The Lair

Read Terry Goodkind’s Phantom on Sunday. I started on the Sword of Truth series a few years ago while waiting for Robert Jordan to hurry up and write his next book. The Sword of Truth series has diverged from the conventional fantasy genre since I started but overall, I still have to say that Richard Rahl and his doings are far from a breath of fresh air for fantasy writers, whatever the author may claim.

In Phantom, there are only about 4 major plot advances of note throughout the book. Having said that, I did enjoy reading it more than my world weary cynical tone might suggest… Terry Goodkind is predictable in the sense of good triumphing over evil (eventually - after much gnashing of teeth, pontific pronouncements by Richard and several wails to “dear spirits”) and he’s good for a lighthearted escapist read. Somewhat unusually, this book is the 10th in the SoT series; but it also is the 2nd in a mini trilogy embedded into the series. For an added note of cheer, the eleventh book (which is also the concluding book in the embedded trilogy) will end the series. That means that a fantasy writer will actually finish a series in my lifetime. My jaw is agape at this shocking state of affairs.

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We’ve all seen and heard them. The zombies of the modern age. Get on public conveyance of any sort and there are always a few; earbuds (usually brilliant mug-me-and-take-my-expensive-player-please white) and tinny music blaring out of them. For the past few days, I’ve been that guy to my cube mates - only without the brilliant white earbuds. My litany of playlist miserabilia starts with Blue and goes onto Matchbox 20 (or Twenty). Stop looking at me all funny like. For the past few days, I’ve been inflicting my cubemates with this admittedly middle of the road choice of music and the worst part is, I’ve been generally oblivious to how bad it is myself. Things have not been good. Only a little bit of RHCP and Blur separates myself from the (admittedly deserved) tag of teenybopper. How did I descend so far, so fast?

The girl who got away after 8 years. Now that’s a scary story. the Daily Mail comments seem accurate to me though, the escape is possibly the first step in what’s going to be a traumatic existence… The first I heard of the story (a few days ago) I was reminded of the James Hadley Chase novel “No orchids for Miss Blandish”. Just hope Natascha K.’s (umm, no not her [zomg, Wikipedia has an article on Natasha Kaplinsky?! Go, go Wikipedia]) story ends better than the fictional Miss Blandish.

James Hadley Chase also wrote under the name Ambrose Grant? I-did-not-know-that. Woo.

I’ve been delving (of all things) into the weird and wonderful world of CRMs and bug trackers and task list management tools recently. I remember a complaint earlier about the lack of nice, slick looking Ajaxy todo list and task management tools. Well, I haven’t found what I’m looking for yet; but a few worthy contenders are out there waiting to be evaluated. Been quite tempted to install Mantis and retrofit it to suit but then I discovered ActiveCollab - which looks like a nifty Basecamp clone. There are also the better known dotProject and NetOffice apps which seem vaguely interesting. A definite minus point with the otherwise nice looking ActiveCollab is that it only works with PHP 5; making it slightly awkward to deploy on shared hosting (but not a problem if you’re keeping things inhouse like we are). So, it’s probably going to be ActiveCollab then. I’ve always had a weakness for eye candy.

Yeah, so all the things I’ve found funny recently are of geek interest. Sue me.

I’m coordinating a programming effort where we’re using Soap. No, not the detergent; but the “protocol for exchanging messages across a network”. We’re doing Soap over HTTP; which is a fancy way of saying that we’re sending XML messages over the internets. We have a series of suppliers (with test servers) that we need to exchange said XML messages. One supplier, despite our best efforts, kept on throwing an error. So I got in touch with their tech support. After several hours of to-and-fro, during which we didn’t get any response from their server; I had the following conversation snippet.

drac: wooo
drac: we got our first error *shock and amazement*
support person: what?
drac: no SoapAction set .. that’s the first time there’s been a response body at all
drac: ok, I know how to fix that
support person [triumphantly]: i told u! soap action [to be fair, she did. But she also said that there would be an error message when, in fact, their server kept crashing and throwing an HTTP error code]
drac: let me tell them [the programmer types] and we’ll see if it works
drac: this is the FIRST time we got any error at all
support person: somehow programmers are always forgeting about soap action

…

*sniff* How rude. If you didn’t get the joke (to do with a stereotypical Loonix/Programmer hippie’s attention to hygiene), then never mind.

Or in this case, down aircraft. Despite my earlier resolve, I didn’t go visit the Elvington airshow this year either. The weather was crappy on Friday and Saturday and I really didn’t hold out much hope for Sunday. Fortunately, the skies did clear up a bit so I took the opportunity to saunter down to the neighbouring field and watch part of the air display. It was mad fun.

