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OSDC 2013 Begins

OSDC has begun, currently listening to an excellent keynote by the CEO of silver stripe, a CMS system that I will definitely be checking out soon.

#osdc2013

That'll fix it!

A brief follow up to my previous post.

I emailed a link to that blog post to the MAXX complaints email address, I figured what's the point in mewling if the people who can fix it don't hear right?

Anyway, I had occasion to use the train again today, from the same station but in the other direction, and I happened to notice that they'd taped this super-helpful nugget to one side of the ticket machine:

Yep, that'll fix it!

I can just imagine the pitch at the Veolia Complaints Crisis Team(tm) meeting...

"We gotta do something, and fast!" I'VE GOT IT!!!! A single black and white page, the stark contrast will grab attention"

Then the V.P. of Human Interface Management shouts "Yeah! Start it with 'Public Notice for Auckland Train Users' - That'll grab them, it's practically Shakespeare!"

Then the first guy rejoins: "Dude! That's poetry. But we gotta follow up with a REALLY small font, you know, for contrast...."

Or something like that.

Actually, I should give props where props are due. Either I was just unlucky on my previous visit or someone in charge actually read my rant; either way there was a Veolia rep on the platform handing out flyers about the ticketing system.

OK, not a long term solution, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a temporary fix while little elves someplace (there're loads after the annual post-Christmas redundancies) knock up some fo-realz signs.

Seems the lack of a "Tickets" sign on the ticket machine is a local phenomenon too. I spotted this at the station in Papatoetoe:

And having noticed that I was on the lookout for more. It seems about 1/2 the ticket machines I went past were correctly labelled. Nice consistency there.

To close out this update, I received a response from MAXX complaints today. Just a form letter saying "we got this, you'll get a real response soon" and this line:

"The reference number for your complaint is 2012/01529."

This email was followed up not 4 minutes later by the following gem:

"Dear Luke

"We would like to advise that the reference number for your complaint is 2013/01529 not 2012/01529 as previously stated in the email body below.

"We apologise for the confusion."

Aaaah. There's the consistency I was looking for.

Still FAILing, after all these years

Most Aucklanders will remember the debacle that was the Rugby World Cup public transport. Most New Zealanders in fact, since it made the news several nights in a row. What most may not realise, is that anyone who was a regular user of the rail system at the time (as I was) could see it coming a mile away.

Simply put, Veolia are incompetent. They were then and they continue to be; and today I added yet more proof to the already unsteady looking pile.

I'll start, well, at the start.

In 2010 and 2011 I was a regular rail user. I comuted from Papakura to Auckland central and back again 5 days a week, a journey of over an hour each way. This kind of exposure gives you a fairly good view of the operation of the network, and what I saw was...disappointing.

Cancellations and major delays were commonplace (at least once a month) and bizarre decisions were evident several times. I once got kicked off a broken train (along with all the other passengers) at the Westfield station, and made to wait 25 minutes in the rain for the next train, which was already full, despite there being at least 4 trains within sight (Westfield is a storage and maintenance rail-yard) and it being clear that the train staff had suspected the train was faulty for at least half the journey. They couldn't have radioed ahead? come up with some better plan than simply drenching several hundred people on their way to work?

God, I got so sick of the phrase "sorry for any inconvenience". Bollocks you're sorry.

2012 however, brought blessed relief from my torment. Working from home meant I didn't have to use the train AT ALL last year.

Today though, I needed to hop from Penrose, where I had dropped my car for a service, to Newmarket to meet a friend.

Now in 2011 the "HOP card" existed, I knew how it worked, but it wasn't required. I used monthly paper passes myself. There were indications that the HOP card would be taking a more central role in future, but nothing concrete that I knew of.

So today, with change in my pocket, I wandered onto the Penrose platform and caught the next train north.

I thought it was strange that the train staff (conductor?) didn't come to me to arrange a ticket, despite knowing he'd seen me board. Ours is not to reason why, and he wasn't close enough to ask about it.

