Sometimes your faith in humanity is restored.
The DEC Haiti appeal has raised over £25 million just from the news coverage alone. This exceeds the £20 million raised by last year's Children in Need campaign which (while still a worthy cause) is mercilessly peddled and trailed by the BBC for two long weeks.
Don't forget to mark your donation as 'Gift Aid' which allows DEC to reclaim 28p for every pound given.
‘Make it look good! Thats not what we think design is. Its not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
So very true. Via a comment on an interesting blog post comparing Tumblr to Posterous.
Ironically, this short post would have been better suited to a one liner, throwaway post correctly labelled and nicely formatted as a quotation on a service like, well Posterous or err, Tumblr but I am trying to consolidate all my efforts into this blog.
This country is shit. The food is shit, the government is shit, the weather is shit, the transport system is shit, education is shit, life is shit, death is shit, I am shit.
As this country grinds to a halt yet again after a light dusting of snow, a timely and apt quote from Arthur Smith whose autobiography 'My Name is Daphne Fairfax' I can highly recommend.
Last year, I visited a customer in Swindon. When I arrived at the office, I noticed some water dripping from the underside at the front of my car. I didn't have time to investigate or get my hands dirty so I subconsciously hoped it was just condensation from the air conditioning unit and tried to forget all about it.
After work, I managed to navigate Swindon's world famous roundabout of roundabouts and finally locate my hotel. When I parked, I noticed the temperature gauge was reading high - very high. Sure enough, I got out of the car to see steam pouring out of the bonnet and was greeted by the familiar smell of anti-freeze.
I still didn't want to get my hands dirty so I opened the bonnet and just stared at the problem, hoping that would miraculously fix it. Then I checked in to my room and rang the AA. I introduced myself to the operator as 'Hi - my name is Norman and I'm an alcoholic.'
The AA man duly arrived before 'The One Show' had even finished. We both stood looking at the engine knowingly before he asked: 'Now, Sir, what seems to be the problem ?'
'Well, I think it's pretty minor and easy to fix. It's just the top hose has perished and needs replacing.'
'Oh I see, Sir. Why do you think that ?'
'Well, when the engine was running, steam was pouring out of the top corner of the radiator - right there where the water hose joins.'
'OK, Sir. Thanks for that. Please could you just turn the engine over for me so I can take a look myself ?'
Engine on. Water and steam billowing out. Smell of anti-freeze. Temperature gauge rising.
'Whoa ! That's fine, Sir. Engine off now, please. Well it's not your hose, Sir. The problem is over here. It's your bleed screw, Sir. Look (flips the screw from the middle of the radiator). This bleed screw has sheared off in half. Quite a common problem on this model. Seen it a couple of times now.'
I felt a little sheepish (but very relieved that a solution was in sight) and the man from the AA, James, filled the radiator with 13 pints of cold water and I followed him to a local garage where we parked and he kindly drove me back to the hotel so I could wash my hands.
The next morning, I walked into the customer's offices to be excitedly greeted with 'Oh good - glad you're here. We have got problems. Serious problems. Performance problems. On production.'
'Ah OK - what seems to be the problem ?' 'Well it's the database, you see. It's the hard disk - 99% busy. Partition 27b on logical volume 7 is overheating. Oh and another thing that might be relevant - the hit ratio is right down at 72.7%'
'OK - thanks for that. Do you think you could just start the system up for me and I'll take a look myself ?'
That was the year that was. Statistics for 2009 with the comparative numbers for 2008 in brackets.
What a terrible holiday period for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
By the time, we had opened all our presents, stuffed ourselves with turkey, fallen out over charades and finally slumped in front of 'Gavin & Stacey', Umar should have been sitting at the right hand of Allah, surrounded by a variety of 57 vestal virgins, clad in white silk lingerie, feeding him grapes, tending to his every whim, straddling... - [That's enough vestal virgin fantasies - Ed].
Even worse, the young man does not have much to look forward to in the coming weeks of 2010.
His girlfriend is unlikely to accept his perfectly reasonable explanation that the white, sticky stuff coating his boxer shorts and trousers is indeed PETN explosive residue and nothing more sinister after his 20 minute visit to the aircraft lavatory, clutching a copy of 'High Life' magazine.
Umar Farouk will need nerves of steel and great mental strength to endure the endless questioning and sophisticated interrogation techniques used by the FBI and CIA. Overcoming sleep deprivation, maintaining stress positions for prolonged periods and surviving water boarding are child's play but heaven help him when the US authorities play Metallica, David Gray and Dire Straits 24 hours a day with the volume turned up to 11.
Poor Umar is unlikely to be able to claim a refund on his underwear from Marks and Spencer. 'I'm sorry, Sir but with no receipt we can only offer you gift vouchers. In any case, these Y-fronts appear to be worn and, worse, slightly soiled.'