Yes, I took some photos - but then I discovered tintop’s photostream and that has put my humble photography skillz to shame. Struck up a conversation with some other onlookers on the same field and I heard complaints that Elvington has declined in quality and aircraft displays since about 2002 … and that it’s a steady downward spiral to mediocrity. It was still a blast for me in every sense of the word though (yeah, especially the bombing run) - even though the weather was a bit of a spoilsport and my tshirt wasn’t proof against a constant chilly breeze.

And in other news, I suspect that my flickrb0y account has been jacked. Bah. I have moved, perhaps appropriately (perhaps not) to this location. Yeah, it wasn’t a very secure password so I only have myself to blame if the other account has been taken over. I should rant about how hard Flickr makes it to do this whole merge account business but that’s a whinge for another day.

Oh hear ye, hear ye for I have seen the future. Its name? Portable Apps. On the face of it, a simple enough concept. No installation or fancy setup programs required, no uninstallation. Just unzip the application onto your hard disk and it … just works. Some other OS, most notably Mac OSX, have had it for a while now but this new revolution in portable applications is merely a harkening to the heyday of Windows apps; where applications were lean and writing registry keys and registering components were a rarity instead of the norm.

I’ve already tried Portable Gaim 2.0, Portable Firefox 2.0 beta and Nvu Portable. The only criticism I have of this completely wonderful site is that updates seem to take a while to filter through… For example, Gaim is now on beta 3, but PortableApps still offers what seems like beta 1. Still, a minor detail. All of this focus on portable apps started after advent of U3, a proprietary standard for USB thumb drives. It’s a wonderful idea. Just unzip and start using the application. Don’t like it? Just delete the directory and you’re done. No uninstall required.

And in other news, I notice a new version of Google Talk. Some of the features look so cute that I feel compelled to ditch my Jabber client and install the real thing; but I’m valiantly resisting the temptation. The file transfer stuff, well, I’ve heard it promised before but it doesn’t seem to really work all that well. Maybe GTalk will get it right.

And in that promised rant, I want to vent my spleen (not for the first time, and probably not the last) on blinkered OS zealotry. It’s all very well, sez I, to profess love and undying devotion for a particular operating system, piece of software or anything else. But if you’re using it as a tool, then to remain ignorant of other choices is nothing short of criminally stupid. Consider a web designer who says “I love me Firefox. Thus, I don’t care about what happens to IE or Opera or any other browser”. Or consider a budding young sysadmin who says “I love me Linux. So what if I have Windows machines on the network? I don’t like Windows, so I don’t care”. Umm. Yeah. Chances still are if someone offers our young zealot the use of a browser (or OS), it will more likely be IE (and/or Windows) than it will be Firefox (and/or Linux). Figure them both out and then decide which to use. Don’t make the choice based on ideology and then go “la la la la, I hear of no alternatives, I see no alternatives, thus the alternatives do not exist”.

Umm.. [rant mode = off]

The big buzzword that people tend to ignore (or talk about to excessive extents) is proper risk management. Well, it’s only been talked about since 1989 or so. One of the essential qualities of a risk management strategist, I find, is an appropriate amount of cynicism. “Oh, you say tool FizzyBang is going to solve all our problems in one fell swoop, do you? Can it drive me to and from work, give me massages to relieve tension headaches and make decent coffee too?”. Magic bullets usually aren’t, you see. After you’ve seen a few dozen purported magic bullets come and fizzle out, you know this whole magic bullet business is better saved for an adventure flick with a Waterworld-like special effects budget.

Not being overly cynical or anything, when I needed to write a tool that would grab and import several hundred megabytes of content generated by other people, I immediately started to feel a tension headache coming on. Yes, so the people who’d generated this content met with me, assured me that it was of excellent quality, that it would always be generated on Sunday night, there was no need to ask all those nasty probing questions about “what if you don’t have it available by Monday morning?”. Of course I didn’t believe them; but it seemed impolite to twitch a cynical eyebrow and make like the O RLY owl.

That was probably my lack of experience in being nasty to random strangers. I should have schooled myself by hanging out in a few IRC channels or something. I’d soon get over those inhibitions.

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Because I like those weird typos.

