Wildfalcon

Its been some time since I last wrote anything. However I refuse to sit here and write down that its simply because I have been too busy. The real truth is I have been too mythered. Not enough taking control of my life. Just the other day I sat down and did some paperwork, and found unopened bank statements from as far back as June. Thats just not like me!

Those close to me always told me it would take about two years after completing my PhD to really recover. I laughed at that and thought it was stupid, but looking at the calendar I see that is has now been two years, and finally all my bank statements are filed. Just in case…

So what now, what changed? Well for starters I have just accepted a new job, which I will be starting in the new year. Check out www.getnaked.com for all the lowdown on the company and the team. We will be developing a open messaging platform, which, in short is going to let you use your online existence to really be open with your friends. Not in the way Facebook lets you keep track of all the people you lost touch with 15 years ago, but actually maintain and nurture friendships, encourage you to be open, honest and emotionally naked with those people you trust. This will tie into some thoughts I wrote about a couple of years ago now. My thinking then was inspired by a Joel on Software post on how the tools given to online communities can influence the culture of the community. I’m really looking forward to spending some more time thinking about these sort of things. So check out the naked site, and sign up for the beta program, which is launching soon.

The last year or so I have also been getting more and more into my dancing. I don’t write too much about that, partly because it doesn’t translate so well to written form, and partly because my partner is a private person, who would not appreciate it if I were to go into day to day details. But I’m enjoying it, we are making progress and have started to attend competitions regularly.

The last thing thats made me stop and think about things a bit is an up-coming operation. In 3 days time i have to go under the knife to have the bones in my little toes reduced in size. The operation itself is pretty minor, but i will have to spend 2 weeks in bed to let the bones fully recover before putting weight on them again. I have been rushing about so much trying to get all the little bits that need to be sorted sorted, and then I will suddenly go from running everywhere, to not moving for two weeks. I think I am going to feel like I have run straight into a brick wall! If anyone feels like sending me some nice messages, or better yet, visiting and keeping me company, it would be very much appreciated. Oh, and if you are coming. I prefer green grapes to red, preferably peeled :-)

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I have been thinking quite a bit recently about online communities. Not just the technology that allows them, but what exactly is their role. No doubt this has been inspired by my recent work on Paso, a replacement web based online community tool for IVDA.

My friend James pointed me in the direction of Joel Spolsky, who has written a bit about how the tools provided by an online community can have a drastic effect on its culture, and its sociology. For example, putting a “reply” button at the end of a thread rather than the beginning increases the likelihood of people actually reading the thread before replying.

From there, I did a little bit of research about Ray Oldenburg, who has written a book, The Great Good Place, in which he talks about a “Third Place”, somewhere other than work or home for people to gather, and be social. Joel Spolsky pointed out that more and more online communities are becoming a “Third Place” for people. This strikes me as both very true, and very unfortunate. I find that an online community, such as UDS is capable of providing enough social interaction to remove the feeling of loss that can otherwise drive people out in search of a Third Place, but, falls short of providing the social needs that such a place should satisfy. This raises the question, are online communities doomed to be pale shadows of real communities, or have they just not yet reached the point at which they can compare? I think the answer is somewhere in between. They will never (I hope) replace real face to face interaction, but I think the can serve as a great way to maintain social links when its not possible to be physical present, and I think they have much more potential to catalyse real communities. Over the next few months I will be thinking about how this can be achieved in UDS, and no doubt I will be posting some of my thoughts, and maybe even my conclusions here. I would say that the problem of creating viable online communities is no more than 10% solved.

Finally, I would like to point out a talk by Marc Smith, at Microsoft research, who studies online communities, to analyse behaviour patterns. He did a talk that is available on IT conversations. Well worth a listen.

Technorati Tags : “online, communities”, forum, paso, dancing

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Recently I have been trying to teach myself eXtreme programming. Without repeating all the ideas and concepts, one of their key arguments is “Do the most important stuff first, the rest can wait till later”. That’s all well and good, and I like the idea, I would even go so far as to say I agree with it, and think it’s a damn good idea.