I detrained in NewMarket and this is where I discovered the truth. In order to leave NM station, you need either a Hop card, or a prepaid ticket.

I went to the nearest Veolia staff member, a white bearded noddy in a red cardigan who reminded me of Santa, and said: "I'm sorry, I boarded at Penrose and didn't realise I had to buy a ticket there. There were no signs and there's no ticket office, what do I do?" at which point he proceeded to admonish me and claimed (I quote) "we put up plenty of signs!" and tell me that if this weren't all so new I would have to pay the full fare of $10.something. I was given a brochure again chastising me and directed to the ticketing booth, where I was allowed to pay for a ticket from Penrose to NM.

Well, being quite embarrassed and as anyone who knows me, a stubborn prick, I decided to revisit the scene of my crime, to witness these "plenty of signs" I'd criminally and wantonly ignored.

Here is the open, inviting and not-at-all-creepy entrance to the Penrose station:

No signs here. Perhaps further on:

Hrmmm, can't see anything from here, but still some way to go so let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

Almost on the platform, surely I should have seen one by now? Just something saying "Tickets"?

Maybe the "board" will have something:

Well, it mentions the Hop card, but nothing yet about a prepaid ticket being required. Maybe the other side?

Nothing this side either. OK, keep looking...

More Hop card stuff, but this doesn't really tell me anything:

OK, I'm standing right in the spot where I actually boarded the train. Is there ANYTHING visible from here?

NOPE. NOTHING. From the footpath till I boarded the train there were NO signs AT ALL indicating that a ticket had to be pre-purchased. There weren't any on the train either, that I recall, although it would be pointless advertising it there, as by that point YOU'RE ALREADY A FILTHY CRIMINAL.

OK, so there has to be a ticketing machine right, lets go find it:

The view from the far end of the building in the previous picture, some 30 or 40 meters from the one and only entrance to this platform.

I suppose that tiny blue thing in the distance could be a ticketing machine, but how can I tell, since THERE ARE STILL NO *(&(*ING SIGNS.

Lets get closer:

OK, I'm pretty sure it's a ticket machine now, although it's possible it's just an ATM or something. Still nothing that says "Tickets".

Note the yellow pillar to the right? Yeah, that's an emergency "I'm being raped help me" button. Not that you'd know that since the "sign" is a tiny sticker about 1"x2". It's that red bit above the blue bit. Glad I'm not being raped right now.

OOOOH I FOUND IT! ALL THE SIGNS!:

This is the ONE AND ONLY indication on the WHOLE *(^#ING PLATFORM that a ticket is required before boarding. At the VERY BOTTOM of the machine, in text so tiny I had to be within 5 feet to even realise what it was.

I felt vindicated, and pissed off.

Veolia: You are a pack of worthless cumstains that couldn't manage your way out of a paper bag, much less run a rail network. You're not fit to lick the sweat from my ballsack. Go F*&(* yourselves.

Now, I'm a believer in "constructive" criticism, so having got the criticism out of the way lets make some suggestions.

1) PUT UP A F(*^ING SIGN. Just one big one would do, on the end of the building so you can't help but see it as you walk onto the platform.

2) PUT A SIGN THAT SAYS "Tickets" ON THE TICKET MACHINE. Seriously, unless you're standing right in front of the damned thing it's not clear that the (&^@ it is.

3) Don't assume everyone that uses your service uses it regularly. The portion of passengers that don't may be small, but should not be ignored.

4) Think. Actually visit these platforms and try to think like some pensioner, or tourist, who hasn't used the trains before. It needs to be CLEAR and SIMPLE.

5) Sell the railway to someone else. Come on, you've had plenty of time to get it right, but you haven't. Give someone else a go.

Yours sincerely.

Luke Pascoe.

#Veolia #Fail

As-builts are stupid

Let me begin by saying I'm not against documentation in general. Things need to be documented for reasons so obvious I won't regurgitate them here.

As-builts however, strike me as a singularly pointless waste of time and effort.

