Poetic License to Kill.

BBC Fail

2009-11-19T19:36:56Z

I know three programmers working at the BBC who were not offered jobs. At least originally. First, you search for a job. Then you answer a bunch of questions and you then have to register to apply. Then you then have to fill out an online application and click submit. You can't send a CV and you can't talk to anyone. The result? The three programmers I mentioned who were not offered jobs were all rejected by this Web process (I was sent a stock email informing me that I wasn't qualified), but all three of these programmers now work for the BBC because they found someone in IT who could forward their CV. The people who actually know about the jobs were very interested in the candidates in question, but the Web forms guarantee that many qualified candidates can't get pass the submit button.

Why, oh why, would you want to go through this pain? If the companies argued that it restricted the CVs to serious applicants, I could almost agree, but the fact that strong candidates are being rejected by this process is a frustration.

Similarly, I know someone who was trying to apply for a job with Islington Council and their application process was, in short, pathetic. CVs were not allowed. Instead, you have to jump through their hoops and answer a bunch of ambiguous questions which do nothing to judge whether a candidate is qualified beyond their ability to jump through hoops. Unless a candidate is dramatically unqualified, you can't judge a person's mettle without meeting them.

I told this person not to apply for that job. Any company which is so silly as to not recognize this idiocy is clearly not a company you want to work for. Then I remembered that the BBC does the same thing.

The BBC is a great place to work, but they often complain about a shortage of qualified applicants. I wonder why.

Approaches to Managing Software

2009-10-28T12:20:06Z

I've just had the most interesting meeting with another developer who needed to figure out a solution to a complicated problem. His solution was a caching strategy with synchronization issues. He had three separate processes which must be run in sequence and at the end, the only way he could figure out if his information was stale was to refetch the data he was caching. I was totally confused by the approach. When a solution is complicated and non-obvious, it's time look at the underlying design. He wanted to solve the problem and I wanted to simplify it. As it turns out, one minor change to our system eliminates many of the problems he was facing.

When faced with a complicated problem, I can't understand why someone's first instinct isn't to step back and say "what problem are we really trying to solve and how can we make it simple?" That should almost always be the first approach. When you can't solve it, simplify it.

Marketing Fail

2009-10-25T13:18:53Z

Three guesses why this "exercise equipment" never caught on.

You have to wonder just who the hell thought they were going to make their fortune on this thing. How could you not realize what a laughingstock this thing is?

Another fake "Obama was born in Kenya" rumor

2009-10-25T11:13:43Z

Birthers fail another one. They cite a 2004 "AP" story as evidence that Obama was born in Kenya. Turns out that the Associated Press did not, in fact, mention that Obama was from Kenya. Seems the "Kenyan-born" reference was added by an author who didn't bother to fact-check his sources.

His birth certificate has been released. Hawaiian state officials have verified that it's real. Hawaiian newspapers at the time of his birth had his birth notice. The courts have routinely tossed cases about this because there's no credible evidence he was born in Kenya. The "Kenyan" birth certificate which was released turned out to be a poorly made forgery. Several respected conservative magazines have investigated this and determined that Obama was born in Hawaii. Would you people who insist upon "knowing the truth about where Obama was born" knock it off? We already know the answer and there are far more important things to pay attention to.

The Republican Party is Crucifying Itself

2009-09-28T20:30:12Z

In the Trinity College study American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population (PDF), we find that the Republican Party has troubling times ahead. The "nones" are those described as "no religion" in the American Religious Identification Survey 2008. The "American Nones" study has this to say about "nones":

Nones are easily misunderstood. On the one hand, only a small minority are atheists. On the other hand, it is also not correct to describe them as “unchurched” or “unaffiliated” on the assumption that they are mainly theists and religious searchers who are temporarily between congregations. Yet another incorrect assumption is that large proportions of Nones are anti-rationalist proponents of New Age and supernatural ideas. As we will show, they are more likely to be rational skeptics.

Amongst some of the highlights of the survey, it found that in 1990, 6% of Democrats were nones and 6% of Republicans were nones. Today it's 16% Democrats and 8% Republicans. Nones are currently 15% of the population, but that number is expected to rise to about one fourth of the population in 20 years. Further, fewer than 10% of nones under the age of 30 are Republicans. If the present trends continue, the Republicans are going to find it harder and harder to sway voters.

In short: the Republicans are actively chasing away one the largest and fastest growing demographic groups in the US. I wonder, perhaps, if they're actually responsible for this group's growth.

Pop Quiz!

2009-09-26T21:08:23Z

OK, pop quiz time. Please define "patriot".

