” plus opportunities for all members of the UK Community to take part in events and promote their groups and themselves.

To that end, the REMIX team are organising another Speaking Competition along the lines seen at TechEd and the UK Launch. There’s been some discussion recently about promoting new speaking talent on this thread. Well, here is a fantastic opportunity to do just this by offering the chance to speak at a major event to your user group members. In the process they can get some help in improving their speaking skills plus have a chance to win an Xbox 360! Yes “Ready Steady Speak” is back for REMIX.

For those of you not familiar with it, the format is as so:

Contestants will present a 5 min session on a subject of their choice relating to Web Development or Web Design. They will present in front of the REMIX audience and in front of a panel of judges. If there are more than a certain number of contestants (TBD), there will be ‘heats’ earlier in the day with the winners of the heats in a ‘speak-off’ in the evening session. The ‘speak-off’ will take place as stated in the evening of the first day of REMIX and the first prize is an Xbox 360 + Goodies!

Prerequisites:

Mandatory

  • Speakers must NOT have previously presented ‘full sessions’ at DDD, TechEd, DevWeek, SDN, SQLBITS, VBUG Conference, NxtGenUG FEST or any similar such conferences.
  • Speakers must create a new session of their own with new material which can be based on existing material but cannot be a simple copy of it.
  • Speakers must limit their session to as close to 5 mins as possible (overrunning time will cause the speaker to be marked down).
  • Speakers must not have previously won Speaker Idol or “Ready Steady Speak” UK Launch – Sorry to James Coulter!
  • Speakers must state their desire to enter the competition by no later than close of play on Monday 15th September 2008. E-mail dave ^AT^ nxtgenug ^DOT^ net to express your interest!

Desirable

  • Speakers should provide if at all possible their own laptop, but one can be provided if necessary. The speaker should notify the organisers of any software prerequisites.
  • Speakers should have spoken previously at a User Group meeting even if only for a 10 min mini-session or ‘nugget’. This is NOT mandatory.

The likes of Scott Guthrie will be there and could be in your audience!

Technorati Tags:

General, Opinion, Rants

Yet a lot of firms have instigated a blanket ban…

4 Comments

Just yesterday one of my friends e-mailed me with a small Outlook 2007 font size problem. There is, it appears, no solution as yet. However, unrelated to his original question, I found this link that I knew would be of interest to him in his professional capacity.

I wasn’t all that surprised to hear that his firm block sites such as Twitter. It got me thinking: Twitter, for me and for many of the folks I follow and those who follow me, it’s all about the conversation. Of course for me it’s a software development conversation – at least for the vast majority of the time. Generally speaking, I would think that most employers would be keen on peer to peer conversations and learning opportunities.

The amount of non-work related conversation that I am exposed to whilst sat at my desk (both in Edinburgh and London) is huge and very much irrelevant. Are you interested in your colleague’s telephone conversations? Open plan environments must be nightmare for those folks who can’t use a telephone quietly. I endured overhearing a 20 minute call between the chap sitting at the opposite desk and his umbrella company – I know what his weekly shopping bill is, his weekly rent, credit card spending and his date of birth…and that’s what I can recall without thinking. I was trying to work whilst this conversation took place – however since it was so close and so loud, I was very much distracted. This was just one such distraction that caught up with me today – I know that I’m not alone – blocking out the periphery noise whilst you’re trying to work isn’t easy.

The couple of times a hour that I might want to check-in with my peers, find out what they’re up to, perhaps ask them a taxing work-related question, in some organisations I’m denied that privilege. Compare the level of conversation and usefulness of Twitter to the average office-based morning chatter, it soon becomes clear that employee productivity is thwarted by in-person social networking. Of course, I’m not saying that there is little value provided by in-person conversations, far from it. What I’m saying is the amount of “noise” generated overall isn’t good for productivity, yet little is ever done to address the lost time, the distraction, the interruptions and the stress that such scenarios can create. Instead, the more focused avenues, such as Twitter, are blocked.