If and when he should finally rediscover a place in his girlfriend's affections (after persuading her that he wasn't pleasuring himself when he placed the blanket over his waist), sexual intercourse is going to be very painful with charred bollocks and a red hot poker that is just like - well - a red hot poker with third degree burns.
People never ask me Hey Norman - where has your glamorous globe trotting lifestyle as a IT consultant taken you this year ?
Cary Millsap posts a brilliant article about his approach to performance troubleshooting that resonated loudly with me.
When I first started working at Siebel, a standard review was a production health check that consisted of meetings with key project staff (Siebel Administrator, DBA, systems and network admins, project manager, developers) coupled with some standard checks on key Web, Siebel and Oracle configuration parameters.
At the tail end of one engagement where I had precious little to note or report on, I asked to meet with an end user for a brief chat. The response was surprising and not dissimilar to the standard retorts Cary describes.
'Talk to a user ? Why on earth would you want to do that ?' (delivered with suspicious frown)
'The user won't understand your questions.' (patronising)
'The users don't understand the business requirements.' (surprising and worrying)
'The users are too busy.' - 'Can't you just talk to a supervisor instead ?'
Of course, most of these responses are instinctive, defensive measures, immediate responses to what is probably a rather unusual request and, to be fair and in the interests of balance, I have been introduced to end users by development staff who do know and obviously have a healthy relationship with the user community.
If and when I succeeded in getting an audience with an actual user, I didn't actually chat at first. Instead I introduced myself and simply asked if I could watch the individual use the system for 10 minutes.
It was often very enlightening just to sit quietly and observe the business process (typically, handling an inbound call at a call centre), the subset of available screens accessed by the agent, typical searches executed to locate data, actions they expected to be slow, actions they needed to be fast, common tasks they did frequently, lengthy interactive queries that were truly batch reports as well as interactions with other applications.
I have been running Linux Mint for 8 weeks now and I've been delighted with it. My desktop PC is fast and responsive and I am hugely impressed by the sheer amount and quality of software available for Linux. Printing, scanning, wireless networking, audio, DVD writing and all my USB devices just work.
I don't have a virus scanner consuming memory and chewing clock cycles. I am no longer considering a memory upgrade as Linux works fine with my paltry 512MB.
I have all my favourite applications available (Picasa, Chrome, FileZilla, Emacs). Linux is brilliant as a development platform and installing software is easy. The Mint desktop looks great and with the addition of Microsoft TrueType fonts, my display is razor sharp and crystal clear.
Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, my wife has also embraced the change. She now uses Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express, Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Word and Excel and Nautilus instead of Windows Explorer. All of this was fairly transparent and painless.
This fulsome praise all sounds like an advert for the wonders of freedom loving, a precursor for some open source software evangelism and a concerted attempt to convert the great unwashed to Linux. However, there is an elephant sitting in the room. Right there - in the corner.
The Ubuntu and Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) distributions have a 6 month development cycle. This means that a new release will appear twice a year which is great because users know when the next major release is due. In addition, minor fixes, security patches and improvements are continually being pushed out via automatic updates. What is not so good is the actual process of upgrading to a major release which, in my opinion, is relatively complicated and risky for an inexperienced, new user.
To be fair, Linux Mint are upfront and honest and describe the upgrade process fully, the options available and the pros and cons of each approach.
'There is no guarantee that it will work for you. In fact, this [dist upgrade] is quite a risky process. If you're experienced and if you know how to troubleshoot and solve common Linux problems then you're probably OK. If you're a novice user we recommend you perform a fresh installation of Linux Mint 8 instead.'
David Marsden is an experienced Linux user and comments that he is comfortable performing Ubuntu upgrades, quickly and reliably without losing his data. He claims that Ubuntu upgrades are quicker and easier than applying a Windows Service Pack.
Of course, David's absolutely right. Even I managed to upgrade to Linux Mint 8 at the first attempt without losing any of my user data and even managed to preserve the configuration settings for all my favourite applications. In fact, apart from the modified login screen and wallpaper, the four people who use the Linux computer would have struggled to notice the change, it was that transparent.
In fact, all I needed to do was:
Now I am fairly technical and understand most of this. I have no problem whatsoever doing all of this. David is correct - all of this is common sense, quick to do and the whole process takes less than 2 hours. I don't even mind repeating this process every six months because, as David points out, I have a new, shiny operating system with new features, additional applications, bug fixes and improvements.
What I have a problem with is trying to explain this whole, convoluted process to my father. Or rather, rescuing his system after he has failed to follow this process. Remotely.
Of course, my father has a few options available. If it ain't broke, don't fix it - if Mint Gloria works fine than stick rather than twist. Alternatively, he could use a distribution that automatically performs rolling upgrades so his software is always the latest and greatest.
The first (and probably the last) in a very occasional series.
Channel 5. Thursday night.
Arsenal fans taunting Liverpool on their unwanted appearance in the Europa Cup.