(Originally found at Cake Wrecks)

Leveraging Bureaucracy

2009-09-08T12:43:25Z

Bureaucracy is a breathtaking thing to behold. I'm gone on holiday for two weeks only to come back and find that I'm now a Java developer. Though surprising, this isn't as entirely crazy as it sounds. A new system integrating with our platform needs to be developed and since it's a server on our Forge platform, it must be written in Java. Not having written Java in years, I am nonetheless our most experienced Java developer.

So we now have two new Java developers on loan to our team and my task, along with another developer on our team, is to learn enough Java to take over the new system being built and to use our rights modeling domain expertise to guide the Java developers on the creation of the new system.

So today, we find ourselves needing to explain the modeling of a particularly complex part of our system and we need to find a meeting room with a white board to diagram it. After much searching, one of the Java developers reports back that he's found an available room. Upon arrival, we find a lady in the room, gaily chatting away on her cell phone. Stumped, we stand around and try to decide options and I say "hold on a second." Our booking system is so rubbish that rooms are often double-booked.

I opened the door, stuck my head in and asked "excuse me miss, have we had another booking error?"

Since I asked, seems she just assumed that we had legitimately booked the room and apologized and left, making way for our team.

Not a nice thing to do, but we had a full, uninterrupted hour to realize that the problems we faced were greater than we thought.

As A Native Texan, I Approve This Message

2009-09-02T16:56:59Z

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

What do you want in a Web site?

2009-08-19T09:13:16Z

I'll be taking a couple of weeks off from hacking on my pet project as I'll be in the US for a friend's wedding, but in the meantime, I can still have ideas percolating in the back of my mind. What I'd like is some of your ideas percolating in the back of my mind.

Maybe you love adventure, you're bored with your home country, you prefer the politics of other countries, you want to travel, etc. Whatever your motivations, you probably have been annoyed trying to find "one stop shopping" for information about moving to other countries. Turns out it's a hard thing to do, but there's a lot of possibilities out there, if only you had the information.

Most Web sites dedicated to this topic restrict you to a single country or are old school sites like www.expatriates.com or hideous commercial sites like www.escapeartist.com with no social aspects.

I think it would be interesting to build an online community of world travellers (or would-be travellers) with an ability to share stories, experiences, tips, etc. Search for countries by ease of entry, languages spoken, government stability, job prospects, immigration laws, etc. If such a Web site appealed to you, what would you want to see in such a site?

My Current Project

2009-08-17T23:08:11Z

Because you were just dying to know (ok, you weren't), I've been building a Web site. There's nothing terribly exciting and most of you would be bored to tears by it, but geeks might be interested in the technology used to build it.

The site is running from the built-in Catalyst server on a friend's box and the database is SQLite, so don't hammer it too hard :)

Naturally, the source code is public.

How To Find Out If People Read Your Long Emails

2009-08-13T14:56:50Z

I had to send an email to our internal customers. Regrettably, it's both an extremely important and long email. Those tend to not get read. My email opened with this:

In our never-ending quest to annoy our customers, the PIPs team has identified a potential need for a backwards-compatible API change.[1]

See that "[1]"? Means there's a footnote. After a long, drawn-out technical explanation, I have a footnote. If they read the email, they might actually notice the footnote. This is that footnote:

1. Actually, our first plan to annoy our customers was to steal your puppies, but we quickly realized that some of your are puppyless and we'd have to spend our hard-earned cash to buy you puppies first. That would annoy *us*, hence our fall-back annoyance strategy.

I originally wrote "eat your puppies", but that would have been unprofessional.

Engaged!

2009-08-12T08:30:11Z

So it turns out my trip to Portugal was more eventful than I thought. Leïla, the woman to the right, foolishly agreed to marry me. No date is set for the wedding, but given that it will be a mix of French, American, and English cultures (one of these things is not like the others), it should be interesting. I have a larger Lisbon, Portugal photoset on Flickr, if you care to see it.

We also mentioned this on Facebook. My favorite comment so far was by a French gentleman whose English appears about on par with my French. He wrote "We enjoy the weeding ceremony". Seems like a rather appropriate mistake :)

Just Because ...

2009-07-22T06:49:25Z

Update: Bah! They removed the image :/

(Can't credit the gif as I don't know the author and it's a random photobucket link)

Do You Miss Firefly?

2009-07-18T19:53:13Z

Enter Crimson Dark (that link starts at the beginning), an online Web comic. The author freely admits his influence by Firefly and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. The art is fantastic (all computer models) and the story line is interesting, too. If sci-fi and Web comics interest you at all, I highly recommend it. Pure escapism.