As an example, Paso, the web software I am writing for IVDA needs some new features before it can go live. It needs to be able to have a forum board that only people at one university can see. That way all the people at Imperial College have a place for gossip, and team discussions, without allowing Oxford or Cambridge to read it and steal their ideas. In fact this is the one biggest thing that’s currently missing from Paso, so XP dictates that I should add that feature right now, as it provides the biggest business advantage.

Web development is different from other forms of development (sorry for the quick subject change, but it will make sense later – promise), and one of the key differences is URIs – those bits of text starting with http:// at the top your window when you are viewing a web page. Every single thing I want done has to be expressed as a URI, and sometimes, some extra data. We all know that cool URIs don’t change, ever!

Often, if you look at the URIs  you will see it contains long strings of numbers and implementation specific details  such as http://www.some-forum-site/viewtopic.php&topic=13487282. This is bad a bad URI! It says what software your site is written in (PHP – but do your users care?), lists what number that topic is (13487282) which is not something that anyone is going to remember. Its really good for your traffic if someone can grab a beer mat in the pub, and scribble down the URI for a topic they were reading, the person they give the beer mat too is much more likely to read the site, then if you say “go to some site, and search for a topic on blah”. Finally, that little “&” says to many search engines “ignore the rest of this URI”, so your actual content doesn’t get indexed. Lots and lots of missed searches – less traffic – bad!

So your site is doing to do better if your URL is something like http://www.some-forum-site/topic/what-fake-tan-is-best, but URIs of the first form are much much easier to develop. I’m using ruby on rails a lot at the moment, which for the most part, produces really nice URIs, but still falls into the trap of putting strings of numbers into the URI. This is probably the most minor of the URI issues, but still one I want to avoid.

The problem comes when you try and combine XP with web development. The business value side of me says “Get university boards up and running”. It’s more important than nice URIs, the part of me learning XP says “Do the university specific boards, then at a later date, sort them out with nice URIs”, the part of me that buys into the cool URIs don’t change mantra, says “ARGHHHHH”

So what to do? In my first few iterations I spent the time creating nice URIs from the beginning. It was great, Paso forums have really nice URIs, I’m very pleased with them, and proud of them. However it added lots of time to the development, and its still not done, The short names (what-fake-tan-is-best) need to come from somewhere, If I ask the users to type them in they are just going to bash away at the keyboard, and I’m going to get meaning less garbage. Auto generating them is a hard problem that will take a long time to get right. Already I’m thinking about how to solve a problem that not that important from a business value point of view. XP says that’s wrong.

My gut feeling is to think: sod it, this is still under development. I will have static URIs once the key features are fixed and done. But I have lots of cool things I want to add to Paso, and fighting with short-names and nice URIs are holding that up, the project becomes less fun, I get less motivated, and less productive. It’s a bad cycle. I know how I work, I really want nice URIs but I want a working site more. I want a site that people can use without caring about the URIs - to be honest, most people don’t. So I’m going to lay off on the nice URI mantra for now. And get the site working. Once that’s done, I will enjoy playing with it to get the URIs nice. And the dance community will enjoy using their new software, or at least, they will enjoy telling me what’s wrong with it :-)

Technorati Tags : agile, XP, URI, development, paso

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Just got back from the osteopath about my knee.

I have had an ache in my knee for almost 18 months now. This spring I went to see a physiotherapist who diagnosed me with patellofemoral pain. She told me to do some leg raising exercises, and over the next few months told me to just keep doing them while I continually reported minor or no improvement.

Today’s visit to the osteopath was much better. For a start within 5 mins of beginning the hour long appointment I already felt she had taken a more detailed and through assessment, and that was before she put me on the table and did all sorts of prodding, poking, pulling and so on.

The final assessment is that the patella is indeed out of track, as with they physio’s diagnosis. This is irritating and inflaming the ligament connecting the tibia to the patella, which causes the ache. However she isn’t convinced by the cause. A long time ago I had some bad shoulder pains, which eventually were traced to a problem with my right hip. Meeta (the Osteopath) thinks that this is what is causing the problem again. My right leg is all every so slightly turned in wards (kind of like a permanent tango position) which is cause the miss-tracking of the patella. However she isn’t sure, partly because the Quad is so tense as a result of the exercises from the physio, that i have to go back in a week after doing a week of stretches on the quad to relax it a bit. If I get a major change before then I’m to put ice on the knee, and report back on what effect that has.

