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By Richard Blazek Wednesday 16 March 2005 My current web sites Over the last year I have put up a number of web sites and changed some existing ones. It now seems a good time to list and to describe them, more for my own benefit than for the interest of any other reader.
Monday 1 December 2003 A long weekend near Valencia Before this contract crossed the horizon, Jill and I had planned a little trip to Canet d'en Berenguer (http://www.hotelplayacanet.com) , near Sagunto, to check on the progress of our little flat and to visit family and friends. We visited two places as tourists. On Saturday we parked in a little village called Ain, in the mountains between Sagunto and Castellon and took a short walk in the countryside. The weather was balmy and the countryside was delightful. We lunched in the Moli del Duc, a charming inn in the village that was recently renovated with funds targeted at improving rural tourism in Spain. It provides home cooking, as well as a small a la carte menu and its specialty is Vino turbio, a slightly cloudy white wine. On Sunday we visited one of the largest navigable caves in Europe, the Grutas de San Jose (http://www.riosubterraneo.com) , in a town called La Vall d'Uixo. Again, a very pleasant excursion made even nicer by a lunch in one of the restaurants (http://www.restaurantelagruta.com) that are built into the caves. Both of these locations are close to each other, but neither would be found by a search in Google because no one would know what to type into the search engine. I have been thinking about how to address this problem: how to find things that you don't know exist. What would you type into a search engine, for example, to find either of these two locations? You might type in Sagunto or Castellon but this would not uncover their existence. It is just possible that you might find a directory of places around the two towns that would include these, but you would be unlikely to find any other information that would encourage you to think that they were of interest. Also, in order to have a web site developed, someone needs to fork out something like 2000 Euros and few organizations would think that they would get that much business as a direct result of their web page, not least because no one would find the web sites using a Google search. My solution to this and related problems of finding things that you don't know exist is to set up Wiki sites where enthusiasts would help assemble a huge amount of information and keep it up to date just for the pleasure of doing so. Look at the article at the bottom of this page, Degree Confluence, where people write about their experiences trying to arrive at the points where the latitude and longitude are integers. The organizers set up a list of such locations, and enthusiasts filled in the details of each location. So why no something similar that has a more practical purpose; that of guiding the visitor to places of interest. And Wiki software is ideal for realizing this purpose very economically. I am going to try to realist this kind of web site in the near future, probably centered around the town of Alcobendas where I am currently living and see how far this idea can be progressed.
Sunday 23 November 2003 Starting a new contract Let me start with a confession. I have never been a contractor before. I would not be one now unless fate had played me a joker. But I accepted my fate from the start (you always find yourself where you are meant to be), and will follow this road, as I followed earlier roads, with humor, optimism and a determination to succeed. I am in this condition because of a decision way above my previous level in the organization to re-organize the company and reduce costs. I can understand that. At the same time I have to wonder at the sanity of such a decision that depleted the workforce of its most experience staff and of course disrupted the lives of thousands. Only time will tell. But when the die was cast, I felt a kind of relief that all the petty burdens and annoyances that had been building up for years would no longer molest me. I am now free to control my own destiny. Freedom is a difficult concept as it implies responsibility also. Yes I am free, but at the same time I have a wife, a house, a cat to look after, let alone myself. Although I left my last organization with something of a pension, it was not enough to live on, except in a very meager and unsatisfactory way. Not only financially, but also intellectually. I crave the stimulation of new things to do and new people to interact with. So there was an imperative to either look for permanent employment, or to join the growing movement for personal independence. I chose the latter out of a desire, willingness and ability to take the risk of controlling my destiny and a rejection of being controlled by 'the system'. While waiting for 'the contract', I was very busy setting up my company and learning how to operate effectively. I also had a number of ideas for business opportunities that I shared with a number of colleagues, hoping that one of them would act as a spark and catch fire. Well, maybe none of my ideas was good enough. I was also lucky to have been able to continue some work with a colleague and a company with which I had been involved in the past, and I will always be grateful for the start they gave me in this new life. So here I arrived at Lilly in Madrid one bright Monday morning, in a new but not totally unfamiliar country, and