Things You Don't Expect

2009-07-17T14:27:06Z

Talking with a British colleague who mentioned he was at a French restaurant in London with his sister. The waiter came over and asked if their meal was OK and his sister replied, in French, that it was an excellent meal. The waiter apologized, explaining that he was from Indonesia and didn't speak French. So she repeated what she said in Indonesian. The shocked waiter replied that he was actually from Bali and didn't speak Indonesian. So she repeated what she said in Balinese.

Damn. Just damn.

Many people (usually not British or American) speak several languages, but they're usually European or African. Frankly, were I the waiter, I think my brain would have imploded at that point.

Writing Exercises

2009-07-12T11:39:13Z

Yesterday I submitted my first ever fiction piece for publication. I doubt it will get accepted (it is my first submitted piece, after all), but I figured I should try.

Writing non-fiction is easy for me, but fiction is harder. Much harder. However, as any good writer knows, there are three rules to writing: write, keep writing and write more.

I generally have interesting ideas, but my characterization skills are a bit weak and I'm not terribly good at establishing the setting and atmosphere. To rectify that, I have am working through some writing exercises and thought I would share one with you.

The exercise is to pick up a book at random (preferably one you do not know), pull one sentence out of it and, without referring to the context, write keep writing from that sentence, without stopping, three times, each time taking off in a different direction. The sentence I read at random was:

"A man called Bruno seems to be their most colourful victim. Perhaps he chattered with angels too, so to speak."

So let's see how I handle this.

1. "A man called Bruno seems to be their most colourful victim. Perhaps he chattered with angels too, so to speak."

Clearly they weren't going to let this matter lie, but if Bruno was really chattering with angels, perhaps he really was communicating with the Angels. This was bad, but perhaps not as bad as if they were communicating with Bruno.

The trio sat and stared at the campfire, its sparking and crackling the only hint of a conversation. It mocked their silence, seeming to be bright and happy, casting playful shadows about their grim faces. The ladies knew that Bruno's disappearance was a problem. More important, though, was whether or not he really was chatting with the Angels.

2. "A man called Bruno seems to be their most colourful victim. Perhaps he chattered with angels too, so to speak."

At this, Angel Raphael looked up. His solemn, beautific, almost painfully perfect face turned to each person in turn, the light from his gaze illuminating their faces as he regarded them. One by one, they met his piercing blue eyes, cold as ice chips but warm as a mother's love. Raphael's wings fluttered nervously when he finally spoke.

"Fuck off. I'da heard about it if Bruno was grassing on 'em. Ain't no shit goes down that I don't know about."

And with that, a collective herd of shoulders slumped in relief.

3. "A man called Bruno seems to be their most colourful victim. Perhaps he chattered with angels too, so to speak."

Sally, a broken down street walker if there ever was one, protested loudly. "Bruno wasn't going down. He woulda beaten 'em to death with his cock with one testicle tied behind his ass!"

Silence.

The nun coughed nervously. She knew that no wimple was white enough to overcome the black stain on Sally's soul. Plus, like the rest of the gathering, she had no idea what the hell Sally meant. Usually Sally didn't either. The nun quickly made the sign of the cross, her fingers automatically tracing out the seven points.

Hmm, I have a lot of work to do, but I think the disturbed direction of my thoughts is giving me hints as to my voice. It's a dark voice with a tendency to hysteria. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Misadventures In Language

2009-07-04T10:34:04Z

Today my girlfriend was making lunch for us and it looked lovely. I asked her what she was making and she replied tarte au thon. She speaks quietly and my French is not perfect, so when I mispronounced this as tarte au con, she was a bit surprised.

It's natural when one is not fluent to inadvertently say the wrong thing, but referring to "tuna pie" as "cunt pie" was particularly unfortunate.

Things I Had In My Mouth Last Night*

2009-06-19T08:40:32Z

Crocodile
Zebra
Kangaroo (yummy!)
Crickets
Creme de menthe from a bottle with a python curled up in the bottom

... and a baby bee.

* Not an exhaustive list

Best. Hack. Ever.

2009-06-16T10:55:10Z

I am not responsible for this. I merely found out about this from another developer, whom I'll call 'Alice', who told me about the task she was given.

Customer: we need you to write a script which synchronizes two directories.
Alice: why don't you just use rsync?
Customer: because the target box runs Windows and the admin says it doesn't work.

Alice wrote the script and it works just fine. All it does is call rsync.

