Posts from 2010

People never ask me Hey Norman - what modules have you installed thus far on this wonderful Drupal 7 powered blog ?

• Archive - monthly archives.

• Disqus - although I had some problems with this module so I am currently using a simple Disqus block.

• Global Redirect - ensures that 'node/1234' is redirected to '2010/21/22/blog-post'.

• Google Analytics - mandatory to torment myself over visitors statistics using GA.

• Markdown Filter - although I haven't fully embraced this yet. Old (raw HTML) habits die hard.

• Mollom - Disqus provides built-in spam protection but I use Mollom to guard the user registration and contact forms which is very effective.

• Pathauto - to map Drupal nodes to my date based permalink structure.

• Token - required by Pathauto

• Tagadelic - marvellous, configurable, graphic 'Tags' page to aid Bill's navigation of this site.

• Wysiwyg - evaluating various options but not found nirvana as yet.

• XML sitemap - produces search engine friendly sitemap.

I also modified the 'page.tpl.php' template to reinstate my wonderful, award winning rotating tagline (or slogan in Drupal terminology).

Curiously, I haven't enabled the D7 core 'blog' module as I don't need multi-user blogs. Each post is simply an 'Article'.

The date for the long awaited Drupal 7 release has been announced as 5 January 2011.

Dries should just play this video. Then he should simply read the following and leave the stage.

Straight as an arrow\ Defect defect\ Not straight, not so straight\ Reject reject\ Towards anti-social\ Solo solo

Standing on the stairs\ Cold, cold morning\ Ghostly image of fear\ Mayday, mayday\ Gonna leave this region\ They'll take me with them

Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7

Theres a common saying in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) circles along the lines of:

It takes 10,000 times more time/money/effort to acquire a new customer than it takes to retain an existing customer.

Evidence of this is commonplace; introductory offers, improved interest rates, free Parker pen and pencil gift set and enticements for new customers for which existing customers are ineligible.

Now I occasionally claim that I am writing this blog purely for me, myself and I. What I mean by that is that I tend to write what I want when I want and don't feel pressured to produce content on a regular ongoing basis. However, that's not entirely true; if it was I could equally well write this stream of consciousness into a A5 notebook locked in my top drawer where no-one would ever see it.

Let's be honest - people are blogging to get noticed and everyone likes feedback (even if it's negative feedback) and it's fantastic if, just occasionally, someone says 'God - that post about LinkedIn and pole dancing made me laugh'.

A recent comment by Bill (which I will reproduce here) rather took me by surprise and made me pause for thought

I like your blog, but just one thing about it frustrates me - you “tag” posts, but I can't seem to find an index of these tags. (?) For example, I like to read your comments on emacs - but without such an index, I am forced to use Google to search your site.

Now here was a potential customer (an interested like-minded reader or even hopefully, that rare animal, a brand new subscriber) for my business (my humble blog) and what was I doing to welcome him, to encourage him, to help him find his way around my blog ? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

After giving this some thought, I decided to take prompt and decisive action:

Many thanks for popping by and bothering to leave some constructive criticism about the lack of decent navigation options on this blog. There's a couple of reasons for this:

1. I recently moved this blog to Drupal 7 and I didn't actually know how to add tag clouds, archive pages, previous/next post, related posts or search functionality.

2. In the past, I have played with all of the above on both WordPress and Habari in an effort to keep casual readers lingering for longer and my gut feeling was that none of these additions made a blind bit of difference to Pages/Visit and merely cluttered up the blog.

However, prompted by your comment, I have now added 'Tags' together with a search box on the sidebar and an 'Archives' tab allowing you to browse by year or month.

Unfortunately, I never heard from the mysterious Bill ever again. A cautionary tale and a valuable lesson in CRM for all small-time bloggers.

Shamefully, I dont read many books so an eBook reader has never been high on my list of priorities as it would probably become a moderately expensive white elephant and yet another gadget to carry around.

However, Amazon's high profile marketing campaign for the Kindle eBook reader sparked my interest sufficiently to download the free Kindle Reader application for Android to sample the experience of reading an eBook on a mobile device.