An as-built document is a snapshot of a server, describing the method by which it was installed and any gotchas or deviations from the standard build, taken (usually) at the moment of it's release from "I'm still working on it" to "OK, I think it's OK to put into prod now". On the surface this is a good idea, the intent is that should the server need to be rebuilt, or reproduced, any tech should be able to use this guide and not have to reinvent any of the particular wheels invented by his predecessor (or more likely himself, 6 months earlier).

The problems here however are legion (well, platoon anyway).

Firstly these documents are almost always written by one person, however there may have been two or more engineers involved in building the host. Inevitably those who are not directly involved in writing the as-built will either get missed, or gloss over their contribution when asked by the documentor in an effort to expend as little additional effort as possible.

Secondly there is almost always some amount of time between actually doing an install and documenting it, during which you learn about what you're installing, install it wrong, read some more, install it right, test it... By the time you get to actually documenting it the chances of recalling every step required is virtually nil. You will miss a config file, or a screenshot, or a license key.

Finally, and this is the real nail in the coffin, server are not cast in stone once deployed. There is always a period of polishing, finding rough edges and smoothing them off. Then there are changes to related infrastructure which require configuration changes on the host. Moves, Adds and Changes are the life of a server. Each of these means your as-built gets rapidly more and more inaccurate, since lets be honest, once that sucker is accepted and filed away it will never see the light of day to be updated.

All this means that in the unlikely event that you actually need this documentation, it'll be useless to you. It might even be harmful, leading you up a garden path that you long ago turned explored and rejected, but forgot to update the doc.

Besides, these days the only time you'd need one of these cursed things is if the unthinkable happened and you lost not only the host, but the backups as well. You're taking backups right?

So in sumation, they're inaccurate when they're written, they're out of date before they're even finished, they get more out of date by the minute and you don't need them anyway. Stupid.

Enought said.

Luke.

On the road

Half way through the first month as an owner/operator and things are going well so far.

Four customers signed up to 12 month contracts and some work coming in already.

So far I've sorted a server infrastructure, bank accounts, a workspace, etc. but I still need to sort out an accountant and public liability insurance (impossible to do over the christmas break).

I'm considering moving my servers to a hosting provider, there's no real reason to have them here and there are issues (power, internet connectivity) which cannot be easily guaranteed here.

I've completed the migration of OSNZs mail to Google Apps, and I'm part way through my first customer migration. In some ways Google apps are phenomenal, in others they're somewhat rudimentary.

My wife starts back at work next week, which means I need to get back into a work routine, rather than the holiday get-up-at-11am mode I'm in now!

Onward and upward.

On a roller coaster

I quit my job

Let that sink in for a minute.

I have my first child due in 4 months and I just quit my job.

You're asking why of course. The answer, in a word, is "Opportunity".

My father has always said "You'll never get rich working for the man!" and he's right. Having worked for "the man" for 40 years, he's been around the world, had a lot of responsibility, done some cool things and earned a not-insignificant amount of money. Well off? Yes. Rich? By some standards perhaps, but he's no Daddy Warbucks.

I wont bore you with the details, but for the last few years the company I've worked for for around 8 years now has been winding down. This has been a deliberate effort (strange I know) as it's owned by a larger company who has no real interest in what it does. What it wanted when it bought us was the engineers. Our expertise. Our Intellectual Property.

They wanted to apply these things to their customers, who were a very different lot to "our" customers. This meant changing our approach, our methods, in fact pretty much everything about the way we do things. These new methods conflicted with the old ones to the extent that it is impossible to service both our new and our old customers simultaneously. The result being the aforementioned wind-down.

Since we're good corporate citizens (but mostly because I demanded it for our loyal, long-standing customers) we started to migrate customers to another provider, chosen by us and introduced as our "partner". Sadly this crowd either never followed through to present support contracts to the clients, or were otherwise found wanting. 2 customers contacted me in the same week to ask if there was any way I could continue support, and discussion with other customers indicated there were more opportunities out there should I decide to offer this myself.