scarcely able to speak the language properly. Well, I didn't arrive all of a sudden, of course. Quite a lot of planning and organizing went into beforehand. Not to mention packing, flying and wandering around the town of Alcobendas like a lost soul on a Sunday night looking for food. No one helped me with any of this; but they wouldn't, would they. I am after all an independent contractor. And this is where I am meant to be! The new office turns out to be great. Lots of very helpful people all trying to make my stay a pleasant experience. In my particular role, it has been decided that I will be most effective if I am located with the user group rather than with the IT group. That is fine with me. The first few days I had to get used to the new routines and systems and ways of doing things. I have been going though the training required in company and local group policies and SOPs. I have to admire the setup here which is more comprehensive and integrated that I have known before. Monday 1 Sepember 2003 The mystery runners For those of you who are not resident in England, here is some context. The telephone watchdog http://www.oftel.gov.uk/ has decreed that the British public need more competition in the field of directory enquiries (finding a telephone number for a person or a business). The Old British Telecom service was already very efficient and obtained by dialing the number 192. Now with competition, all directory enquiry numbers are to begin with 118 and many service providers have set up new services, including the old BT whose number is now 118 500. The most prolific advertiser for a new service is The Number UK Ltd (http://www.thenumber118118.com/) and the advertisements feature a pair of runners wearing vests with the number 118 on them (http://www.mysteryrunners.co.uk/).
Anyway, Jill and I were doing our evening run and approached a group of teenagers. We ignore such groups because usually the least offensive things they taunt us with are "pick you knees up", or "One-two, one-two". This time, one of them was inspired and shouted, "118118". We looked at each other, we looked at them and the whole party collapsed into hysterical laughter. Well, I shouted back, "No, 118 500", but I have to admit that this was rather weak. Sunday 18 August 2002 WinCVS. http://sourceforge.net/projects/cvsgui/ I have been putting WikiTypeFramework up on Sourceforge, and one of the main benefits of using Sourceforge is the ability to put the source code of a project in a code management system. The particular code management system chosen by Sourceforge is CVS. I had expected to find CVS to be like most other code management system, but was surprised to see a completely different approach in this product. Most code management systems demand that the user behave 'correctly'; that they check out those code modules that they wish to change, causing these modules to become locked in the code management system. Of course, few people actually work like this as after one has taken out a lock, one may not actually do anything for some time, therefore preventing others from making changes. Most prefer to take a copy of all the source and only begin the process of checking in when they have completed some work. This behavior often makes the use of the code management system less useful than it should be. Amazingly, CVS supports the natural way of doing things rather than the 'proper' way, and I immediately felt comfortable with it. Checking out in CVS does not induce a lock in the repository. Checking in fails if the source has been updated by someone else, but the system supplies an update to the local sources allowing any potential conflicts to be resolved before re-trying the check in. WinCVS supplies a useful GUI the base product and already I have placed many of my modules under management by CVS. Sunday 4 August 2002 360 degree panorama from Everest The astronomical picture gallery exhibits some outstanding photographs of the universe and galaxy and also of the earth. This link shows a 360 degree panorama taken from Everest. I have borrowed it and displayed it with the VsiPanViewSW applet from Vertical Software, Inc. . You may need to give the image a little 'push' with the mouse to get it moving. iCorrect Entree. I infrequently play with image software so I have never become expert at manipulating images. In the October edition of PCPlus, I found a piece of software that essentially improves most of my photos automatically. I was so pleased with the results that I refreshed all my pictures in Walk along the English South Coast and re-published them. Digital Maps. http://www.multimap.com Maps to a variety of scales and of most parts of the world have to be one of the big benefits of the Internet. Recently, sites have appeared showing satellite photographs of various parts of the world. Multimap combines the two in an amazing way. You can search for a place and view either the map, or the satellite photo, and get both to the same scale. Further, you can request the system to overlay the map on the photo and a small area, moveable by mouse, does exactly that.
Friday 12 July 2002 The 5k Contest. http://www.the5k.org/list.asp Every year a competition is run for the best complete web site that occupies less than 5k bytes on disk. There are the most amazing pieces of coding submitted, some of them quite useful, if not to achieve a task then to learn from. Some of them are highly artistic.In these days of 'bloat ware' it is refreshing to see what can be achieved with so little.