In addition, I've just purchased a higher capacity (16GB) SD card for the Android phone which means it could replace my iPod Touch as I can now store all my music on the Android phone and start to consolidate two of my mobile devices. If the Android Kindle Reader application is usable, could the HTC Legend also fulfill the role of an eBook Reader ?

I downloaded Tom Reynold's 'Blood Sweat and Tea' mainly because it was free and I had previously enjoyed Reynolds' blog about his experiences as a paramedic working for the London Ambulance Service.

I have had (courtesy of my employer) an HTC Legend for 3 months and I have been staggered at the razor sharp quality and resilence of the screen. Even without a screen protector, the display is pristine and crystal clear despite moderate use during that period.

Reading text on the Android is pretty easy on the eye. The font is large enough and clear enough for me to read easily and the contrast is excellent. Also, I am only reading for short periods (up to half an hour on my commute into the city) and the fact that 'Blood Sweat and Tea' is merely a compilation of blog posts means each story is a very short and manageable chunk. This light, casual reading may be slightly easier on the eyes than ploughing through 'War and Peace' for prolonged periods.

The larger screen on the Kindle does look great and I have heard great things about the screen technology but there's one reason I would currently not even contemplate buying a Kindle.

I selected a popular book being advertised for Christmas - 'The Fry Chronicles' by Stephen Fry. The paper edition of this book costs £8.20 at Amazon (UK). To my amazement, the Kindle version of the same book costs a staggering £12.99.

Yes - you read that correctly. £8.20 for the hardback book and £12.99 for the electronic version of the same book for the Kindle.

Now let's think about this. For the paper edition, the publisher has to print a book on 448 pages of paper. The book also has to be bound and this is the hardback edition. For the Kindle edition, the publisher has to, err, well, create an electronic copy of the book.

How in God's name can the publisher/Amazon justify charging an additional, extortionate, staggering premium of 58% for the Kindle edition ?

Now this may be a one-off rare example and it's true that some books are cheaper on Kindle than for the paper book. For example, the popular 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is slightly cheaper on Kindle (£2.68) versus £3.89 for the paperback edition. Now I don't have the time or inclination to exhaustively check the comparative prices of paper versus Kindle editions for the remainder of the best seller lists and it is true that some classic texts (e.g. Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes) are freely available for eBooks.

However, in a sense that's irrelevant - the Kindle edition should always, always be cheaper than the paper book - guaranteed, 100%, every time for every book regardless. Until that is the case, I won't be buying a Kindle or any other eBook reader.

Frankly I think the pair deserve each other but some excellent quotes from Tevezs agent, Kia Joorabchian, on Garry Cock.

‘Garry Cock thinks hes bigger than Carlos Tevez.

‘Garry Cock has an inflated opinion of himself. I brought him in from Nike after he begged me to get him a job in football.'

‘I got him a job which paid him more than four times what he was earning at Nike and he didn't complain about me then but it's all gone to his head.'

‘Maybe because he played no part in bringing Carlos to the club that's a problem for him. Maybe he's upset because he didn't have any input.'

Last week, I went to see The National at Brixton Academy. Twice. Both shows were great (Monday just shaded it) and the band resurrected a rarely played classic ‘Lit Up (one of my all-time favourite National songs) on both nights which was an unexpected and brilliant bonus.

I’d been eagerly waiting for these dates to come around since I saw the band on election night back in May at the Royal Albert Hall.

This beautiful photo taken by Alison Philcock brilliantly captures the mood and sense of expectation shortly before the band took the stage.

My family were genuinely perplexed as to why a grown man was going to see the same band play twice within three days and were unimpressed with my reply of ‘Well, I couldn't get tickets for Tuesday'.

I also won a £10 bet with Norma who bizarrely insisted that the band would play the same set in precisely the same order. On Wednesday, two of my favourite songs ‘All The Wine' and ‘About Today' replaced ‘Runaway' and ‘Little Faith'.

