Rob Lally : Robert Lally

I just stumbled across this very cool video. Irrespective of how you feel about aquariums, you have to admit it is pretty.

I really liked the song and, since there was a link on the page, I decided to buy it. But of course, Apple and the record company have decided that they don’t want to sell it to me because I live in the UK.

If this was the first time I’d had such a problem, I would write it off as an aberration. But it isn’t, it happens all the time and it really pisses me off.

I don’t know anything about the record companies business model, or the realities of life as an up-and-coming artist - but if your business plan involves artificial market segmentation to the point where people can’t buy your products.. you deserve nothing but scorn, poverty and, if all my wishes came true, some sort of painful and inconvenient ( but not necessarily fatal disease. I don’t know what Scrofulous is, but it sounded funny when Terry Pratchett used it, so, for now, I’m going to hope for that.

Barcelona, keep up the good work, I hope the Scrofula doesn’t get in the way of your singing, nor the poverty and attendant malnourishment distract you from your musical endeavours. I’m sure that the scorn will only aid you in your artistic struggle.

This intriguing article from Monica Harrington caught me by surprise for two reasons:

1. Bob was real! I remember seeing MS Bob - way back when, but I genuinely thought it was a gag. I’m both flabbergasted and a little disappointed. For years I’ve thought kindly about Microsoft because I remember how hard I laughed.. discovering that it wasn’t a cunning joke is… oh, my.
2. There’s a lot of wisdom compressed into a short article.

Estimation: ““

(From the genius that is xkcd.com.)

As a tribute to Sir Humphrey, indeed the whole of the Ministry of Administrative Affairs, I shall endeavour to deliver this message in a suitably unhelpful format.

Sir Humphrey : “For those of you who’ve not seen it, and those of you who have - and therefor want to see it again - assuming, that is, the sanity, soundness, fitness, health, quality, control and general ‘fit for purpose’ utility of your mind, that is your brain, control centre, seat of consciousness etc. The greatest (a word I use not lightly, nor without appropriate consideration, contemplation and cogitation) comedy show of many, most, or indeed, perhaps all decades, including but not limited to those after the invention of television - although, of course, those decades before, preceding, that is, those that are, if you would, antecedent of the years and decades in question, are automatically disqualified on grounds of technical ineligibility which presupposes, induces and creates an inability to compete - has been released via iTunes.”

Jim Hacker : “Sorry, what was your point?”

Sir Humphrey : “Yes Minister has been released on iTunes. And you should go and buy it”

Jim Hacker : “Yes Minister?”

Sir Humphrey : “Yes, Minister.”

Jiggy Pete says…

I was out shopping with my wife this morning. We popped into a craft store to allow her to pick up a few things for a project she’s undertaking.

I noticed this :

Which made me chortle a little. The fact that Kanban - Quality As Standard had made it into the realms of hand-crafted gift cards was surprising. Then my jaw dropped at the next card in the rack:

Wow! Waterfall and Kanban, right next to each other competing. Then I noticed this:

It turns out that nobody is buying Waterfall in the craft world. Nobody is buying it, no matter how it is packaged.

It has come to my attention that people have misinterpreted my last story.

When they told me they wanted me to spend hours in focus group meetings, I laughed at them and walked away. Anyone who didn’t would be in the low-wattage light-bulb category.

End of message.

A few weeks ago I was on holiday in Las Vegas. In one section of the casino I was staying at, there was an area run by one of the big US TV networks where they were testing out TV pilots and newly shot episodes of TV shows.

As you passed by, they would stop you and ask you if you’d like to help them choose the future of TV. I thought it might be amusing, so I took a leaflet and listened to a thirty second pitch. Spending an hour watching a show and giving feedback might be fun - it was near the end of the day and I was tired and footsore from sightseeing.

They started out with “we’ll give you $75 to go through our process”.. hmm, that made it even more attractive. I can have a seat and a beer and pay for dinner with the proceeds. Then came the kicker. After watching the show, you have to participate in FIVE focus groups, each lasting an hour or so.

It turns out that the reason most TV shows suck is because the people who review them are morons. You’re staying in a casino, paying two or three hundred dollars a night for a room, and you’re going to give up a whole day to review a TV show for seventy five dollars. Anyone who’s not a moron would conclude that this is a pretty bad deal.