Sunday 7 July 2002 TreePad. http://www.treepad.com Ordinary editors and word processors are designed to create and edit text in a linear way. Although you can add headings and other formatting devices, the text essentially starts at the top and finishes at the bottom and you may have to scroll though dozens to screens or pages to read it. That is fine for reading, but for thinking about the text, a different format can be helpful. Microsoft Word offers an outline view, but this is barely adequate for most purposes. I have played with mind mapping software and used the mind mapping template in Visio and although the tools are useful for thinking about a subject, the result cannot be easily converted into the linear format required for documents. So it was with pleasure that I found a neat piece of software called TreePad. This allows one to create and edit text in a tree representation, allowing the whole content of a document to be summarized in one line (the root node) or expanded in any number of levels in a very flexible way. The resulting file is a simple ASCII file, unfortunately not XML format, but easy enough to manipulate programmatically to suit a wide variety of purposes. Indeed, a number of utilities are already available to create XML files, export to Excel, or create a set of HTML pages. My particular requirement was the ability to create a test script for a project that I am currently working on. One often sees test scripts presented in a linear format in a Word or Excel table, but how can the script be written in the first place or checked; a long list of instructions does not provide sufficient context to understand what is being tested and why and gives no confidence that everything has been tested. Writing the script in a hierarchical way makes the whole exercise much easier and gives much more confidence that everything has been covered. Two additional tools are needed to help make sense of a tree structure when it is converted into a linear presentation. The first is the ability to name each node in such a way that it can be sorted correctly. The second is a function to 'calculate' the tree. Two types of calculation can be performed. The first is summing the leaves of the tree correctly to give a total sum for the root node. An example of this is the Windows Explorer program when it calculates the size of the directly based on the sizes of the individual files. The second type is what I call the Pass/Fail indicator: here if a single leaf has a fail result, then the whole tree must report a fail result. But it is then simple to navigate the tree to locate the failed leaf. I found that the creating of the algorithms for these calculations was the most complex programming task I have attempted; but then I never learned these at college since I did not take a computer science degree. The basic TreePad version is free, and is offered to sell the more interesting latest version of the program that can handle rich text format, graphics and HTML content. Another piece of software called The Brain is also interesting, but this, I feel, is more a triumph of design over function as it is not simple to get hold of the data for one's own purposes.
Sunday 12 May 2002 AbiWord. http://www.abiword.com This is a new word processor (version 1.0.1) that has two aims that I wholeheartedly support:
Preliminary experience with AbiWord is that it is very much like MSWord, but obviously with fewer features. The most noticeable absence is table support, but this is coming in a next version. Otherwise, it is great to be able to see the structure of one's document, have it converted nicely into HTML and being simple, this word processor is fast to load and to use. Something very useful to me, but I recognize that I am out on a limb here, is the support for multiple spelling dictionaries in the same document.
ibiblio - the public's library and digital archive http://www.ibiblio.org A curious mixture of digital material including text, sound and image. This is a constantly changing site with new material being added monthly. I particularly liked the Dr Fun cartoons.
Degree Confluence http://www.confluence.org A crazy project to visit and record each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world. The first few stories I read were rather amusing of people wading through swamps, wallowing in thick mud and meeting un scaleable cliffs to attempt to stand on a particular spot on the earth aided by their trusty GPS. The most common theme is that these points seem to be guarded by fierce dogs. Don't bother looking in the UK, all the points have been visited, but there are a huge number in rather uncomfortable areas of the world still available for the would be explorer. On one page is a fascinating composite world map with a minute picture of the 'confluence' at each point where it has been successfully reached.
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Below is a list of my primary starting points for my meandering journey across the Internet. http://www.memepool.com A good source for the bizarre http://www.robotwisdom.com Science and literary links http://slashdot.org Open source community news http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html Politics, computing and other subjects http://www.hyperorg.com Infrequent but very perceptive articles on all sorts of subjects http://www.joelonsoftware.com Creator of City desk has some excellent articles on developing software http://members.aol.com/acockburn Excellent articles on requirements gathering and analysis and also on development methodologies http://www.freewarepalm.com Source of very interesting and sometimes useful applications for the Palm platform http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html Astronomy picture of the day |
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