Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

It is an interesting coincidence that I was enthusing about doing it for free
random-hacks-of-kindness/
as IT Pro is pulling this blog. Do I carry on elsewhere or do I give up? The coincidence is that I am paid by IT Pro, if I set up my own blog site obviously I’ll be doing for free.

Whilst I’m enthusing about volunteering I’m not sure about just blogging for the sake of it – it smacks too much of vanity publishing. How will I know if it’s read or even if it’s worth reading? If someone pays me I know someone values what I’m doing, if not…

Anyway this is pretty much the end here for me as the mystery blogger. So I’ll say farewell and finally reveal my true identity…

I am not an IT bod at all – in fact I am a Gay Girl in Damascus
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13744980

or am I?

Random Hacks of Kindness

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Speaking of volunteering, ( blog entry doing-it-for-free/ ) here’s an org with a great name

Random Hacks of Kindness

and what seems like a great idea – get people who like a bit of coding doing something useful!

Doing it for free?

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Volunteering is a great way to increase your self esteme, meet people, increase your experiences and make yourself more employable, … oh yes and help other people!

David Cameron’s Big Society ideas rely on volunteers so he’s keen to get more. I did get the impression New Labour didn’t like amature do-gooders much of the time. There is a theory that we should leave it to the professionals and all that’s needed from us is our cash but I think getting your hands dirty (figuratively or maybe literally) is good for us.

Anyway, to help get more volunteers there is a government report – it is, unsuprisingly, a bit wordy but has some helpful bits.

Here’s the report
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/unshackling-good-neighbours
and here’s a couple of sites commenting on it
http://www.vsnw.org.uk/news/view/2011-05-17-unshackling-good-neighbours
http://www.wrvs.org.uk/news-and-events/news/Unshackling-good-neighbours

Super injunction – is tweeting chatting or publishing?

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

I’m a bit confused about this whole super injunction fandango. The courts say you can’t publish stories about X and people said this was mad as you can talk down the pub about it. Now they are trying to charge someone who has tweeted about X – is tweeting chatting or publishing?

Maybe it’s how it has always been, you can call anyone a philandering moron to your mates down the pub but technically you could be sued for slander. If you jump on the table and proclaim it to the whole pub you may well be sued for slander.

It all seems a bit mixed up but an individual tweeting seems a lot different to a 6 page spread in a newspaper. Something to do with personal vs. corporate, size of content and profits made. There’s something about conversation / statement. I can express my opinion and you can reply in a conversation, in a statement there is no immediate right to reply. That differentiates a phone conversation from a newspaper article but where does that put a tweet or an email or a text?

As I hate secrecy but also hate scandal rag newspapers and also the ability of the rich to exploit the law in their favour I’m torn in too many ways.

What would be nice was if people weren’t interested in prurient of scandal – but that really is mad thinking.

It’ll be worse before it’s better…

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

I used to have this verdant, green lawn. However, if you looked closely much of the green was moss. So, a couple of weeks back I fed it “weed and feed” which killed most of the moss and I have spent much of this weekend raking it out. The trouble is I now have a lot of brown earth and not much grass. The idea is now the moss has gone the grass will (eventually) grow over the bare patches the way it couldn’t over the moss.

So what has this to do with IT? The whole process reminded me of bug fixing a project that has gone bad. Once a system is well out of hand fixing the bugs gets tricky because they interact with other bugs and you end up with temporary fixes and work arounds until the other bugs are fixed which in turn create their own problems… The “best” approach (for development) is to clear them all out and start afresh. The problem is you end up with system much like my lawn – a bit bare.

This doesn’t go down well with users, however they will sometimes live without features for a while IF they believe they will be replaced with fully working ones.

Marketing usually really hate the idea – they’d rather have a healthy looking a system even if the healthy look is only from a distance. Still, I have often said the you could display everything about most marketing departments’ enthusiasm for openness on one screen of a smart phone … in a very large font.