To delight the science/astronomy/space geek in me, the IAU (International Astronomical Union) will decide on the fate of Pluto within the next couple of weeks. Fortunately, the options do not include sending him to the dogpound (yep, it’s not that Pluto. Rest easy, Disney fans.). When you stop and think about it (as I do, from time to time) the very definition of a “planet” is so nebulous and seemingly arbitrary that it is surprising that things haven’t been debated before. Contrary to earlier reports Pluto is still not safe from demotion, but it seems probable that the astronomers will choose to expand the definition of planet to include many more objects (as many as 50 planets? Oh my) rather than reduce the number.

In the unlikely event that you’re wondering what on earth is going on - part one is here.

Rouse myself from a reasonable airport-slumber (which basically means eyes are closed, but I’m not fully asleep in case some wandering light fingered denizen tries to make off with the ridiculous ziplock bag. Ziplock bags being a precious commodity and all). See various people eyeing my extremely comfortable posture amidst a large unorderly stack of chairs. Some others have also clambered into the middle of the stack and are sleeping soundly. Rouse myself with a start as I recall that I carry no cellphone, no PDA and no other device to tell me the time. Aargh.

A seemingly long, boring wait later; the gate number is announced. Head over to the gate to find it has a banner announcing a flight to Madrid. Lots of confused people milling around the gate. I know I’m in the right place because everyone else at that gate also had a ridiculous see-through bag with all their documents. Some trusting souls had even put their wallets into that plastic bag. Grab seat, stretch out and wait.

I’m in cattle-class this time and I have the most dreaded of all seats, center right aisle. Dammit.

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In chronological order, more or less. It’s been a hectic 48 hours.

Random airedale, on the way to the airport: So, what have you got in your bag?
Drac: Umm. My laptop, some clothes, some food. That sorta thing.
Airedale: I don’t need to check your bag then, do I?
Drac: … Er. No. Thank you.
[Thank you, thank you, thank you, airedale. I don’t think I could repack my bag without having someone sit on it. I owe you]

Random airline hottie: [Senhor Drac], you have been upgraded to business class for this leg of your flight!
Drac: That’s awesome!! thank you. [But wait. Do I get the business class food or is this going to be another “just the seat, not the perks” upgrade? Aargh, you’re such a curmudgeon, Drac. Take the extra leg room and be happy.]
[Do I flash the famous lopsided Drac grin and risk her recoiling in horror? Or not?]

Some random female waiting in the lounge: Excuse me, are you flying to Switzerland?
Drac: I’m afraid not, no. I’m going on to Manchester.
Female: You’re going to university! [in the air of someone making an exciting discovery]
Drac: Umm. yes, I am.
[Ok, why the heck is this person talking to me?]
Female: [in a conspiratorial whisper], you know, I don’t know why I’m going to Switzerland.
Drac: … Umm. Ah. Oh?
A couple more minutes where she tells me more details about her adventure and then they start herding the eco-cattle into the plane. I almost get up at the first announcement, then I remember that I’m not travelling with the hoi-polloi anymore. Grin and wave goodbye to the voluble Swiss miss.

Watch in amusement as several folks resort to colourful threats [do you know who I am? I’m never flying on this airline again!!] at being offloaded from the overbooked plane. Watch in even more amusement as a number of drunk Russians (tourists?) kick up a fuss at having their expensive perfume and booze confiscated at the security checkin. [A syrup is not a liquid! You never told us that syrups aren’t allowed on the plane!]

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Dunno why I channelled John McEnroe at the moment; but there you go.

Let me make with the linkification first. Plot to blow up planes foiled. Then, try Heathrow closed.

Now, ladies and gents… the kicker. Travel advice for passengers. To quote John M. liberally here; “you cannot be serious with that security shite“. That travel advisory left me blinking in disbelief. Nothing other than passport/tickets, keys, wallet and a few essentials can be carried onboard. Which means no notebook. Aargh. Which also means no books for the journey. No PDA, no reading material, in fact … nothing can be carried onboard the cabin.

Verification of liquids as “authentic” seemed like it was a big deal. The theory I’ve heard from someone else that maybe the “bombs” were liquid based? Or maybe some eejits are planning on a mile high acid bath or something? Delays are going to be between 1-3 hours minimum and BAA is actually encouraging people to stay at home instead of flying to places. Permit me to chime in with OMGWTF.

As a person who is planning on using the UK airport system pretty soonish, permit me also to say that they will probably have to prise my notebook from my cold, dead hands (and put it into the cargo hold). I get twitching and withdrawal symptoms within hours of being separated from computers. It’s a medical condition. No, really. I got a card and everything. Wonder if they sell tickets for the cargo hold, in that case.

No, I am not being serious. But I contemplate the possibility of putting my preciousssss notebook and electronics into the cargo hold with great sadness.

