Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - life

Everyone likes stats

2012-03-26T23:54:00+01:00

So what has my blogging frequency been like, well I'm glad you asked:

[archive_chart name="Posting frequency over the last 12 months" width="600" height="300" count="12"]

It seems the trend is pretty clear and it's not exactly surprising as my hands have been more than full with other concerns. Despite coming to a phase where the odd hour or two in the evenings is possible blogging is still fairly low down the priority list. This parenting lark does seem to occupy a fair amount of time. So far it's an exercise in trying to balance a number of competing demands. While being responsive to Ursula's minute by minute desires keeps her generally happy we are beginning to see the benefit of following some sort of routine. It seems the oft repeated parental sayings are founded in a degree of experience ;-)

Of course just as we started to establish a successful routine we disrupted it all with a trip up to Manchester. Thanks to some friends parents we were able to set up a base of operations in Bolton. We then proceeded to do the local tour and introduce Ursula to our northern friends. She was very well received on her debut although we suspect the schedule may have taken it's toll. By Sunday she was starting to get a little fractious so it was good to end up at P&C's for a very relaxed evening. We took it easy on the journey down on Monday and have been getting back into the swing of the normal routine.

It was really nice to catch up with everyone we saw while we were visiting. Next time we come up North we will probably try a slightly less hectic schedule with hopefully a less frazzled family. Thankfully next week is all based at home which is a much more familiar environment for all of us!

Rewards

2012-02-17T07:44:00+00:00

As predicted the blogging has dropped off quite precipitously. I still seem to be functioning on a reduced amount of sleep (although Fliss is taking the brunt of the sleep interruption by far). However the evenings are both shorter and much more structured. Eating is slowly moving from a task best accomplished at speed as we alternate baby holding/entertaining duties with each other to one where Ursula is happy to sit in a bouncer/bumbo and watch us shovel food in our faces. We have started getting into the bathing/sleeping routine which currently puts us all to bed at roughly the same time.

However it's still very rewarding. I didn't think I'd get quite so gooey inside when Ursula started smiling at me. Although she's simulated smiles for a while it's mostly been a prelude to some sort of gas incident. She is now firmly into social smiling territory and every time she does it it's like a gift to salve the troubled soul that your at least doing something right. In the time that this post has been brewing (I started it a couple of weeks ago) we have even moved on to giggles and laughs. It's certainly noticeable from close up how fast they start developing their personalities as they move from needing food/sleep/cleanliness to discovery and play.

We have managed to leave the house for extended periods and spent a lovely weekend in snowy Yorkshire on the annual walking holiday with friends from Fliss' time at university. It was particularly fun because there was a spike of new parents with their kids (along with a couple of old hands) along with plenty of helpful hands willing to hold babies when parents needed to do something else. I found is particularly helpful chatting to people a few months/years ahead of us in the parenting game and be reassured about what we are doing. My stated parenting style is to exude a air of calm confidence while paddling like mad under the water to figure out what to do next.

Fliss' mum was very kind to come over and spend the night giving us a chance for a meal at one of our favourite Italian restaurants with just the two of us. It was nice to get a few hours to ourselves to remind us of what life used to be like. However for all the work and disruption that a new family member causes we are happy with our new life and only occasionally think wistfully of our former freedoms. It does also make those periods of freedom when they do happen taste all the sweeter.

In other news I have also been working quite hard at my day job and have recently been promoted to Principle Software Engineer. I'm now responsible for all the software engineers in the company as well as all the software deliver-ables. I'm not quite a drop-in for the old Head of Software as I'm sharing some of the management type responsibilities with the Head of Engineering as I'm quite keen to keep my hand as a developer. 2012 is certainly shaping up to be a busy and rewarding year.

Getting organised

2012-01-13T10:38:00+00:00

What with becoming a parent and getting promoted I suddenly find myself needing to become a lot more organised. Although I've been using org-mode for a bit I need to get a lot more organised with it.

Previously I had two sets of org notes. My personal set where sitting on my server which I could access via the terminal. I generally accessed this at home on the odd occasion when I was doing things like the annual round of insurance quote gathering. The second set was a fairly simple time sheet type affair that I was using at work to keep a vague track of where all my time was spent. The big missing part of this is when I'm on the move.

I've just recently upgraded my phone to the latest Galaxy Nexus which is a fine Google enabled device. I make no apologies for using Google's calendering and shared document services. They work very well and importantly allow me to share things with my wife who doesn't quite share my desire to run everything from a text editor. However for my personal task lists on the move and remembering what's coming up at work it doesn't quite cut it. Besides I like org-mode and I'd heard about MobileOrg so I endeavoured to set it up.