Hay Fever

2009-06-15T09:01:33Z

About once a year, I have a really bad hay fever attack. I mean, really, really bad. Sniffling, sneezing, tears running down my face. In fact, I had one exactly three years and two days ago, my first day on my first job in the UK. It was pretty embarrassing.

Now, I'm having one today. I'm typing this at work, but I think I need to go home soon. This is awful.

Worst. Joke. Ever.

2009-06-11T11:18:03Z

Last night I went back to my old house in Ealing Broadway and picked a a few remaining things, got my deposit back from the landlord and hurt my back -- again -- by being stuck standing and stooped over on an overcrowded bus for half an hour. By the time Greg and I got home, I was in a poor mood, so I bought a bottle of Bruichladdich (whiskey) and Greg and I just sat, smoked, drank and chatted the remainder of the evening away. And that's when, without warning, I said:

I once knew a girl so stupid she had her eustachian tubes tied and now she can't hear her baby crying.

It was intended as a joke and I've no idea where it came from (I think I made it up on the spot and it's not particularly funny), but that's the strange way my mind has been working lately. In fact, plenty of strange things (words) are rummaging around in my brain. The other night, while washing the dishes and doing laundry, I walked over to my computer, opened it up, and wrote a seven page short story. It all just poured out of me. It's rather bizarre and I've no idea what's going on but I expect that stress from having so many things to juggle is part of it. I won't complain about it getting me writing again. I'll just go with the strange flow for now.

Tube Strike

2009-06-09T09:28:43Z

Tonight we will enjoy a Tube strike lasting 48 hours. This is annoying because bright and early tomorrow morning, I need to be at the US Embassy to renew my passport. Fortunately, because I'm a BBC employee, I can walk from the embassy to the Broadcasting House (BH) and catch a shuttle to the BBC Media Village (near the Television Centre, or TVC) in which I work.

Walking from the US embassy to the Broadcasting House is a 17 minute walk and having a back injury, I'm not keen on this. If I want to save a bit of time, I could instead walk to our Marylebone High Street (MHS) offices (good luck pronouncing that correctly if you don't live here) and catch the shuttle bus there. After reading the instructions we've been sent, I've opted not to. I reprint the relevant section here, verbatim.

Customers catching the MHS shuttle going from BH to TVC are recommended to catch the earlier shuttle going from TVC to BH and then waiting on the shuttle at BH to guarantee getting a seat.

Got that? Seems Auntie Beeb has Alzheimer's.

Trousers

2009-06-08T11:57:03Z

A couple of months ago, I was buying a new pair of blue jeans and the size I tried was a bit too large for me, but other than that, they fit just fine. Being in a hurry, I just grabbed the next size down off the rack and bought them without trying them on.

Later I found out they were mislabeled and I could squeeze into them, but I couldn't fasten them around my waist. Today, I'm thinking about just donating those jeans to a charity shop. I have to pull them up constantly because they're too big for me. I've lost over a stone and a half and am over halfway to my goal of losing three stone (42 pounds). I was at 15 stone (210 pounds) when I finally decided it was time to do something about it. And I'm not writing "stone" just to be an annoying twat. I genuinely think of my weight in stone, now. It's very, very strange.

The weight loss has all just been a matter of healthy eating. Breakfast is usually a bowl of Dorset Muesli with non-fat milk. Lunch is a salad or soup and dinner is usually a healthy meal of stir-fry, a chicken breast with veggies or something else suitably low-fat. Snacks are often just peaches or apricots. I frequently "splurge", as I did last night with a dinner of baguette and a variety of lovely cheeses (and I've not given up alcohol), but my diet is good enough that it's still working quite well. It's gotten to the point where I've had to ask my girlfriend to serve me smaller portions because my appetite is so much less than it was.

Now I just have to go out and buy new clothes.

This Is Not the Onion

2009-05-20T08:13:07Z

In reading this news story on illegal behavior by members of the House of Lords, I reached the final paragraph and had to double-check that I wasn't reading The Onion:

'Two other Labour peers implicated in the affair, Lord Moonie and Lord Snape, were cleared of any wrongdoing but ordered to apologise to the Lords for "inappropriate" conduct.'

If you're not a Harry Potter fan, that won't make much sense. We, on the other hand, are amused.

Embarrassment

2009-05-14T16:12:22Z

Embarrassment: when a French person asks for your help with pronunciation, don't correct them by teaching them how things are said in Texas.

I haven't been back to Texas in almost two and a half decades, so the idea that I still pronounce some things that way is a bit of a shocker.

And if you must know, the word was "genuine". The "i" is pronounced with the "i" in "pig", not "swine". She was pronouncing it like the "ea" in "wean".