At the weekend, I purchased a new printer after replacing the ink cartridges failed to reinstate the ability to print in black on my Canon IP4000.

Previously, I'd researched which printers had decent Linux support and decided on an HP Deskjet 3050. This is a wireless printer so I hoped that the Windows PC's in the house would be able to print directly and the management of the printer (inkjet levels) would be easier. My current Canon IP4000 has served me well but is pretty old and I was surprised to find I could pick up an HP wireless printer for £34.

I checked the price on Amazon to find the price has risen to £38.99 in the intervening two weeks - not just at Amazon but at all online retailers I normally use. No problem - still excellent value. As Norma is patiently waiting to submit a couple of essays for her course, I decided to venture out to try to buy a printer as delivery times from Amazon could be delayed given the recent cold spell.

I walked into Comet - the HP Deskjet 3050 was on the shelf listed at the price I'd originally seen - £34.00. I darted next door to a cavernous PC World which is the size of a aircraft hanger and a gadget heaven. They also had the printer but now at the higher price of £38.99.

I went back to Comet, picked up the last remaining Deskjet box and walked up to the till. The girl swiped the barcode and said (much as I expected) - 'That will be £38.99, Sir'. 'Oh I think that's a mistake - it's listed as £34.00 on the display'. 'No, sorry, Sir. It's coming up on the computer as £38.99'. 'Sorry but the price on the display is £34.00 and you have to charge me that price for the printer. It’s the law'.

She interrupted me ‘Well I will have to see this for myself. Can you show me ?' So we both ambled over to the display area of various printers. The shop assistant wasn't best pleased and she muttered ‘Are you absolutely sure it's the same printer, the same make and model ?'

We arrived at the display item for the HP DeskJet 3050 printer where the price was displayed as clear as day, in black and white as £34.00. She turned back towards the till without a word so I duly followed, feeling slightly guilty.

'Right then, Sir'. And she entered a manual override for the price and entered £34.99. That will be ‘£34.99 please'. ‘But the price is £34 dead, £34 exactly'. 'Was it ?' By now my patience and my good humour at finding the desired printer in stock and saving £5 was being tempered by this girl's surly and unhelpful attitude.

‘Listen. We've just walked over to check the price. We did that because I know what the price is but you don't. Didn't you even look at the price ? What was the point of going over if you're can't be bothered looking at the price?'

‘So you're really going to argue with me over 99p are you ? I've already keyed it now.'

'Yes - because the price is £34.' She emitted a long sigh under her breath and she entered the correct price and I proferred my credit card.

And now in a voice scarily reminiscent of Catherine Tate as the TGI waitress; ‘Would you be wanting extended insurance cover with that, at all, Sir ?'. 'Oh no - thanks - just the printer, thanks.' 'Insurance cover is available for just £24.99 for 3 years and £34.99 for a full, comprehensive 5 years peace of mind'.

'I’m not really likely to insure something that cost me £34 for £35. If it blows up after 1 year and 1 day, I’d just buy another printer that is likely to be better, faster and probably cheaper.'

‘Well that's entirely up to you, Sir but these printers can be quite unreliable.'

'No really. Just the printer thanks'. 'Right - so that’ll be £34.00 for the printer then.'

I went to nudge the printer box towards me in a precursor to leaving this godforsaken store and erasing this girl's morose, stupid, miserable face from my memory bank. For ever.

‘Can I interest you in more ink cartridges, Sir ? Special offer in December on all inkjets - buy one set of ink and get another one at half price.'

‘No thanks. I normally get my cartridges off the Internet.'

‘OK, Sir. That's entirely up to you but I must tell you that printers only come with a 'starter pack' which only print 50 pages or so so you might run out very quickly.'

I smelled bullshit here but I wouldn't put it past the printer companies in an effort to recoup their loss on the actual device to ship with smaller, low capacity cartridges. Worse, the spectre of Norma printing out several lengthy papers and articles and the ink running out just as she printed of the final revision of her essay for submission was hovering overhead like a hungry vulture.

'No thanks. No insurance. No additional ink. Just the printer. Thanks.'