Strangely, there were people queueing up to watch the shows… I looked at them, and judged them in the light of the information I had. I stand by my moron theory.

Everywhere I go, I see the same thing. “The best way to avoid swine flu is to wash your hands after you go to the bathroom.”

So, if this advice were to be believed, the source of swine flu is one’s own genitals. This does not seem likely. I don’t understand why seemingly rational, intelligent people keep stating this again and again as if it made sense.

My penis is not the source of swine flu. If my penis had swine flu, then I’d have swine flu. I cannot catch a disease from myself.

When I say I can’t understand why smart people would relay this same, obviously bad, advice again and again I’m really lying. I can understand it. There’s a whole host of reasons but mostly it is people attempting arithmetic with small numbers and failing.

1. I should wash my hands after I use the small room
2. I touch lots of things with my hands and so they are a significant vector of infection

Washing your hands may be able to help reduce your chances of catching certain ailments. Or it might not. But it has nothing to do with making use of the WC.

Sadly this sort of conflation of ideas happens all the time in the programming world. People take some idea that seems reasonable, toss in a dash of something else reasonable, shake and concoct a third thing of ‘limited utility’.

Looking for an example: well, take much of BDD for a start.

BDD = Penile swine flu.

I’m just going to leave that hanging there for a day or so whilst I write up my thoughts properly.

I’ve just been on godaddy.com looking for domain names for a side project I’m working on. I hadn’t checked in a while, so I popped in roblally.com to see the status of it (please give it to me Irish Rob Lally… you don’t really use it). It still isn’t available but godaddy had some alternative choices for me, apparently Godaddy wants only bad things for me. Here are the choices it suggested

• DEPRIVELALLYLIVE.COM
• YOURDEPRIVELALLY.COM
• DEPRIVELALLYPRO.COM
• DEPRIVELALLYONLINE.COM
• BESTDEPRIVELALLY.COM
• EASYDEPRIVELALLY.COM
• DEPRIVELALLYSTORE.COM
• MYPILLAGELALLY.COM
• PILLAGELALLYLIVE.COM
• YOURPILLAGELALLY.COM

Why does Godaddy think I need to be pillaged and/or deprived so badly? What do they think I need deprived of? I guess I’ll never know, but if anyone comes near me at tonight’s techmeetup in a godaddy shirt I’m going to punch first and ask questions later.

https://twitter.com/roblally

I went indoor-climbing last night for the first time in over a year. Right now my arms hurt so much that I’d rather not have them. It’s not like they’re doing me much good just now anyway - my hands are largely incapable of closing and the opposable thumb seems like a dim and distant dream.

I did learn a few lessons last night, about climbing and about the way my mind works. When I arrived at the centre and approached the first wall, I realised that I had no idea how the equipment worked. I couldn’t remember how to tie myself on, and I couldn’t remember how to set up the belay end of the rope. That information had completely fallen out of my head. I’ve done it a thousand time but … I still couldn’t quite recall how to do it.

The bit I found most surprising is that I was sure I knew how, I was sure I’d forgotten nothing at all; right up until the point when I tried to do it. There’s a lesson there for all software architects (me included) - if you don’t write software regularly you will forget things about the process. Not only that, but you won’t know what you’ve forgotten. If you forget enough about the process you’re no longer an asset to your company. You’re just a guy who’s telling people how to belay, and keep other people alive, who can’t actually belay. Don’t be that guy.

My second lesson is about trust. I climb with my wife and my best friend. These are people I trust implicitly. I’d also given my equipment a thorough check over before I went out, so I was sure it was working fine. Even with that, I was terrified on my first few assents. Now, I don’t like heights, I hate them in fact. In the dictionary, under acrophobia it has a picture of me .. screaming whilst standing on a shoe-box. But I’d got over it whilst climbing, a year ago I could climb freely without fear. Now I was sweating and panting and wearing out my arms clinging onto the wall for dear, sweet life. Why?