Now don't get me wrong, I could have stayed where I was and been abundantly contented. I did not find the new customers or the new methods unappealing, and I have to say I've been working with the best bunch of guys that I've ever had the privilege. The pay was very good. And regular. And secure.

But after looking at the numbers, getting legal advice around restraint of trade and getting a firmer indication from my potential customers I realised that this was an opportunity that I just couldn't ignore.

So, I've registered a company (Open Source New Zealand, OSNZ for short) with myself and my wife as directors. This process is remarkably cheap and easy, done entirely online through the New Zealand Companies Office. Kudos to them for having a well sorted, easy to understand process and for not charging the earth for it.

I've written up a contract and created a logo and a website (www.osnz.co.nz, as yet incomplete). I've resigned my position and started to build the infrastructure I'll need to support my customers. As of December 24th I am my own "man". A Christmas present to myself, as it were.

I've had a great deal of support, from family and colleagues. Everyone is convinced I'll do well and it'll all be sweet. If only I could be as confident!

What I really need now is signatures on paper. I have one, and another should be signed tomorrow with 2 more expected.

This could go really well or really, really badly. Fingers crossed :P

Luke.

P.S. I must not waste an opportunity for "brand exposure" so, if you're reading this and you need support or consulting for Linux or almost any Open Source software, I'm your guy. Help me feed my family! :P

12 week ultrasound scan

On-e in the oven

So it's official: Rachel and I are pregnant!

To be more correct, Rachel is pregnant and I am expectant.

This is a big deal for us, she and I have been trying on and off since we were married 6 years ago. We were starting to think it wasn't going to happen.

To say I'm excited about this would of course be understatement. I'm stoked. I'm over the moon. I'm ecstatic. I wish I had a better vocabulary.

As I write this (some weeks before publication) we've just come back from our first ultrasound scan. It's real, and I've seen it. Even though it's just a 1.8cm blurry blob on a screen at this point, it certainly makes things a lot more real.

Until that first glimpse the whole experience is kind of suspect. There are pink lines on sticks, vomiting in the morning, all the usual signs, but it's all circumstantial. Tests can be wrong, it might just be the Flu? There's no doubt now though. We saw a hollow oblong shape about 3 inches long containing an even smaller, bean shaped, solid thing with an even smaller fluttering heartbeat!

Either we're having a baby or I need to study my Alien box set more closely and start stocking up on heavy weaponry.

Now we wait another couple of weeks, dealing as best we can with the morning sickness, for the next scan. Once we've hit 12 or so weeks we'll be ready to tell the world and this page will be made public. So if you're reading this, keep an eye out for more details soon!

Fingers crossed.

Luke.

On the Rise

Just returned from Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Finally a film that doesn't leave me feeling like I just wasted $50 and 2 hours of my life.

The fact that we (the global "we") can now produce computer animation that is not only passable, but believable as a leading character along side real human beings is incredible. I wont go so far as to say it's flawless, physics still seems to be ignored though not to the extent I have seen in some films, but it's damned good.

The length is somewhat short on paper, but felt exactly as long as it needed to be and no editing horrificness, which has plagued many recent "blockbusters".

Certainly better than Transformers 3. Or 2 for that matter.

A+, go see it at a cinema (you cheap prick).

P.S. Rachel and I can't quite believe how long it's been since Marky-mark did the remake of the original. Holy crap we're old.

On a code binge

So yesterday I started working on some Python to plug into SNMPd which would use the "pass" feature to export my OWFS (1-wire file system) mount.

That's a lot to squeeze into one sentence, so let me rephrase.

I have some sensors dotted around the house which tell me the temperature and humidity in various places. I'll soon be adding more weather related sensors including wind speed and direction and bormetric pressure.

These devices talk to a PC using a protocol called "1-wire" which sends data and power over a single pair of wires.

In order to read data from the devices I use some software called OWFS which presents the pertinent data items as files in a virtual file system. So to read the temperature in the lounge, I simply read the contents of the file relating to that sensor.