In the meantime, dancing is apparently good for the knee, it disperses the inflammation, which prevents the pain from getting too bad. However, standing in static positions with weight on a bent right knee is bad, and to be avoided. So I now have an excuse to straighten and take weight off my right knee in Tango lessons :)

Technorati Tags : Knee, ache, osteopath

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Two days have passed since I paid valuehost the money they want to get UDS back up online. The valuehost control panel still says we haven’t paid, and all my messages to them have been ignored. They certainly are not doing anything to counteract the rumours that they are just crooks.

I could set up a minimal service on another computer somehwere, but that would take a blitz of intense work, a few days minimum (possibly longer) and then we would have to endure downtime as the DNS changes propogate, and again when we move back.

This all leaves me feeling a bit helpless, all I can do is work on a long term solution to make sure we don’t have this problem again in the future :-(

Technorati Tags : web-hosting, ivda

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Sometime on Friday night http://www.universitydancesport.com stopped working. After a day or so it became clear that it was not due to a temorary technical hitch. On Monday both Jess and I independently managed to discover the problem was that our hosts, valuehost (link diliberatly not included so no-one makes the mistake of following it!), had pulled the plug on the account. Their justification was that we had not paid the bill, which seems fair enough, or at least would do were it not for the fact that they never told us the bill was due. Ideally we should have checked, but its still not nice of them. After some hasty online meetings with Chris (IVDA president) we decided to pay them, rather than try and take the opertunaty to jump ship and go with a sensible hosting company.

We do still plan to move to a different hosting company, but this way we have the chance to do so at a time of our choosing rather than when its forced upon us.

Anway, valuehost have their money, and now we are just waiting for them to notice, wake up and put the site back online. Lets hope they don’t take too long.

Technorati Tags : web-hosting., ivda

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Well i’m now well and truely into job hunting. I have finished my CV, though not yet webified it. I have sent of CVs to several worthy employers, and I have attended the less than worthy carears fair at Imperial. Come on employers - I have spent 4 years doing a PhD, don’t tell me that your going to ignore it and just stick me in the same old graduate recuritment program as everyone else. I’m not biting on that line.

So i’m spending my time job searching, dancing, and working on the new university dancesport website, which now has a list of requirements.

Now I need to go and pick up my suit from the tailors, pick up some cooking ingredients and then go buy some new latin shoes. My shoes are to tight, and it does matter, as I have not forgotten how to dance.

Technorati Tags : job-hunting, dance-shoes

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I recently took my dance medal tests and now have the results. I got honours in both bronze and silver, with low 90s for the bronze exam, and high 80s for the silver. The comments from the examiner are that I need to relax my shoulder line, work on “swing and sway” and improve my movements when moving backwards. Overall i’m very pleased with the results, and can’t wait to get back to doing some more dancing, just as soon as my knee is fully recovered.

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Today I took my ballroom bronze and silver dance exams. I had to dance the silver exam three times, once with Laura, my regular dance partner, and once with Florence and once with Deepti. I guess this means I’m stable enough to dance with several girls, at least in theory. In reality, I lost the timing on the Quickstep with Deepti, which I felt pretty guilty about, given it was her exam, although we later figured out she was leaving out some of the steps, so I can’t be held entirely to blame :-)

Apparently everyone passed, though we are still waiting official results.

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I am having a trial to see if I can make selling photos feasible through my website. Photobox allow me to upload photos to their site, and then to let me set the prices. I then don’t have to deal with printing or postage at all. They obviously take a cut, but the important thing is that it allows me to put photos up for sale without me spending long periods of time printing photos, stuffing evelopes etc etc….

For now I am doing it manually. If people want to buy the photos they need to e-mail me and tell me what photos they want, and then I will upload it to the photobox web site, and they can buy from there. I might be able to automate the process a bit more, as i can upload photos by e-mail, so i can configure a scrpit to do that, and then sort out the URLs, but that is going to take some testing. I can also get them to do most of the automation, but that requires a �250 set up fee, and I have no idea if I will make anywhere near that much so I can’t justify it.

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