It's all gone pear shaped!

... doh!

Ok, so a BIG PAT ON THE BACK to me.

Updated Django to current trunk and BROKE IT ALL.

Sorry. Resuming normal service at some point in the next millenium.

"Your Friend"

An open letter to those that distribute drivel

I recently received this from my mother of all people. Thought I’d share.

Dear Friends

As we move closer to the end of another year I wanted to thank you for all the e-mails you have forwarded to me over the past year.

I must send a big thank you to whoever sent me the one about rat s*** in the glue on envelopes, because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing.

Also, I now have to wipe the top of every can I open for the same reason.

I no longer ...

I really don't want to know

... how many of my friends are not quite with it.

No really.

Thanks facebook.

Having had a play of an iPhone, I cannot (at present) see anything other than hype. I agree, they are certainly pushing the mobile evolution forward in terms of UI, but in terms of actual functionality, it’s nothing more than iPod a web browser and a phone.

Please stop trying to convince me that it’s cool… Or I shall have to beat you senseless with my Nokia E70, soon to be a Nokia E90. Granted formfactor is a little difference, but it’s definately more functional than your stinking iBrick.

Super Yacht Cup: the overview

... in 60 seconds

Boring boring boring…

I mostly hate these industry events that we sponsor. Far too muhc money goes into them for very little return, they’re pretentious affairs pandering to a group of people who for the most part shouldn’t be given the acclaim they’re given, and well… they’re VERY boring.

The only good thing out of them is the experience.

You never quite understand the amount of work that goes into provisioning most of these events.

In most cases it’s relatively simple. Show up on the day, setup some banners, put the kettle on, sit round ...

Geek funnies...

... ipv6...

You’ve probably seen it, but still I found it funny.

Friend of mine has been playing with IPv6, and was complaining that the first p0rn site he visited on ipv6 (god, he’s so cliché), had no porn.

So I did a quick lookup:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.ipv6porn.com.       86053   IN      AAAA    2001:4978::b00:b1e5

The appropriate bit was highlighted.

Trouble is, only the geeks will ever see this humour.

Geeks

... spanish ones no-less!

Ok, so moof is over for some of his visits and invited me out with a group of local geeks.

An interesting evening. Not least punctuated by work related panic alerts being fired at me from the monitoring system… Not fun, but it all worked itself out.

Hopefully though, I have found some guys who I can bounce some of my ideas off…

OpenID broken...

... well... sortof...

My openid implementation is a wee bit broken at the mo people.

You can signin/register, as long as your openid provider supports the sreg extension. Specifically, it needs to respond with a `nick` and an `email` element.

Sorry folks…

There has to be a better way...

I’ve come up against a submerged rock.

I’ve recently switched from Google feed reader to Liferea. I’ve gotten to critical mass on feeds. Not so much information overload, more like it’s taking too long to skim/read the feeds.

I can’t really stop, because else I’d be clueless as to what’s happening in the world, which is somewhat embarrassing when you make an inappropriate comment to someone and have to explain “I don’t live in the real world”. I don’t watch TV, mostly because it’s bad for my productivity and ...

Beancounters...

... should be seen and occasionally heard...

… not managing engineering teams.

Especially if you understand little about the processes and technology involved.

This is the one part of my job that I really hate. Our beancounter has recently developed a habit of “meddling” in my process, to the point where I’m being micromanaged.

Proposals I’ve been asked to investigate by bossman get blocked, contracts that need signing at the request of the bossman get held and invoices that need to be paid, don’t get paid until the last possible moment.

It’s been my experience that beancounters, while essential for the correct functioning of ...

Openness and interoperability?

...a good thing?...

With the press-release from MS about the various things they’ve done, are doing and are going to do, I thought I’d take a barny over at Port25 (The Microsoft Open Source side of things).

It was an eye-opening experience.

MS have really taken up the baton recently with regards to open source. There’s all sorts of Apache 2.2 briefings and implementation notes regarding various aspects of integrating it with Microsoft Technologies like Active Directory and Server 2008. And that’s just in the quick squizz I gave the site. Some interesting reads…

Though all this interoperability ...

God I was a pretentious fuck...

A belated apology to all that know me

I’ve been cleaning up the rest of the database this evening. I know, I’m a sad little fuckstain.

Anyway, I have been reading over some of the old old old old blog records that are in the archive, and I can only guess that I must have been unbearable as a person. God the pretentiousness is some of those posts is staggering. Like I was god’s gift to the development world.

Jesus christ all fucking mighty.

Therefore, to those that know me, I can only offer my sincere apologies for the utter fuckwittery that you must have ...

PostgreSQL, I love you...

... if only it could have my children...

I love postgresql. It’s the most wonderful thing since sliced bread.

Specifically, the tsearch2 that comes with it in the contrib directory. Makes my life so much easier.

I’m so glad that theo inflicted postgres on me all those years ago. It’s such a relief to just be able to use real SQL, instead of the cut-down pseudo SQL that MySQL implements.

And before you go harping on about version 5, please note: PostgreSQL has supported SQL 99 syntax for a metric fucktonne longer than your toy RDBMS. I’d prefer to stick with something that’s ...

Ooops

... Sorry guys...

I broke the feeds last night.

Should be working now though.

It's alive... again...

Mwhahahaha

I got bored and finished off the code behind this site.

It’s more of a feed aggregator now than ever before, only it’s only aggregating my feeds. Meh, it’s a cheap way of getting a site that updates all the time.