This is all well and good, but I'm using Cacti to graph the data and that prefers to make queries using a protocol called SNMP. I had something jury-rigged up which was working OK but some time ago I decided I should to it properly. A fully functional translation layer from SNMP to OWFS was required.

Well, a couple of hundred lines of Python later and it's working. I thought it would take about a week, assuming my motivation held out, but in the end I managed it in about 16 hours. Man I love Python.

Anyway, it's presently only read-only because that's all I need, but it's easily improved to make it read-write. I'll get around to it at some point.

In the meantime, if you would like a copy just ask. I've let the OWFS guys know it's available if they want to include it with thier suite. We'll see what they say.

Luke.

On Google+

That's right, I'm on Google+

Find me.

On a cloud

If you've half a brain, you'd know that despite an awful lot of effort by vendors to convince us otherwise, there are many many pitfalls to moving to "the cloud"

Here's another really good one

Generally speaking I'm not a cloud hater, I've even built one or two. But most people don't consider that if someone else does something bad in JooR cloudy environmentz, the authoritezz may just take/shut down the whole damned thing, regardless of the tens, hundreds or thousands of other innocent users.

Think about it.

On the box

My wife and I watched 2 movies last night, picked from the new releases section almost at random. Both were excellent and worth reviewing:

The Ghost Writer

Starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams this is the tale of a ghost writer who wins the job of completing an autobiography of an ex-British Prime Minister after the original writer dies in mysterious circumstances.

The cast is excellent and the story engaging. I've not read the book but this feels like an adaptation that's stayed true to it's origin. The humour is excellent and although IMDB calls this a mystery/thriller I reckon it's closer to being a black comedy.

Ewan McGregor has been a favourite of mine since I first saw him in Trainspotting and I his epic adventure "Long Way Round" is a must watch whether you're into motorcycles or not. In this he is convincingly uncertain, almost terrified of what he's going to discover next.

Of course I've been a fan of Pierce Brosnan since Remington Steele, so, forever.

These 2 play off each other pretty well, although Brosnans character is a little uneven. The special features bit about the characters shed some light on this though, pointing out that the character was under tremendous pressure from the accusations and nearing breaking point, making him somewhat unstable.

All in all well worth watching.

The Fighter

After his average performances as the dark night (that husky voice was just ridiculous) and a pretty plain action outing in the latest Terminator movie, I had pretty much written off Christian Bale. But his portrayal of the washed-up, crack head ex-fighter and brother of the protagonist was absolutely incredible. It made me remember how I used to like him before the aforementioned from The Machinist and American Psycho.

The person he becomes is so convincing it's like watching a documentary, and when they show some brief footage of the real Dicky Eklund during the end credits it becomes even more profound. He captures his mannerisms, his energy, his impulsiveness perfectly. It's no wonder he won the Oscar for best supporting actor for this role.

Marky Mark Wahlberg has come a long way from the Funky Bunch too; but while I've always enjoyed his movies, such as Shooter and the Happening, I've always thought he was a little samey. Good but not Great. This is one of his better efforts though and the amount of physical effort that must have gone into going from the somewhat heavy "I'm a loser" in the middle of the film to the "You could do your laundry on my lats" Welter Weight Champion of the World is truly impressive.

Finally Amy Adams. Wow. HOTTIE! Pretty damned good actress too. She really does a stand up job as the girlfriend-who-turns-it-all-around.

Another must see I reckon. Well worth the time. A+.

On being easily misled

Don't play the game, game the player

As I was leaving work the other day, my "people leader" (a term that deserves a post all to itself, but translates to "manager") was quipping about a trick he'd used to win a Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament and how, despite its simplicity, people were taken in again and again.

All he did was suggest, before each bout, a play to the other player by visibly making the motion in front of them, but disguised as something else. For example, he might put his flat hand to his face thoughtfully, with his fingers split apart either side of his nose suggesting scissors.

Apparently these simple cues are surprisingly reliable.