In a nutshell
The content that I get from Twitter is far more tuned towards the work I do. Blanket bans are often the result of the few spoiling a good thing for the many.

Next time on Murphy’s Rant
Printing on both sides of the paper, an environmentalists dream or just a source of frustration?

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Community, Developer Events

DDD7 – Voting Open

5 Comments

I am pleased to announce that voting for DDD7 is now open!

We had an exceptional response to the call for speakers, resulting in 96 submissions – thanks very much to all those who contributed!

Now it’s up to the voting public, the community, the attendees, etc. to vote for 15 sessions that they would like to see on the agenda. We’ve increased the number of votes from 10 to 15 because of the large number of submissions!

Vote here:

http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/votesessions.asp

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Development, General

Ugh. Memes. How I Got Started In Software Development.

4 Comments

Thanks to Colin (Stuff that’s in my head) and Barry (idunno.org) for tagging me in this meme.  I’m only promoting it because it gives me a chance to document a little bit of my past…

How old were you when you started programming?
I suppose I was about 12, probably tinkering with a TRS-80 (in Tandy/RadioShack), an Acorn Electron, a ZX-81 and an Oric 1.

However it wasn’t until I was 14 when a BBC Micro (Model B) arrived complete with it’s User Guide.  Those where the days when user guides were real user guides and …  The User Guide itself was over an inch thick and was ring bound.  The ring binding was perfect, you could lay it flat on a table and it would stay open, great for typing whilst reading.  This is in complete contrast to the RISC OS 3 Programmer’s Reference Manuals that accompanied the Acorn Archimedes (more about this shortly).  I learned everything there was to learn about the BBC, in some cases this meant getting very intimate with SHIELA, JIM and FRED – sometimes all at the same time (user guide page 421)!

Those were also the days of cassette-based storage.  How slow were they?  Very slow.  Indeed, when I finally got a 5.25” disk drive, I spent a lot of time moving tape-based programs on to disk.  Of course, some tape-based programs where fussy and insisted that they load and run from “PAGE &0E00”, whereas the disk control moved the base page to &1900.  So I spent more time working out how to load programs into a different PAGE then magically move it to where it expected to be where it could then be executed from.  The process of moving tape-based programs onto disk was something I became pretty good at.

How did you get started in programming?
I guess that I have my father to thank for this!  When we were in Libya, he brought home fan-fold listing paper for me to use as scrap paper.  Whilst a lot of it was ‘address listings’ and other such program output, some of it contained COBOL listings. 

What was your first language?
That would be BBC Basic.  I can’t remember how long it took me to master it.  BBC Basic had the advantage of a built in assembler – anything that was a little bit slow in interpreted Basic could be hand-cranked using 6502 Assembler.  They were the days – it was possible to learn how to understand the entire computer: it’s architecture, it’s hardware, it’s interfaces, you name it.

What was the first real program that you wrote?
I don’t know if I can remember the very first program that I wrote.  I can remember writing a number of programs whilst at school.  There was a network broadcast program that I called Channel 5 – obviously long before the TV station came along.  Then there was my A-Level project, a program that created graphs – it had to manage data, graph plotting and printing: a tall order in those days.

Part of the graphing program involved sorting data.  After the graph data had been loaded from file, I was using arrays to hold the data in memory.  My sort routine involved looking at the first element of the array, then comparing its value with the second element – if the first was less than the second, I’d use a temporary variable to allow me to swap the array elements.  I was, as you might imagine, very pleased with myself – this was a really cool sorting method!   Of course, like many/all first-time programmers, I believed that I was the first person to “invent” this sorting technique.  Oh how much I had to learn – it didn’t take long for the bubble [sic] to burst!

What languages have you used since you started programming?
ARM Assembly Language, Turbo C, Turbo C++, Turbo Pascal, ML, Perl, COBOL, Borland Pascal, Delphi, Visual Basic 6, Classic ASP (VB), PHP, Visual Basic (.net), C#.