Of course there’s spammy posts, like my music feed, but that can easily be silenced. I’ve polished here, and there, added little nuggets of usefulness including sitemap.xml main feed… so yeah… should be good now.

Damn, damn, damn

... and double damn...

Having written this lovely bit of code, I an unable to deploy it.

Why? Because I needed python 2.5 for some of it. That requires upgrading python on my gentoo box which is still Python 2.4!

There are circular references all over the place. Crap.

Something wicked this way comes!

Fun and games in lalaland of Python and Django

Finally!

I’ve managed after a few weeks working on this, here and there, to finally get the ideas and bug fixes I had while putting together my previous blog and put them in code.

You’re now looking at the all new wonderfully shiny new gotworms.co.uk.

What? It looks the same? Yeah, sadly it does… But it’s an all new engine under the hood… and this beast has an internet connection.

Yes my friends, foes and casual browsers my website has an internet connection!

You’re probably wondering what manner of narcotics I’ve been taking ...

Are you a Python Developer?

Messy or not-messy?

Something that really fucks me off about some developers is their code. Some people just don’t know how to write readable code, and it’s these fuckwits that I’m bitching about today.

Yes, you know who you are… You’re the kind of fuckwit that does things like this:

self.name,self.namespace,self.attrs,self.data,self.kids,self.parent = node.name,node.namespace,{},[],[],node.parent

… and…

if something: return self.method(arg1, arg2, arg3).method(arg4, arg5, arg6)[:self.method(arg1, arg2, arg3).anotherMethod(X, Y, Z)]

(I kid you not on that)

I mean really ...

Give me my time back

KPLXTHNX

Well last week was pretty much a waste of time.

Bossman had enrolled the gang here in the office in a CCNA course, since it’s pretty much a pre-requisite of any progression in Ciscoland.

The sad thing was, I spent the majority of the week working on other things from my lappy instead of from my desk.

sigh

Pro tips

for those plotting to go into managerial roles

When a developer, who has proven his worth god knows how many times, tells you something, do NOT under any circumstances utter the words “But 20 years ago it would have taken me 10 minutes in $language, I’m sure there’s been signifigant progress made since then…”

Doing so will likely result in your name, and several expletives being mentioned in the same sentence.

Doing so repeatedly will result in one of two courses of action:

• You being challeneged to write said code in 10 minutes using $language
  * A resignation being thrown over their shoulder as they walk out ...

Lost knowledge

good thing or bad thing?

Well, I’ve finally gotten round to updating the CV. Not because I’m looking for a job, but just a cursory update to keep things in line…

After the update, I just sat around and read what my CV actually says and whether it’s still relevant, and I’m absolutely shcoked at the amount of stuff I’ve forgotten or can’t remember anything about anymore. Looking at my CV there is alot of SHIT on there that I can remember doing, and setting up, but then having thought about it, I can’t remember the slightest thing ...

You sir, are are a retard.

Asshat developers and protocols

So bossman asked me a few weeks/months (they tend to blurr together for me), about setting up inbound SMS to the (not-public-yet) helpdesk, so that clients can SMS us with problems since, when connectivity is down, it’s usually the last thing they have left before they call…

Fine I say. Now considering the front end servers are nowhere fucking near the backend servers… as in there’s about 2000km between the 2 sides (think dynamic multipoint vpns), I’ve got to get the messages from one side of the network to the other. Ok. So I’ll just ...

Pop goes the.. err popfly?

A new name is needed.

Well, considering Microsofts past exploits, they really are starting to embrace the share and share alike concept… If only a teeny weensie bit…

It it however a masterful piece of PR and marketing…

Take Popfly for example. I’ve managed to get an account on the Alpha of this and it is looking like a really interesting approach to the whole web2.0 thing… It is the very essence of what I think of when someone says “web 2.0” to me. e.g. RSS feeds, xml, cross site queries and stuff… But popfly takes it to a whole new ...

No I'm not dreaming

Seriously, it's all good

I’d forgotten how nice it is to work in a real IDE for a change.

Over the past few years I’ve worked in a number of IDE‘s… Eclipse, IDLE, Eric 3 and 4, and the various Linux based IDE‘s that claim perfect integration with the language that you’re working with.

None of them, and I mean none compare with Visual Studio however.

Unsuprisingly, MS have really done their homework on VS… Granted I’m using the severely crippled VS Express, but nevertheless it’s still a kick ass working environment.

Tooltips, code complete, indentation, build ...

Day 1

As usual not alot to report

Ok, so in light of several factors, mostly because I really can’t be arsed anymore, I’ve decided to give up smoking.

Yeah yeah yeah, shut up bitches… Those that know me will know that the nicotine is possibly the only thing that’s kept me awake at times.

Well… i’ve done this whole give up thing so many times, I abrely notice the first day… Mostly since I just sit down and get on with shit. I hate patches, gum, inhalers… Whatever. They all suck, and it’s my belief that replacing an addiction in one form ...

Assumption is the mother of all fuckups

You, sir, assume too much

Fuckers… Ignorant fuckers.

Something that I’ve only recently started experiencing and it screams evil in terms of usability and that is assuming you know what language you want a website in becuase your IP appears to be from a specific country.

Now, I’m all for the integrated approach to web experience, but assuming that because I’m coming from a Spanish IP that I want all the web pages delivered by your site or application in Spanish is just stupid. It’s slightly incovenient for me since I don’t understand spanish that well at the moment, even ...