How to blog sulking

Friday, May 13th, 2011

Blogging is a weird business. I have no idea how many people read this. One approach is to make up a target person and write just to them; but assuming I’m writing to the great British public I have to say that I’m not speaking to you. Not “not addressing all of you” or “failing to reach”, actually sulking. My lack of blog wasn’t laziness, it was me deliberately snubbing you. The trouble is I don’t think any one noticed.

I did rather pin my colours to the mast over the referendum and as far as I’m concerned a no vote to AV put the “dumb” in “referendum”. The only people I’ve spoken to who were against it didn’t understand it – of course it could be plenty of people were against it but didn’t want to have a boring argument with me so pretended they were. Considering the majority of people didn’t vote for the ruling party (parties if you assume the lib dem’s have any rule) why wouldn’t people vote for a system that lets them have a say in their second choice…

Anyway, there are two ways we can play this. Either I get 68% of a 42% turnout* – say 17 million – comments apologising or we just forget the whole thing and pretend it never happened.

What never happened? Rather than crash the site I forgotten it already. Friends again?

(* results from
http://ukreferendumresults.aboutmyvote.co.uk/en/default.aspx turnout was amazingly hard to find for a site dedicated to informing us of the results!)

Governing by compromise

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Referendum day! If you haven’t cast your AV vote yet let me encourage you to do the right thing (although the nature of democracy is your right thing might not be my right thing!).

AV is a sensible step towards the way we agree on everything else – only kids say “I want this and if I can’t have it I don’t care”, grown ups should be saying “I’d like this but if you really don’t I’ll settle for that but what I really don’t what is the other”.

I have to say I have been well unhappy with the No Campaign. Statements like it will cost £250M (for counting machines that most places say they won’t use and could be used now anyway), it will favour smaller parties like the BNP (it may favour smaller parties but not extremist parties like the BNP) and Australia are trying to get rid of it (some states may be, the majority aren’t) seem to be bordering on the “lie” to me.

Avoiding extremists is exactly what AV does – the BNP only get in if the vote is split between main parties. Most people don’t want the BNP and would not place them 2nd – I’d like this but I really don’t want that.

Only with first past the post do you get the 98% arguing over which Indian restaurant to go to being dragged off to the Chinese by the 2% who agree on which Chinese THEY want.

If one person wants Dell PC’s, one person wants HP, one person wants Lenovo, one person wants NEC, …. would you buy Macs because 2 people do?

Please saw off the branch you are now sitting on…

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

I am heartily sick of installers asking me to close down all other windows etc. I appreciate that updating a library that may be in use is a problem but it is irritating.

To top it all I ran an install today that asked me to close the installer! That’s what comes of the company wrapping installers in its own roll out – and presumably never testing it. Or maybe someone had a sense of humour or even a grudge against the support team who would have to take the calls.

Here’s to the <irony> unobtrusive, fast and painless updating we can expect in the future </irony>.

Recursion the hard way

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Has anyone got a simple way of getting a command to recurse sub directories (in windows / dos)?

I seem to remember writing something years ago but it wasn’t terribly satisfactory, I’m currently doing a
dir *.dat /s /b > temp.bat

dir *.dta /s /b >> temp.bat

and editing the batch file to add my command (a file compare) to each line via a macro.
Surely there’s a better way?

Come to that is there a windows option to compare directory trees? It seems a basic requirement just to check backups…

I expect I ought to be saying something witty and clever about IT and royal weddings  but I’m not much on weddings or royals so I’m sticking to the IT!

HP Touch Pad – touch to share with webOS!

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

As I have blogged before HP are voicing a serious commitment to webOS. I say voicing because it is hard to see many actual devices yet, but it is a non-trivial task they are about so we shouldn’t expect instant products and it is easy to doubt just because the kit isn’t here yet.

Here is a link to a video the sort of thing that should be along soon but as yet no price or firm date.
Fierce Wireless – HP TouchPad demo

Looks good though! The Touch to Share looks cool (10:20 mins in). Plenty of other videos after this one has run.

As a developer, webOS is good with me, if you can write a web page (java script, css, HTML, …) you can write apps. You can also write in C/C++ if that’s your thing, just get hold of the PDK to do that.