Yeah, bomb exploded close to office. Everyone in office is safe and sound though. Of all the things that a project manager must factor in; elimination of team member(s) by bomb explosion is surely one of the more gruesome contingencies… Yeah, a bit of flattish gallows humour for you - wonder if the PMP folk tell their apprentices in SL to budget time accordingly. Probably not.

Anyhow, this explosion apparently happened around 1400 or so SL time. Two hours later, things are back to normal - everywhere except Dickman’s Road is now open for traffic. Ominously silent Fire Rescue trucks and ambulances were headed back towards the city as I three wheeled back from a latish lunch.

In other news (which is utterly mundane and probably inappropriate), the GR (or Bavarian Barn … or German Restaurant) is having a lunchtime promotion. 12% off the bill during lunchtime - in effect till the end of this year. Which makes it possibly the cheapest place in town for artery clogging steaks. Oh; and Chickie was brave enough to try tequila too. Woo.

And finally; anyone who saw me during the last week must have noticed my weirdly lopsided glasses. Most people didn’t comment on it (due to politeness or possibly because it offset my lopsided features). I went to the opticians to get it fixed today. Ordinarily, this would not be a blogworthy event. However, the technician’s spectacle adjustment technique was definitely blogworthy. Despite having an array of pliers, tweezers and other gear worthy of a mediaeval torturer; he resorted to the old fashioned technique of tugging at the spectacle arms till it became less lopsided. Yeah, so maybe he noticed that this pair of frames was ultra flexible and stuff, but it’s a bit of a let down when the guy with all the tools seemingly tosses his training out the window and uses muscle to wrench the spectacle arm back into alignment.

And no, he didn’t make a comment about my ears being two different sizes or oddly shaped. I did that all by myself, much to his amusement.

If that’s what it takes to do adjustments, heck… I guess I can make adjustments myself in the future. I just need to stop cringing when I perform bendy acrobatics on the (very expensive) spectacle frame arm.

Precede that title with the discovery that life is, indeed, a bitch.

Had probably the lowest point in my uh… career (well, work experience) thus far and even though it was the right decision to make, it’s still a toughie. I’ve rationalized it, been vindicated by other people’s opinions that it was, in fact, the right thing to do, heck … I know it was the right thing to do all by myself - no external input required. Still hard, though.

I guess I still feel a bit of a heel at having to crack that proverbial egg; never mind what the omlette will taste like.

In other news, Wordpress 2.0.4 was released about a week ago. No, I haven’t upgraded just yet - but I will tomorrow. Upgrading is confined to weekend activity these days, what with the hectic day job and all. No, it’s not the best security practice evah, but it’s all I got to give for now, ok? *looks defensive*

But actually, an intriguingly evil thought struck me a while ago and I was wondering … A neighbourhood aggregator engine has been giving me lots of grief recently. The feeds are not well formed and this in turn cascades into a bit of a nightmare for my local meta aggregator project. The feeds are not well formed because of a couple of bugs (for example, this one) which existed in Wordpress 2.0.2. Also, 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 were both security releases; with reasonably severe (trash your blog) style exploits available for some things which were fixed in the releases. Should I be a good citizen and urge the Kottu chaps to upgrade (and thus, serve my own nefarious purposes?)… Or do I listen to the mini-me with the pointy tail and horns and uh… do nothing.

Mmmm… email sent to the admin. If he wants to fix it, he can. Not my problem anymore.

I, mes enfants, am off to drown my sorrows at having become the evil PHB I never wanted to be. Have a nice weekend etc

I think I’ve just done the bloggers version of round the world in 90 days. Only, it’s a mere 72 hours or so and I’ve met most (not everybody) of the people that I read online. It’s been fun. Some of the conversations have been truly bizarre. Even worse, I’ve further reinforced my theory about everyone in Colombo knowing everyone else.

At a coffeehouse with Kermie the Hermie, Chickenbutt and another friend, the Needlybug. We’ve (that is to say, I) have eaten enough apple pie to bust and I’m descending into a sugar induced daze. To keep myself awake and amused, Chickie and I start poking fun at Kermie about his recent declaration of love (remember he loves her, he loves her not ? Yeah, that saga sage) Randomly, Needlybug mumbles … “hey, you guys blog? I only know three Sri Lankan blogs. Kermit; a friend of mine who lives in Aussie now and a reporter guy named maha***.”.

In a flash, all three of us turn on the bemused Needlybug. “What? You said you know whom?”. Visibly alarmed, she repeats the name. We all laugh. At length. Loudly. We refuse to offer an explanation. However, we do encourage the Needlybug to get her own blog.

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