What Was Your First Programming Gig?
Gig? I suppose by this it means where I was actually paid to write code.  That would have been in 1990 when I spent a year working for IBM in Hursley, near Winchester.  At the time I was an avid Turbo Pascal fan – my first boss was a Modula-2 dev-head, he loved it.  I inherited a C language parser written in Modula-2.  It was fun working on the parser…until I discovered that the recursive nature of the parsing process wasn’t controlled using local variables as it should be, but was controlled using global variables.  I think this was close to my first “OMG, I don’t believe it” moments (I’ve had plenty more of those since then!)

If you knew then what you know now would you have started programming?
I think the short answer to this question would be yes, yes I would have started programming.  However would I have chosen to learn assembler language?  In today’s abstract world, with class libraries getting evermore feature rich, it seems that fewer folks truly understand today’s processors at an instruction set level.  I wonder if there will be a shortage of assembly language developers in years to come? 

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers what would that be?
Keep it clean, keep your code clean.  It’s difficult to teach “feeling” – when I’m writing code I often know very early on that I’m probably writing code that will be difficult to maintain – it’s at that point I stop and think about better (read: simpler) ways of achieving the same thing.  In the same thought, I’d also recommend that you shouldn’t try and write perfect code the first time.  Don’t be afraid to write code with refactoring in mind – there are plenty of good tools that will help get there!

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?
You might think I’m weird (or may be wired) however this is an honest answer!  Back in about 1994 I was working in Newcastle as part of an Acorn Archimedes library development team.  One of the application developers was about to go on holiday, he had been frantically getting his CD-ROM based application ready for production.  Disaster struck, somehow he managed to delete his source directory (yes, backups, yada yada, I know…)  Rather than let him cancel his holiday, I hauled his Acorn A5000 into my office space (thus I had two A5000s) and proceeded to recover as much of the source code as I could.  I couldn’t get it all back, so in the two weeks that he was away, I filled in the blanks.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/A300.html

Tag, you’re next: Richard Peat, David Christiansen, Ian Smith, Scott Lovegrove, Danny Thorpe

.net, Development, General

Implementing Excel’s STDDEVP in C#

2 Comments

I have been adding functionality to one of my applications. Without going into huge amounts of detail, it’s a C# application that pushes data out to Microsoft Excel – end users like Excel! The functionality that I’m adding was prototyped inside Microsoft Excel using simulated data and…the Excel Analysis Toolpak. To cut a long story short, I really wanted to remove the reliance on the Toolpak. In fact, I really wanted as much of the control element pulled back into the C# application, i.e. I wanted Excel doing more presentation of data and less scripting.

Part of that functionality involved replicating a few of Excel’s statistical functions, most notably STDDEVP (more details here)

Of course, it’s very likely that there’s a .NET implementation available in the .NET Framework…however my brief search was inconclusive, so I set about writing my own. The code you see below will compile and run using Visual Studio 2005. If you are using Visual Studio 2008 you can take advantage of the built in Sum, Average and Count methods (e.g. total = n.Sum(); instead of the foreach…total+=num loop)

[C#, compiled and tested using Visual Studio 2005]

class Program
{
    static public double STDDEVP(params double[] n)
    {
        double total = 0, average = 0;

        foreach (double num in n)
        {
            total += num;     
        }
  
        average = total / n.Length;
        
        double runningTotal = 0;

        foreach (double num in n)
        {
            runningTotal += ((num - average) * (num - average));
        }

        double calc = runningTotal / n.Length;
        double standardDeviationP = Math.Sqrt(calc);

        return standardDeviationP;
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        double s = STDDEVP(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7);
        Console.WriteLine(s);
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

This worked for me – your mileage may vary.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

General

[geek thing] It’s a long way to Aberdeen from Dunfermline…longer now

6 Comments

Yes, I realise that what I am about to write here is perhaps taking my status as a geek too far….