I got home, quickly installed and configured the printer and discovered HP provide two standard cartridges (black and the 3 colour mix). No starter pack.

I quickly checked wireless printing from three Windows computers (XP, Vista and Windows 7) and downloaded the latest version HP native Linux software (HPLIP) to configure and manage the printer which was conveniently available in the Fedora 14 repositories.

Finally, I ordered two spare cartridges from Amazon for £20 compared to £24 at Comet.

In my job as a roving IT consultant, I have given a number of technical presentations about Siebel. During that time, I have learned that I am much more comfortable presenting material and content that I have created myself. I have also presented slide-decks used by technical pre-sales. This has occasionally led to detailed questions arising about a very innocuous looking bullet point which I was unable to effectively answer; not a comfortable situation.

Occasionally, I have delivered technical workshops about a very specific area of the Siebel product set that was tailored to a customer requirement for a module that is not covered by a formal course offered by Oracle Education. I have thoroughly enjoyed this type of work as I find it stimulating and very rewarding. I also felt the customer also found these workshops useful and valuable.

Last week, I gave a 2 day workshop about EIM (Oracle's ETL tool to bulk load data into a Siebel OLTP database) and I actually created some practical lab exercises to give the attendees some hands-on experience of failing to load data using EIM. I'm being serious here - I firmly believe it is very important to be exposed to the different classes of errors and idiotic mistakes when trying to achieve a seemingly straightforward task of populating a single customer record.

I visited the client's offices the day before to check the logistics and the Siebel environment provided for the workshop. I also took the sensible precaution of completing the various exercises myself. To my horror, I discovered at 3pm on the day prior to the workshop that EIM wasn't actually functional in the customer test environment. Thankfully, I discovered this was due to a missing Service Pack for the Microsoft SQL Server database which resolved the problem and saved me from a very embarrassing situation.

Whenever I've attended training courses, I've always felt slightly uncomfortable whenever the instructor went walkabout and hovered over my shoulder as I struggled with the syntax of ‘ALTER TABLE'. Consequently, when I set the attendees loose on the first exercise, I tried to take a back seat and only help if someone requested assistance.

I am not a teacher - in fact, I am a lousy teacher as I have precious little patience - and I am not a trained instructor. However, I was quite curious to see how different people attacked the problem. One chap was feverishly reading the manuals, typing at speed, running the tests, examining log files, iterating in an effort to win the race. One of his colleagues had a rather more considered approach and I noticed he chose to take time to assist his neighbour who wasn't as far forward. Another attendee was very methodical and thorough; he essentially created a full source-target mapping in Excel before he did anything else and was completely unfazed by the progress of others around him. Another gentleman reminded me of myself - he was bludgeoning forward at breakneck speed, making mistakes (syntax errors), immediately fixing them and iterating rapidly.

I approached one gentleman quietly beavering away in the corner who had actually completed the original exercise but hadn't shouted ‘Eureka' or called me over to praise his efforts. Instead, he was now creating a data set of 10,000 customer records to see what throughput he could get compared with the performance of the existing custom COM based data loading tool.

All in all, a very enlightening exercise. Psychologists would probably classify each type of individual with a special name (‘Starter-Finisher').

Back in May, I went along to my sons school to hear James Cracknell speak. Cracknell is an old boy of KGS and went on to become a double Olympic gold medalist. Since his retirement from rowing, Cracknell has embarked on a series of endurance challenges. Cracknell supplements his income by writing for the Daily Telegraph and also gives after dinner speeches about his adventures as well as motivational talks at corporate events.

On a balmy May evening, I entered the school building and was pleasantly surprised to see free champagne being dispensed to guests on arrival. I stepped forward to the temporary bar to claim my complimentary glass of bubbly. ‘Are you a Governor, Sir ?' ‘Err, no.' ‘Well - are you with the VIP party, Sir ?' - the gentleman gestured to my right where I saw the Headmistress chatting with Cracknell. ‘Err, well, err, no.' And with that, the smartly dressed waiter, nodded disdainfully towards the Sixth Form Common room where I was able to claim my free class of orange squash in a plastic tumbler.