MobileOrg has been around some time for the iPhone but the mechanisms it uses for integrating with org-mode are fairly well documented. As a result there is a couple of Android implementations for it. Matthew Jone's mobileorg-android was the first version I tried.

The original sync method for MobileOrg was to use a service like Dropbox to sync files. Given the history of Dropbox's security I wasn't about to move my files into the proprietary cloud. The alternative is to enable WebDAV on my web-server and therefor enable two way communication via HTTP. It was a little concerning to see self-signed SSL wasn't supported as this does open up a potential attack vector on my machine. I've mitigated it a little by using digest authentication instead of basic-auth but I'd still prefer to be conducting these read-write operations over something more secure.

Initial results were a little underwhelming. After some messing around with the format of org-links I eventually got a basic outline summary up. Unfortunately I can't seem to sync notes created on my phone to the server. This seems to be a Apache problem which I shall have to dig into later.

After perusing the market some more I noticed there is a new project in town. Konstantin's MobileOrgNG was forked some time ago from Matthew's code and on installing I found it looked an awful lot better. I've still be unable to post any locally added notes (due to previously mentioned Apache config issues). However it's presentation is a lot slicker and it shows a lot of potential for being a good MobileOrg client.

I'm now stuck with a classic open source fork dilemma. The code bases look to have diverged enough that these two projects are essential going their own way. Looking at the two impact graphs it looks like they diverged around August 2011 and since then MobileOrgNG looks pretty much like a solo effort albeit with an impressive commit rate of new features.

So the questions for my readers. Which code base should I jump on? Has anyone got experience with the two different code bases and the reason they split? Are there any other Android clients for org-mode I should be looking at?

Project Veg Patch

2011-10-17T14:46:00+01:00

I noticed I haven't posted anything this month about what's going on in my life. Well as you can imagine the impending arrival of our first child has kind of glossed over everything else. I have not yet achieved a state of panic but it's very firmly in the radar now. Although I've been taking it easy on the drinking (so as to help Fliss avoid the temptation) I'm now going fully dry as I'm on potential hospital driving duties.

It was nice to catch up with a bunch of people at Adam and Lou's wedding last weekend. It more or less qualified as our last venture away from home for the foreseeable future. This weekend I spent a good deal of the time laying the excess turf from Project: Veg Patch over what used to pass for our front lawn. This of course means the main landscaping of the new "Vegetable" patch at the back of our property is now complete:

` <http://www.bennee.com/~alex/blog/2011/10/17/project-veg-patch/alex-and-fliss-landscape-garden-1000/>`__

I have to admit most of the work at the back was contracted out including a my brother and his partner who did most of the work levelling, laying and building what will hopefully be a productive growing area. Still we are both very pleased with the outcome and hopefully the grass will take and we can concentrate on planting what will provide us with fresh food for the future family!

Primary Data

2011-05-17T12:56:00+01:00

` <http://www.bennee.com/~alex/blog/2011/05/17/primary-data/baby-3/>`__

It's hard to explain the impact of seeing a few grainy pixels waving at you on a medical monitor stand. While it's a sign of our modern magical times that I can provide people with a picture of my yet-to-be borne child it loses some impact due to it's static nature. While we watched this recognisable form bouncing around in natures playpen my thoughts underwent a moment of crystallisation from the abstract to the actuality. Obviously I've known we* were pregnant for some time however this was the first irrefutable primary data that it is really all happening.

Obviously I'm not the first person to feel these sort of things. Evolution has been doing it's thing for some time providing the unbroken thread of life to something that is now our responsibility. I'm left thinking that questions about my suitability as a parent are rather academic now. I'm slightly mollified by the fact that a number of my friends have already walked this road. Friends that joined me in youthful excesses and moderately irresponsible behaviour back in the day seem to have taken on the mantle of parenthood with relative ease. It gives me hope that the mantle will fit me as well.

* I hesitated to use the pronoun as Fliss is very much taking the brunt of the pregnancy downsides. However it is a shared experience even if my input at the moment is restricted to platitudes and earnest requests if there is anything she would like that I can fetch her.

Getting warmer

2011-04-04T14:06:00+01:00

We've been bumbling along with the central heating for the last few weeks. Every time the weather seemed to be taking a turn for the better it would invariably dive back into cold misty mornings. However it's starting to look like spring is finally arrived and starting to make it's presence felt. It certainly felt like it when I wandered around the garden on Saturday morning sipping my first cup of tea of the day. It was enough to convince me to hang the washing outside which gives you an insight to how radical my Saturdays have become.