Within the last 10-12 months, I noticed a handful of road engineers physically removing a motorway distance to destination sign. It was on the northbound M90 just after the Admiralty “Sky TV” junction. At that time, Aberdeen was 112 miles away.

I was a little surprised to see the replacement sign being installed about 5 feet in front of the existing 112 miles sign. I was surprised for two reasons. Firstly, there was nothing wrong with the existing sign – it was in perfect condition as far as I could tell. Secondly, the replacement sign had Aberdeen marked as being 115 miles away. I can’t imagine that Aberdeen (or Fife for that matter) had moved 3 miles further apart.

However, after the works had been completed I noticed that the sign didn’t read Aberdeen 115 as I expected it to – it read Aberdeen 117. So Aberdeen and Dunfermline were now magically 5 miles further apart. I’m sure this fact pleases some people, however I was more intrigued at how such a mistake can be made…either the original 112 was incorrect or the new 117 is…or both as the image below might confirm.

In reality, the Aberdeen 115 sign was located less than a half mile further south (back “down” towards Admiralty). Thus the first sign we see is Aberdeen 115, then a few seconds later, we see Aberdeen 117…even though we have driven “up” the motorway in a northerly direction.

Who does one report such “issues” to? I’m going to contact Transport Scotland to find out!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

General, Opinion

The Guile of Cuil

6 Comments

Without much hullabaloo, with stealth-like precision, a handful of ex-Google employees (and others) launched a rival search engine: Cuil – which, according the About page is the Irish word for knowledge (although there appears to be some dispute about what it actually means).  Semantics aside, there is even debate over the pronunciation of Cuil – in a press release, its’ founders advise that it should be pronounced “cool”.  I suppose they’re hoping that search enthusiasts will replace “Google it” with “Cuil it”?

Naturally I looked myself up using Cuil.  I was pleased to see my own web-site appear first. However, what is that car doing there?

So then I looked for “craig murphy” tdd. The results were interesting. The results are shown in the image below. Firstly, I was pleasantly surprised to see Wikipedia at the top. I didn’t know that my article Improving Application Quality Using Test-Driven Development at Method & Tools had been referenced on Wikipedia (thanks to whoever is responsible!)  Secondly, the images were, on the whole, reasonably relevant…based on the content – as the picture of the Youngsters at DDD2 demonstrates (more about this in a moment).

On the right-hand side of the image below, the developer.* link, who are those guys? I suspect they are part of the developer.* team on some sort of social outing, but the image is so small it’s unclear what’s going on. Refreshing the search results does sometimes lead to pictures of the book cover for Software Creativity, which is perhaps more appropriate.

However, whilst the images were useful, I did notice that some spurious entries were showing up. Take the result below as an example. It uses a photograph that I took (The Youngsters at DDD) and associates it with a URL linking here: http://www.webfetch.com/uk.wpro.rss/search/web/Craig The information at that URL is fairly general – whilst the information that is referenced by Cuil is there, you do have to hunt for it. But it’s not perfect: “Craig Atkinson UK based Artist / Illustrator. Hire me now damn it. CRAIG ATKINSON. fine art + illustration. available…” – this extra information has nothing to do with my search. Some work on the result filters may be required.

Of course, the photograph is on the Internet, although it’s not implicitly in the public domain, I guess that is inferred and assumed.  However this just goes to demonstrate what can happen to your photographs. May be I should start to add watermarks and release some event photos under an attribution model of sorts? That last question was, of course, rhetoric. It’s still interesting to see that Cuil have found a means of associating textual content about me with photographic content produced by me.

Poor typists and the dyslexic fraternity may be disturbed to learn that misspelling Cuil could lead you to sites of disrepute, as the first entry on this Google search confirms: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=CULI.COM&meta= 

At this early stage, I think that the folks behind Cuil have exhibited considerable guile with their claim to have indexed 3 times as many pages as the nearest competition (today, 30/07/2008 – Search 121,617,892,992 web pages). May be they have managed to index that many pages…I’m sure that I’m not alone in wanting to see the infrastructure required to handle the index and user demand.