If Norman Junior III had been with me, this exchange would have been excruciatingly embarrassing for him but sadly he couldn't be bothered coming along.

Before the main event, I paid a quick visit to the toilet and I noticed James Cracknell, still politely chatting with the VIP's, wearing an immaculate charcoal grey suit, with a spotless white collared shirt and no tie. To my horror, my eyes were drawn to his feet. He was wearing trainers. One of my pet hates - idiotic commuters wearing suits and trainers. Oh well, he's won two Olympic Gold medals so I guess he can wear whatever he likes.

Cracknell was a very personable, engaging, natural speaker and treated us to a quick run through his career including his Olympic triumphs, an insight into the level of commitment required to succeed at the highest level of competitive sport and his trip to the South Pole. Sensibly, Cracknell supplemented his talk with lots of photos. Interestingly, he seemed to focus on his occasional failure (fourth in the rowing World Championships in 2003) as much as his many successes.

James Cracknell is a very articulate, modest and amusing man. He described failure at the World Championships as ‘doing what we normally do. Train like hell for two years, getting up at 5am to get onto the water on those dark, freezing winter mornings, qualify, get to the final, push yourself to the limit, cross the finish line then stand on a podium standing next to your best mate [Matthew Pinsent] who is crying like a baby. Again'.

When Cracknell was selected to join the coxless four for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, he was the newcomer into an established boat with Olympic Gold Medalists, Steve Redgrave (4 Gold Medals) and Matthew Pinsent (3 Gold medals) Understandably, he was a little intimidated by these two and German coach, Juergen Grobler, attempted to reassure him

‘Listen, James. You are strong. You are an excellent athlete with great stamina and rowing technique. However, in this boat, you are sitting behind Matthew. He is a better rower than you, stronger than you with more stamina. All you have to do is follow him. Just do what he does. Follow his stroke. Follow his every move. When he eases off, you ease off. When he pushes the rate up to 43, you push the rate up to 43. Matthew is hung like a horse.'

A few months later, Cracknell was recounting this story about Juergen's motivational chat to Redgrave who smiled and said “I think Juergen probably said ‘He has lungs like a horse'.”

Cracknell then described his first endurance event when he rowed across the Atlantic with Ben Fogle. Towards the end of the race, the satellite radio wasn't working properly so the pair could only get daily updates on their position and the state of the race.

One call told them they were now positioned second with 36 hours to go. Fogel's reaction was ‘Second - brilliant. What an achievement. Fantastic !' whereas Cracknell's immediate reaction was ‘Right - let's stop these 3 hours on (rowing), 45 minutes off (rest) shifts and switch to 4 hours one, 30 minutes off and see if we can win this bloody thing'.

Cracknell then solved the mystery of the immaculate grey suit and trainers. He had recently returned from the Marathon Des Sables endurance event where he had finished 12th in a race, the highest ever placing for a Briton. During the 151 mile race across the Sahara desert -, his feet were badly blistered - Cracknell showed an awful photograph of his red raw feet after a day in the desert which he described as ‘slight chafing' - which explained the trainers and his slight limp as he took to the stage.

Cracknell answered a question about how he motivated himself and he referred to a note scribbled on a blackboard in a History classroom he had seen earlier that evening on a tour of his old school. Some wag had written 'All things must pass' which summed up his attitude pretty well.

[ After I saw Cracknell, I was shocked to hear he had been knocked off his cycle by a speeding truck when attempting another challenge to cross the States in 18 days, rowing, cycling and running. Cracknell was seriously ill with head injuries but thankfully is now making a good recovery. ]

This blog is now running on Drupal 7 (beta 3).

Currently Disqus comments are absent but I am hoping the Global Redirect module and the Disqus crawler will remedy this given time.

Most of the modules I require are available for Drupal 7 apart from FeedBurner so I have just re-pointed the feed for now.

Let's see if this appears on the other side.

I will probably convert to using MarkDown markup in due course too.

Main reason for ditching Habari was the lack of user forums.