Posted: Sat 27 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Own Business, WebSourceEast, Work-related | Tags: eventbrite, WebSourceEast |
Yesterday I was at the Web Source East conference at the King’s Centre in Norwich. And all told it was alright. Not brilliant, but alright. I’m going to write more about it over on my company site, but thought I’d put a brief review here as well, just for the hell of it.
I think I’d probably have been more impressed if it had been a bit more organised. For a conference based on web stuff, it’s a bit of a worry to go in and be checked off with bits of paper, no tech in sight at all. It’s even more of a worry when it takes them the whole morning to sort out internet access over the wireless network.
Those niggle aside though, it was a pretty good day.
For me there wasn’t a mass of new stuff to take away from the conference, but there was enough to keep it interesting, so that’s all OK then. Some interesting ideas and bits, and it’s always good to see what other people are saying about the same subjects.
Posted: Sat 27 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky, Getting Organised, Sociable, Thoughts, Travel, WHC2010, Writing |
This weekend I was supposed to be at Brighton Shock, the 2010 the World Horror Convention.
Next weekend, I was supposed to be at Odyssey 2010, the SciFi Eastercon.
As it happens, plans have changed (now there’s a common theme) and I won’t be at either.
This weekend ended up clashing Brighton Shock with both WebSourceEast and the Peter Gabriel concert at the O2, plus I figured I couldn’t really justify being away for two long weekends on the trot with work and home. So Brighton Shock got the boot.
As for Eastercon, when I signed up for it I hadn’t realised that Easter was the date it was, and it would’ve meant being away for Herself’s birthday. (Less charitable souls might suggest that me not being around would be a good present in and of itself, but that’d be nasty) Additionally I did some maths and figured out that the cost of it all would be feckin’ expensive, as it’s at the Radisson hotel at Heathrow – not a venue known for its low prices, I think it’s fair to say.
So instead I’m at home for the next two weekends and not travelling round the country like a loon. In some ways that’s disappointing, in others it actually makes a lot of sense.
Posted: Fri 26 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Thoughts, Travel, WebSourceEast, Work-related |
Today I’m out of the office, and instead attending WebSourceEast. No idea whether it’ll be any good or not, so a review will follow at some point.
It’s being held in Norwich, and I figured I couldn’t really miss it, so I booked my ticket when I got the mailing, and then told work about it afterwards.
Because of my contracting background, I really wasn’t expecting anything back from the company about it, but they’ve actually offered to pay for it, and to let me take the day as “out of office” rather than holiday – which was what I’d originally planned to do.
It’s quite weird, this thing of working for reasonable people…
Posted: Thu 25 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Media, Technology, Twitter |
One of the funniest Twitter things this year was NewlywedsOnTJob , a prank by a best-man, automatically recording every time the newly-married couple went at it – start, stop, times, “frenzy index”, “Judge’s review”, the lot. It was very funny to just get the updates saying they were at it again – sometimes in the middle of the working day – and ended up with twenty-odd thousand followers all told.
Things went quiet at the end of February, when Best Man had said he’d be telling the groom about the prank. I hadn’t heard anything, so today did a quick search and found the end of the NewlyWedsonTJob story at I Am Staggered.
It’s well worth the read – made me laugh, anyway.
Posted: Sun 21 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, People, Work-related |
Things have been a bit quiet here of late, mainly because I’m snowed in work time with one big project that’s dealing with a metric fuckload of data coming in by XML. It’s aq nightmare in many ways – and also decidedly scary because of the sheer amount of personal data involved in each record.
Additionally, the company that we’re connecting with are – to be polite – not all that helpful. I got to see their documentation before we started the project, and that looked OK. However, the documented examples don’t actually match up in any useful recognisable form with what we’re getting out of the process.
During this week, among other things, the company has realised that the documentation they sent us initially was out of date – two versions out of date, no less. So they said they’d send the latest/greatest version. And then sent the self-same two-versions-out-of-date documents. The file actually has the version number on it, so it’s not (or at least you wouldn’t have thought it was) rocket science in the least to be able to send the correct documentation.
Once we’d got the up-to-date documentation, I queried the data coming back from the company, as it didn’t match the examples given. Oh yes, I was told, “We can’t put in examples for everything.“. Yes, you can – particularly when it’s what your customers are using to develop their interactions with. Random data format changes aren’t helpful either – “We’ve stopped sending the numbers with four decimal places – yes, we know our documentation says we do this, but we don’t any more”
As you can imagine, it’s making life pretty difficult. There’s a lot to do still, and I can’t rely on the information from the original company. Always a joy.
Posted: Mon 1 February, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky |
Already we’re one month into 2010. Where the hell did January go? (I know for me it went mainly in a blur of broken databases, fixing inherited ropy code and just generally fire-fighting)
Still, at least February starts with a nice palindromic date. I know, geeky as fuck. Live with it – we won’t have another one like this for another 110 years…
Posted: Sat 23 January, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Technology, Work-related |
It’s been a quiet couple of days here on D4D™, and with good reason.
On Thursday, the database at work died in spectacular fashion. It’s been getting shaky for a while, but this week it keeled over totally, and since then I’ve been putting in silly hours getting things back to something approaching usable.
The problems are many, but basically the entire site – user-facing and company-facing – is database-driven. Without the database, there’s no business. It just grinds to a halt. So it’s been a case of “fix the essential bits, deal with the rest later”.
The other main problem is that the database was originally written as a proof-of-concept, a basic thing that’s then been extended and extended. Think of the original as a bungalow. The current site, all built off that bungalow, is the size of an airport, and all balanced on the roof of that original bungalow.
Because it wasn’t written with “the big picture” in mind, some of it is downright fucking nasty- and I suspect the original developer was also learning as he went along. For example, there were no date columns in there ’til I came along – instead it all used some very dodgy string-handling to figure out dates.
One of the main tables in the database now has 170,000 records in it. Which (in the database scheme of things) is nothing. Well, until you realise that each of those 170,000 records has 180 fields in it. That one database table is 600Mb in size. Oops.
So the last couple of days have been spent in Database Intensive Care. I’m through the brunt of it now, but it’s meant that other things – food, sleep, relaxation, D4D™ – have taken a back seat. I’m still going to be working on stuff around this for the next week, but things should be a bit calmer now that the urgent repairs are done, and it’s now more a case of fixing the underlying issues.
Thank fuck my assessment isn’t next week.