Within hours of its launch, the publicity surrounding Cuil was frenzy-like: it was both slated and commended as something that will mature into worthy competition for other search engines. More the former than that latter, I might add.

Is it cool to exhibit such guile? No doubt time will tell.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Developer Events

MSDN Events and TechNet dates for your diary

2 Comments

MSDN Events
MSDN Event – Rich Internet Applications with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
Location: Reading
Date: 2 September 2008
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383782&Culture=en-GB

MSDN Event: Rich Internet Applications with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
Location: London
Date: 4 September 2008
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383660&Culture=en-GB

MSDN Event: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
Location: Reading
Date: 2 October 2008
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383659&Culture=en-GB

MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
Location: Manchester
Date: 7 October 2008
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383656&Culture=en-GB

MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
Location: Birmingham
Date: 14 October 2008
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383649&Culture=en-GB

MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
Location: Bristol
Date: 22 October 2008
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383652&Culture=en-GB

MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?
Location: Exeter
Date: 23 October
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383655&Culture=en-GB

MSDN Roadshow Re-Run
Location: London
Date: 24 October 2008
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383788&Culture=en-GB

TechNet Events
TechNet Event: Microsoft Virtualisation and Management Technologies
Location: London
Date: 4 September 2008

TechNet Event: Microsoft’s Visions for Unified Communications
Location: Reading
Date: 2 September 2008

TechNet Event: Microsoft After Hours
Location: London
Date: 10 September 2008

TechNet Event: Virtualisation Licensing In-depth
Location: Reading
Date: 2 October 2008

TechNet Event: SQL Server 2008
Location: Manchester
Date: 7 October 2008

TechNet Event: Windows Powershell – Around the Datacentre in 80 Scripts
Location: Birmingham
Date: 14 October 2008

TechNet Event: Small Business Server 2008
Location: Bristol
Date: 22 October 2008

TechNet Event: SQL Server 2008
Location: Exeter
Date: 23 October 2008

TechNet Event: Exchange Server 2007
Location: London
Date: 29 October 2008

TechNet Event: Small Business Server 2008
Location: London
Date: 29 October 2008

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

General

e-mail: The Perils of Reply All

1 Comment

An e-mail “did the rounds” at our client site last week. It was a 50k image that contained a scanned paragraph of text relating to some employment issue in Australia – clearly a very focused subject and one that should never really have made it on to a global e-mail. However, for some reason this image (a jpeg) was sent to many thousands of recipients globally…including the e-mail alias abc@def.com!

The original e-mail, including its 50k image attachment was 4MB in size, the first FW: e-mail in the screenshot below. As folks started to Reply All asking to be removed from the list, the size of the e-mail grew, reaching 6MB in the screenshot – I did see one that had reached 7MB. Each Reply All message included the original recipient list as text which added to the size. As time went by, hundreds of MB’s of e-mail hit mailboxes…slowing down the entire global network.

Even as IT staff issued warnings about Reply All, still people did it…it took the best part of 48 hours before the e-mails ceased and who knows how long to clean up the mailboxes. You can be sure that some of the mailboxes in the 000’s that were affected would be unattended in someway, so the legacy of the many 4MB e-mails will live on in the OST’s (perhaps PST’s too) and backup devices for a long time to come. A very costly e-mail…

Lesson learned from this: do not click on Reply All unless it is absolutely necessary. If you do find yourself in the position of having to use Reply All, do try and slim down the e-mail body, i.e. remove unnecessary content such as embedded e-mail addresses etc.

reply all

Technorati Tags:

Murphy's Week

Murphy’s Week – 14/07/2007

Tuesday
I’m due down to London today – another flight, another early start. Still, it’s a routine of sorts – and one that I’m making as much use of as possible – lots of air-side typing (such as this, got it started early this week) and lots of user group attendance in London. I Woke up a moment or so before the alarm went off – it was rather bright outside, had I overslept, a moment of panic ensued before my bed-side partner Mr Nokia heralded the new day with his dulcet increasing ring. Routine has taught me about preparation – whilst I’ve been in this mindset for many years, I have today’s clothing lined up: from the point of waking, showering, getting dressed to being in the car can be done in 15 minutes without rushing. Of course, that 15-minute time-line is only if there’s a flight involved – for some reason it stretches the closer it is to rush hour.