It wasn't a very busy weekend which is just as well as the week at work was fairly harrowing. I did spend some time pottering in the garden doing my assigned tasks and finalising plans for the back garden. About the only other achievement of public note was preparing a full Lamb Sunday Roast for our neighbours.

Apologies for the rather banal quality of this post. I do have a number of things I want to write about including the up-coming AV referendum, some back of the envelope calculations with respect to student financing, and the irony of Microsoft referring Google to the EU competition authorities. However despite having a number of things I want to talk about/spark discussion I'm finding it hard to actually get around to writing about them so for now you'll have to contend with these snapshots of my domestic life :-)

In other news

2011-03-28T10:04:00+01:00

Rat diversions aside the weekend was a fairly sedate one. We visited a rather nice Japanese restaurant in town on Saturday with a bunch of the Cambridge LARP group. We left feeling well stuffed.

I spent a chunk of Sunday attending to tasks as directed by the head gardener while she continued attempting the Saturday Times crossword. We seem to have become Saturday Times readers purely on the basis of the quality of their puzzles. Marcus assures me that the Gruniad provides a more brain twisting Cryptic Crossword which Fliss aspires to graduate to one day. Personally I'm happy to manage one clue per crossword but I think I'm getting better at them over time.

We spent a large chunk of the weekend watching through C4's alternative take on teen super heroes Misfits. It's been a fun show to watch and I suspect we'll get to the end of the season 2 box set in short order. We'll have to be careful because there seems to be a lull in any decent TV until Easter when we'll be spoilt for choice. Recommendations for other box sets welcome ;-)

Goodbye Nana

2011-03-14T07:44:00+00:00

The weekend was overshadowed by saying goodbye to my Nana on Friday. She was the last of my grandparents to go after reaching the grand old age of 95. Right up to end she maintained her sharp wit and sense of fun. The service was a nice humanist celebration of her life and was a reminder of how much harder life was back then, especially raising kids while your husband went of to war. It was slightly surreal to see the whole clan gathered in full. I don't see my extended family as often as I should and funerals are such bittersweet affairs. The sisters had done a wonderful job organising everything including putting out a large selection of pictures from over the years which brought back lots of memories of childhood. She loved her grandchildren and there we were all grown up and saying goodbye.

Still paddling under the water

2011-02-10T12:15:00+00:00

Don't take the lack of activity on this blog as an indication that life has been quiet, far from it. Work continues to be an exercise of multiple plate juggling. Although most nights I've been either clocking up kills on CoD multi-player or vegging watching DVDs other stuff has happened. In brief:

* I bought a new PC, pimped out with 16GB of RAM and an SSD it makes a fine development box.
* I switched my phone from VillianRom to compiled from source CyanogenMod.
* I now own real actual shares (as opposed to maybe-someday-options)
* Married life continues to be wonderful

Fliss has also been very busy doing some long hours in London so a lot of our post-work slobbing has been mutual. However we are both looking forward to a long weekend walking in Wales to blow away the post-Christmas cobwebs.

Busy busy bee

2011-01-25T11:14:00+00:00

One reason my posting rate has dropped off so massively is I've been really busy at work. So busy that my capacity for intellectual thought in the evening is reduced to slobbing on the sofa watching DVDs or occasionally firing up CoD in split-screen and killing people with my wife.

While I delivered my main project more or less on time at the beginning of January it's having more teething problems than most releases. This is in part due to it being a rather major upgrade, including the base OS being upgraded. However I have also just been given extra responsibilities for a part of the embedded product which has rather aggressive deadlines of it's own. We were hoping to go skiing at the end of February/Early March with the rest of the family but until I get a handle on things it's hard to predict if we can.

I suppose with everything else that's going on it's good that we are so busy because we can't hire engineers fast enough as the company is growing quite strongly. There are worse problems to have I'm sure.

2010 In Memorium

2011-01-02T15:25:00+00:00

2010 has been a pretty good year for us, it seems like is has packed a lot in.

Professionally I've been doing really well. The company I work for has had yet another record breaking year which has triggered my bonus again (although I don't find out how much until I get back). It continues to grow in both revenue and size. I finally feel comfortable with the code base I'm working with. At the same time the ever growing feature list means I've still got plenty of interesting things to do with it. Although the internal code is proprietary to the company I've got a fairly wide latitude to work with FLOSS code and it makes a significant portion of the NMS product. Pretty much anything that I hack on that is useful to the wider community outside the application specific task is fed upstream which is good for both the company and the wider world.