In a similar vein, I've been watching a video podcast called "Scam School" which pulls back the curtain on simple pub wagers. Most of these are misdirections that, once revealed, are extremely obvious.

It all comes down to the fact that the human mind while complex, is at the same time fairly routine and predictable. If you can make something unexpected look like something normal, we'll accept it without question. This is how con men work.

It's also why witnesses are unreliable; when the brain is confronted with new and seemingly incongruous data, it will attempt to apply known patterns to make sense of it. Since everyone's life experience is different the patterns applied vary and so the interpretation of events from a number of different witnesses can vary wildly.

But I digress.

What I learned from this is, the easiest way to achieve an outcome from another person is to make them want the same thing you do and it can be remarkably simple to do so.

#tricks #donttrustyourbrain

On the rapture

I'm writing this from heaven. If you're reading this, better luck next time.

#rapture #suckstobeyou

On midnight inspiration

I don't know why, but I get my best ideas right before sleep. Just as I'm getting comfortable, right before I start to drift off.

This can be very annoying as, if it's a good idea, it can wake me right up again and make it very hard to get to sleep.

Usually I try my best to tell myself "I'll remember that in the morning" and force myself back to sleep, but I never do remember or if I do, it's a half remembrance that looses that nugget of awesome that made it worth remembering in the first place.

Well, no more! As of now I am determined to stop and write down the idea before attempting to return to the land of nod. Hopefully it'll help me sleep and who knows, maybe some of those ideas will turn out to be half decent when subjected to the harsh light of day.

Ciao.

#sleepless #motivation #idea

On HTML5 and CSS3

I spent much of my day today updating my online resume. Not so much the content, although that did get a good buffing, but the aesthetics. I figure if I'm going to ask for large stacks of the phat cash I'd better present the impression that I'm worth it from the get-go.

With that in mind here's my original resume:

http://www.pascoe.net.nz/resume/index.old1.html

Obtained many moons ago from some online job registers automatic resume builder and updated piecemeal ever since. Clearly not up to the task at hand!

I figured this would also be a good time to try out HTML5 and CSS3 to see what they're capable of and how good the browser support for them is at the moment.

The objectives were to make it look pretty using modern techniques only; No tables for layout, HTML5 tags whenever possible and as many CSS tricks as I could squeeze in. I decided I try embedding a font too.

The whole process turned out to be pretty straight forward and in fact the resulting HTML is much simpler than I remember the last time I tried to do anything like this.

Font Squirrel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com) was hugely useful and I quickly found a font I liked and was available for free. They even provide example HTML and CSS code.

With a little googling I found a beautiful high resolution image to use as a non-repeating background and I created a simple canvas effect background image using the texturizer in Photoshop. These are the only images I used.

The result is surprisingly effective if I say so myself. You can see it here:

http://www.pascoe.net.nz/resume/index_html5.html

I think the non-standard font with a little shadow (sadly not available to IE users) really pops.

Browser support was a good-news/bad-news situation. Most of the CSS features seem to be supported by recent browsers (I tested Firefox 3.6 and 4, IE 8 and 9 and current Safari) however the older browsers didn't support the new HTML5 tags like "section" and "aside". Not surprising really, but the result was a somewhat mangled page when rendered. FF4 and IE9 really shone, although as I mentioned before it failed to render the drop shadow on the headers.

That experiment over, I decided that since it's a resume and most recruiters are probably running IE7 (or, heaven forbid, IE6) I'd port the HTML back to HTML 4.01 strict. This involved replacing the new tags with plain old "div"s and using CSS classes instead.

I left the CSS unported as older browsers will just ignore directives they don't understand and it should render OK with the CSS 1 and 2 tags present.

That was pretty straight forward and the resulting page renders much the same:

http://www.pascoe.net.nz/resume/

So, mission accomplished. At some point in the future I'll have a play with the "canvas", "audio" and "video" tags that have been the source of so much controversy. In the meantime, I declare HTML5 and CSS3 Awesome and have to ask why we're still waiting for it to be standardised?!

#HTML5 #CSS3 #Resume

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