WordPress 2.6 was released today. I’ve been a happy WordPress user since May 2004 – it has been astoundingly stable. My only issue was spam – to solve that I use Spam Karma. It seemed to do the job, spam just stopped. Recently however, some spam has been getting through – I suppose it’s time to consider another layer of protection, such as Akismet.

Visited a vendor over near Liverpool Street. Successful visit, good demonstration, worked for me – possible future podcast victims! I took the tube from Marble Arch over to Liverpool Street – the Central Line. A rare site, a mother with her child in a buggy – we took our son in buggy on to the underground a couple of years ago – it’s not easy, lots of stairs and narrow angles. Being able to see the mother’s predicament, she was on her own, I stepped in to carry the buggy to the surface. Good deed for the day done, tick.

Doh! I’m staying in a different hotel tonight, which means that I’ll have to pick up the whole £289.00 (+VAT) room rate myself. Geez, that’s a lot of cash. For £289.00 (+VAT) per night, you can expect laundry to be left out in the corridor, black rubbish bags also left in the corridor and Dusty Bins with KFC wrappers as decoration. In the room, you can expect belly button fluff left in the bath. Don’t believe me? Check out the photographs below. However, £289.00 (+VAT) per night does buy me access to BT OpenZone – I still have to either pay the hotel for use or make use of an existing BT OpenZone account.

Wednesday
I was hoping to attend Oliver Sturm’s F# session in Livingston tonight, however since I’m 400 miles south, that won’t be happening. Not all is lost, I am able to attend the VistaSquad meet up at Microsoft’s Victoria office. It’s a shame as I had been trying hard to plan my travel around Oliver’s session. Obviously didn’t try hard enough, such is the peril of frequent travel: I’ve lost count of the number of meet ups, golf range trips, evening golf trips, etc. that I’ve either missed or had to re-schedule because of 3-4 days week in London. Let’s not count the number of podcasts, photos and video content that I have to process… And it’s best not to think about the three inches of snail mail that I have to open and and process – thankfully most of my bills are sent to me via e-mail – what did we do before electronic billing?

Sadly I didn’t make it to the Vista Squad meet up – I came down with a dose of ‘flu-like symptoms (shivers, sweats, aching joints). What do you do in a situation like this – away from home, with nowhere to go until a hotel room becomes available from 1600? Being ill whilst away from home sucks.

On the positive side, tonight’s hotel, the Hilton Metropole, was a mere £149 (including VAT and breakfast). A far cry from the £340 charge of the night before.

Thursday
Conceded and changed my 1825 flight home to the 1715 – turns out these ‘flu-like symptoms have been doing the rounds in the office. Missed the 1525 Heathrow Express to LHR so had to make do with the 1540…

Sunday
Tried hard to watch as much of The Open as I could. Wife invited the mother-in-law up to the house to “clean”. Even with Sky+, the noise and constant visible obstructions made watching the golf a trying process. Why today? Who knows? I’m sure that in some countries it may be considered grounds for divorce – again, who knows?

This week
Listened to
107 Digital Photography Explained (for Geeks) with Aaron Hockley
118 Lean Software Development with Tom and Mary Poppendieck
84 Parallel Programming with .NET

Interesting links
WordPress 2.6
Knowing what’s on your phone–and on those of your employees

Content unbecoming of a hotel of this price

Craig Murphy: author, blogger, community evangelist, developer, speaker, runner