Aside from my work based hacking 2010 was also the year I became a real open source project maintainer. I've been publishing code I write and use for a long time and have done maintenance work on some niche projects as well as contributing to other projects as normal. However at the start of 2010 I released Edit with Emacs to an unsuspecting world. It started as a simple exercise in learning some Chrome Javascript and kicking me to delve deeper into elisp coding. However since then it has grown to something that gets regular contributions and is used by over a thousand people. To quote Blur it gives me an enormous sense of well being :-)

This year has also been an interesting year politically. While there is plenty of debate about the economics of some of the choices made by the coalition I'm personally fairly happy with the approach being taken given the fairly dire conditions they inherited. From my geek point of view it's heartening to see the pre-election commitment that was made to open data seems to be being lived up to. I'm hoping the changes to openness will get embedded into the way government does business permanently.

The big thing that dwarfed all other things this year of course was getting married to the wonderful Fliss. Saving up all my holidays for the honeymoon meant we didn't have many extended breaks and of course as the logistical tasks approached there was much running around and controlled panics. In the end everything went like a dream and the wedding itself was a blur of happy memories. It was a fantastic day and made all the better for all the friends and family that came along to share in the celebration. Getting married to Fliss is quite possibly the best thing I've ever done.

I do occasionally have pangs of guilt considering how lucky we have been especially when so many are struggling with the uncertainty of the economic situation and the stress that causes. All I can do is wish the best of lucky to everyone for the next year. I hope it exceeds the positive expectations and under-performs on the negative ones!

Still here

2010-05-17T12:55:00+01:00

I should be on a plane at this point, however ash has conspired to cancel my connecting flight this morning. I'm now re-booked onto another flight this evening so I'll still be in South Africa in time for meetings just on considerably less sleep.

The weekend was lovely and relaxed. We attended to some wedding preparation on the Saturday including measuring me up for my suit and picking up the wedding rings. As I very rarely wear the things it still feels a little odd making my left hand hang a little oddly, I'm sure I'll get used to it soon enough though :-)

As I was due to be leaving home at 3.30 in the morning on Monday we time shifted Sunday to try and make the morning less painful. Fliss cooked me a wonderful roast Chicken dinner and we enjoyed a quite evening together. I was fairly relieved when the flight cancellation notification finally came through. It was much nicer waking up at a civilised time in the morning with my soon to be wife.

Here comes the Sun

2010-03-15T12:09:00+00:00

The weather this weekend was a lot nicer, not only sunny but also well on the right side of the thermometer. Fliss and I spent Sunday in front of the Grand Prix going through the wedding spreadsheet and started mailing out the wedding invites. However it's already become apparent that we've not been nearly inventive enough with the hidden code. The next one will almost certainly involve a cipher of some sort - although possibly not as advanced as the ones in the xkcd book.

While the Facebook group is a handy solution for those on Facebook we are actually managing the responses via our own website. For those (very few) interested people the hacked up version of the Events Manager plugin can be found on my github pages.

We are up in Manchester next weekend and the following weekend we climb Snowden. It certainly feels like I'm awakening from hibernation. Today was the first day I got into work without having to massage the live back into frozen fingers.

Start of Spring?

2010-03-01T11:26:00+00:00

Giant Talon 1 Mountain BikeIn many ways February has been a bit of bumpy month, the sort when your never quite sure if your going to hit take-off speed for the year. Luckily it's a short month and this morning I cycled out into bright sunshine on my new bike.

Since the death of my old bike I've been muddling along with walking in and using the bike my Dad loaned me. All too often I've taken the easier car route and driven the 1 mile (as opposed to 4 mile bike route) to work. However I now have a bright new shiny, off road, well geared and well braked Giant Talon 1 and no more excuses for taking the easier route in. Hopefully I can start reducing the post-Christmas spread that I've obtained over the winter months.

Smooth Running

2007-08-28T22:37:00+01:00

I came home on the metro today after a month or so of using the pretty efficient bus service. The ride is certainly a lot smoother although they seem to be taking it easy on the new rails at the moment. I knew it was quieter as I could hear my radio without having to turn the volume up to silly levels. We shall see if the other promises of increased reliability materialise over the next few years.

Last weekend was the second weekend in a row I've spent in London. Hi-lights include seeing Jo O and her new physics bloke. Apparently I engaged in some willy waving although I like to feel my question about the practical use of the knowledge of the Standard Model was a conversational gambit.

We went to see All About My Mother at the Old Vic last night. It was a preview night but despite Spacey's "Just in case" speech it all seemed to go quite well. It certainly wins a lot of technical points for the amount of scene changing involved. Diana Rigg was excellent playing Huma and plaudits should also go to Mark Gatiss for his portrayal of the transvestite prostitute Agrado.