the corner office

So that was quite a week, weather-wise. I loved it to bits, although it wasn't without its frustrations. It started snowing last Sunday. I got up extra early on Monday morning, thinking I'd get to the train station before the rush started. This thinking didn't factor in the fact that SouthEastern are an INCOMPETENT OVERPRICED EPITOME OF FAIL. Empty station, no trains, a bunch of commuters milling around thinking 'oh well, now what?'

Since most of the neighbourhood was still unspoiled, I trudged home through the heavy snow via the scenic route, which included me wading through deep snow drifts and scooping up handfuls of virgin snow and generally having a ball. Magical.

The downside of VPN connectivity means you get to sit at home and work on days when everyone else is out building snowmen.

By Tuesday SouthEastern managed to provide a half-hourly (which meant: hour-and-a-halfly) service into London. I was lucky enough to be one of the poor buggers on one of the two different trains which both packed up at Elmstead Woods station at the same time, blocking up an entire branch of SouthEastern's network. 4 hours to get to work. Yay.

Since then the week's improved commute-wise, if you exclude the fact that the pavements in our neighbourhood have turned into slippery deathtraps. Still, it's snow and ice and nothing like anything I ever experienced growing up, so I'm still enjoying it, and I'm going to keep enjoying it until every last patch of white disappears.

The only down side to this being the heaviest snow London's seen in 18 years, is that it might take 18 years for it to happen again.

I ran into Google's 'may harm your computer' glitch earlier today. When I saw that all search results had the same warnings I figured something had gone awry at Google, and soon forgot about it.

I read tonight that it was down to human error. I think that's quite reassuring, actually. It's comforting to think that there are still humans in an engine room, occasionally cocking up.

An annoying preference conflict in Eclipse 3.4 (and possibly earlier). I had a problem in that despite having ticked 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Insert Spaces for Tabs', my Java code was still being generated with tabs.

Turns out that to really get spaces for tabs functionality, you also have to edit your code formatter options. Maybe the default profile is more intelligent, but I have a custom profile, and I also had to go to 'Preferences | Java | Code style | Formatter', edit my active profile and change 'Indentation | General settings | Tab policy', which had been set to 'tabs only'. Changing this to 'spaces only' solved my problem.

Bah!

Sad to read that Tony Hart has passed away. Many happy memories of his shows when I was a kid (and Morph, it goes without saying). I remember one show where Tony Hart said something along the lines of 'you know, they say a real artist can draw a perfect circle unaided', and then off he went and drew a near-perfect circle. I tried to draw circles many times after that... I never managed a perfect circle, but Tony Hart probably played a large part in my love of drawing and art as a child.

2008 over, just like that, and we're into 2009. Happy New Year.

Everyone says 'I don't do New Year's Resolutions' and I'm one of those people. But secretly everyone does have resolutions - it just takes off some of the pressure so that if you resolve to say, floss more often, and then don't manage it, you'll feel less guilty and ashamed when you look at the floss dispenser at the end of Jan 2009 and see the layer of dust that's covering it.

I, however, also like to give myself a different kind of wiggle room. My resolution each year (over and above the flossing), is to Be Happy. I think it's a perfectly noble resolution to have, is wonderfully open to interpretation, long after the fact, and it's not a particularly hard one to live up to, as long as you keep reminding yourself about it occasionally.

... that on the walk to the station, my damp hair froze solid.

Winter rocks.

I like to write up a bit of geek tech review each year, this is the 2008 instalment.

Professionally, what can I say? It's been a good year. Wrote lots and lots of Java and read lots of C++. I think I'm quite firmly a back-end developer now, I've barely touched html or jsps this year, and I don't mind saying that I don't miss it much. Lots of hairy multi-threading, interesting libraries and utilities, some grid computing experimentation, lots of web services.

The most interesting and significant thing for me this year has been an exposure to distributed / service-oriented systems development. Not in the marketechturish all-your-base-are-belong-to-our-ESB kind of way, but in a 'deploy n instances of your app into a completely chaotic and heterogenous cluster of nodes and start seeing how things can go wrong' kind of way. I've been privileged to have many of my (and my colleagues') preconceptions about design and architecture challenged and turned upside down by some very clever distributed systems architects, and I've emerged with new perspectives on performance and scalability because of it.

On the personal geekery front, it's been a mixed bag. My quasi-goal for 2008 had been to get back to C++ and to polish off some low-level Unixy type stuff I've been tinkering on for ages, before moving onto something more exotic and new (to me), like Ruby or Python.

Then in Feb, after finishing my last Honours exams, I reactivated my Eve Online account. I decided to park my plans, write a GUI app to help my in-game trading instead, and share that. Didn't get very far - firstly because I spent too much time playing and too little time coding, and because I just couldn't get going with a GUI framework. I decided to write the app in Java to get it done quickly (ha ha), played with Swing and SWT/JFace/RCP, and didn't get very far with either.

By halfway through the year I'd reached a decent profit target from trading, still had no decent or sharable trading app, and was starting to get a bit bored. I cancelled my Eve subscription and decided I'd had enough of Java GUIs. I opened up the Unix books again and started getting some traction with that.

Then in August, an opportunity to do an interesting work-related pet project came up, and I spent the better part of the next 3 months devoting every free moment to that. It involved things like Apache Mina and asynchronous I/O, and a lot of C++ interaction. Because it was work-related, couldn't talk about it, and no interesting code to share. But it was a really worthwhile chunk of work, and I learned a lot from it.

In November I finally geared down and started casting about for something new to do. I picked up yet another fun pet project which is yet again a little too close to work to blog about. Decided not do it in Java, and chose C++ instead: web services and a bit of multithreading, so it's really interesting tackling familiar problems using a different language.

So, despite some diversions and the first half of the year not being productive at all, I'm happily tinkering away again.

My goals for 2009? Not entirely sure exactly what I'm going to do, but:

• I'm not going to spend my hobby time writing Java code. Java is my day job language: it's a great language, but I want (and need) to broaden my horizons.
• I live in Ubuntu again, I almost never boot into Windows at home. I intend to keep it that way.
• I want to achieve a level of C++ proficiency I'm happy with, before moving on to something else.
• I want to finish the Unix systems programming stuff I've been tinkering on for the past 3 years. Again, this is a 'foundation' thing I want under my belt, even if I never write a single select professionally.
• If I get through that by the end of 2009, I'll pick a new language to start on. It'll probably be Ruby.

That's it. Let's see how 2009 turns out.

Mary Poppins was on ITV this afternoon. I chuckled when I heard Mr Banks say this:

A British bank is run with precision
A British home requires nothing less
Tradition, discipline and rules
Must be the tools
Without them disorder, chaos, moral disintegration
In short you have a ghastly mess

Oh man, I've had a brilliant Christmas day. Great food and great company and some fine beer and whiskey. All that's left is to say I hope you've had a splendid day too, and then I can go to bed.

Overheard from an American lass talking on her mobile along Charing Cross Road:

It happens in New York too, Mommy.