To me, it seems that there are things that come naturally to us, and things that don’t. For me, being off the ground is not natural. By working at it, I got to a point where I was no longer afraid, then I began to enjoy it. At the same time it was good exercise that was helping me get a little bit fitter each time I went. When I stopped going, my confidence and trust in what I had learned started to erode and my natural fears and distrust started to come to the surface again. When we don’t practice something, we not only loose our understanding of it, we can start to believe things that are actively not true. Yes, brother architect, I’m talking to you again. Ever wondered why so many companies are lumbered with crappy products that the group architect purchased? Because they were out of touch, and began to believe the easy lies of silver-bullet vendors. They believed in the things that appealed to their core nature rather than the hard-won truths they’d struggled so hard to find.

When we don’t keep our skills sharp, we forget things. When we don’t practice our craft, we believe things that aren’t true.

In this week’s episode of ‘Rob Shows His Ignorance’, I’ve a couple of questions regarding power consumption and computers.

1. If I’m watching a video at native resolution - so if the picture is 640×480 I have it consuming that many pixels on my screen, will that consume less power than if it has to transform it to a different size/resolution? I imagine that there’s extra processing required to map it onto a bigger image, but I don’t know if modern hardware is sensitive enough to this level of work for it to be a noticeable difference. Will the GPU be able to work at a lower level? Is my basic premise reasonable? Since most video is compressed in some way, is there in fact an extra step required to transpose the picture onto a higher resolution or is that all taken care of within the decompression process? I ask, because I always have the impression that my laptop battery doesn’t last as long when I watch video in full screen mode as it does if I watch it in a window.

2. If I turn the volume up on my laptop, as I understand it, more power is being used to create bigger vibrations in the speaker. Now, I was watching a video (Bill Buxton’s Mix09 Keynote) and I noticed that there was a volume control on it. If I turn the volume up from within the flash application, I’d be surprised if it changed the amount of power running to my speaker so … it gets louder for the same amount of energy. Since even my twenty year old physics tells me that you can’t make energy for free .. this doesn’t seem right. What’s going on? Am I just deluded that my laptop controls volume by a variable resistor just like my great-grandfather’s crystal set?

It is at times like these, that I wish I had a background in EE so that I didn’t have to expose my vulnerable, underbelly of ignorance

I’ve just watched Zed Shaw’s THERE WILL BE PORN: 10 Dangerous Ideas Nobody Should Implement which thankfully contains neither porn, nor ten ideas. He sings, he plays music, he insults people he likes, he has some number of ideas that people should never implement which is less than ten that he talks about and he swears a great deal.

You know the old chestnut whereby both art and porn are hard to describe but “I’ll know it when I see it”. Well, this is neither. But for some reason I enjoyed watching it.

There’s a lot of history you have to have lived through to really understand it; you’ll know if you know. If you do, give his farewell speech a listen. If you don’t … he plays a mean guitar.

Looks like I jumped aboard the Erlang train just in time. If I’d waited any longer I might have missed the chance to be Munctional.

I watched The Watchmen on Friday, and it was truly splendid. I was going to write more but … I think I’ve covered it.

(Via xkcd.com.)

I read this and laughed. Connected? Hard to say.

I saw Aliens at a local cinema last night. No I didn’t fall through a hole in time/space. No, I don’t just live so far into the ass-end of nowhere that 80’s cinema is just getting to us.

I’m not sure why they did a special showing, but they did, and I’m very glad. Aliens is a film that is ageing very well; much better than I expected in fact. I think that it passes the test of time because, whilst it is sci-fi, it is a plot driven piece with memorable and distinctive characters.

I don’t know how the economics of the movie industry work, but it seems to me that the simple expediency of having a plot is giving Aliens the ability to sell out a cinema 23 years after it was made. That must be good business.

Zoë Keating is phenomenal.: I hate cellos, I normally find the sound of them grates on my nerves. This isn’t the normal Cello music, Ms Keating is wonderful. Have a listen.

(Via WWdN: In Exile.)

Art and code - obscure or beautiful code?

(Via JAOO Community Blog.)

I don’t know what it is but .. I like it.

Social Programming A Pyramid is a fascinating video from OOPSLA 2008. If you’ve got 90 minutes, and if, like me, you find passionate people talking about their passions enthralling, then I highly recommend watching it all.

I like books. You can never have enough books. I have lots of books, but I don’t have enough.

What books should be on my reading list? What are the books that everyone should read?

Every morning, when I open my RSS reader, the first thing I do is scan for a new episode of Scot Meyer’s Basic Instructions. You should too.