Kathmandu

well it’s day 2 here in kathmandu. It stinks, the smog is really bad, you can barely make out the mountains that surround the city. The food is good, Helen is in veggie heaven. The KGH is a quaint old colonnial wreck of a place, the gardens carefully manicured and green, overlooked by a large grapefruit tree - overlaid by the thick dust that settles on everything. Smoking would be no hazard here, the smog will kill you first for sure.

We did some sight seeing today and booked the trek. Then lazed about in the gardens enjoying the sun - in my case that also meant nursing my knee, having managed to trip over a tiny stair and damaged one of the ligaments in my knee, not auspicious with an eighteen day hike starting on Monday.

The nepalese are all very friendly and obliging; the europeans all stand out as interminably self absorbed. Had to evacuate the garden at one point as we got so fed up of a young dutch nurse drone on (loudly) about herself . Listening to the Brit ringing home as I am typing this is not inspirational either, I wonder how many times a person can ask “is everything alright?” in 5 minutes, interspersed with questions about whether the drain has been cleared.

Decided to keep a notebook for the trek as I somehow doubt the internet will be much in evidence once we leave bhesi saha. Whether I will be able to read my own writing is a moot point.

All in all though can’t wait to start the trek.

Off to Annapurna

Off tomorrow morning (wed 20th), can’t wait - a 4 week holiday ! Can’t say I have ever taken 4 weeks off work before (planned that is). We start the trek of the circuit on the 25th once everyone arrives, so Helen and I get a couple of days in Kathmandu before the others start turning up.

Then, when we get back, it’s straight into the IVF- sheesh !

Things I hate …

People who answer their mobile phone inside the cubicle of a public lavatory (the plonker this morning was busy telling his “beloved” things I didn’t want to hear and she clearly couldn’t hear the additional sound effects he was generating)

Spicebird

Finally - someone is building on Thunderbird to come up with an Outlook killer ! Spicebird - just downloaded the beta and bedding it in - the mail side seems good, pretty much a pass-thru of the Thunderbird functionality - the calendar capability needs some working at I think as I can’t yet get it to read my googgle calendars, but try that out extensively. At least I can read Outlook appointments now, though again that it not fully stable yet … but its only a 0.4 beta so it’s an impressive start

Joe Bonamassa

Recommended to me by my brother this morning, and excellent too. Couldn’t find the album bro’ recommended (the latest) but got hold of a copy of Sloe Gin; finally someone to fill the gap vacated by SRV

Zoho

So after some research, we have decided to trial the use of Zoho for the project management of our “start up venture”. I have to say that I quite impressed so far. It’s far from a perfect system, but it’s web hosted, attractively priced and offers a useful set of features.

This raises the point that there are not many project management tools that are actually useful. I have used MS Project now for over 10 years and I am heartily sick of it; it is the premiere project management tool and has been around for long enough, yet it still does not offer anything like good enough facilities. It’s clunky, the scheduling is a waste of time, it frequently does not work for complex large programme plans, the reporting is poor (critical path analysis reports are useless) and it does not pro-actively assist the project manager. As for supporting newer techniques such as critical chain analysis, forget it. Open Workbench isn’t much better. I had high hopes for this … once, when it was Open Source. The moment it got gobbled up by CA my heart sank. I have tried very hard recently to set up some complex sample projects and frankly it’s just not stable enough as a product for me to consider using.

Both of these offerings are very much heavyweight tools and neither are suitable for web based usage or for allowing clients access on a transparent basis. And truthfully, in recent years, I have depended on the gant chart less and less, to my mind it’s simply not a particularly useful tool for the workaday project manager and certainly not the fundamental plank of project planning that institutions claim it to be.

So Zoho it is, for the moment, its simple, its easy to use and we shall see how effectve it is over the coming weeks

Birthdays and cryptography

It’s me birthday today and yep, I do feel old, still things could be a lot worse, at least I am healthy and have a wonderful wife, so not complaining.

And on the topic of birthdays, I recently found out about the “birthday paradox“, the maths of which form the basis for the cryptographic birthday attack; I got curious as to how Wi-Fi WEP keys were cracked and starting digging around. It’s fascinating how the mathematics of this are, at face value, entirely counter-intuitive (well to non mathematicians anyway).

Slashdot and Java

I’ve been wading my way through the posts on Slashdot to this article. It’s great reading, and oh so deja vu. I’m old enough to have read several variations on this theme; c/Java/Cobol/ for example. I think the esteemed professors in question are missing a point though - “Because of its popularity in the context of Web applications and the ease with which beginners can produce graphical programs” - the fact that Java is often used for Web applications isn’t the fault of the language, nor does it mean it is an inappropriate language. I have personally thrown C++ graduate engineers out of interviews because they didn’t know that the command line existed or understood the concept of batch processing; I can remember when, in the late 70s, the company I worked at, placed a blanket embargo against employing any CS graduate because what they had been taught at University was wholly inappropriate for the needs of commercial software development and the effort needed to “undo” their training to make them understand that pragmatism and excellence could and should co-exist was deemed too great to justify employing them.

What I do find reassuring are the engineering responses, the passion and the energy, things I look for when I am recruiting; and what I don’ t look for when I am hiring is a specific language skill, a good engineer views computer languages as tools in his/her tool box. Arguing that teaching Java is a bad thing misses the point - if the CS courses are churning out inadequately trained grads, then it’s the course content and the teaching that is poor, not the choice of language.

 

Beginnings

For the last 8 months I have been working away from home for one of the household name insurance companies as a delivery manager, with a remit as trouble shooter; and boy have they had some c*** to sort out. Gotten a bit tired of that, too long away from home makes me even less sociable than usual and sorting out the same old shite again and again gets tedious, very tedious. But it’s coming to an end and from this week I am on a 4 day week there, mainly so that I can start work on a far more interesting start-up endeavour with some colleagues.

This new work promises to be far more interesting, and has the merit of not being in the financial services area (hallelujah, and possibly good timing too), so I am looking forward to it and plan to “blog” progress on it here. Currently I am working flat out to finish an ITT for the required hardware that will be needed and researching technologies such as Jboss Drools, as well as sorting out what project management and office software we will need and use (open source as far as possible, subject to costs - and isn’t that interesting ? the annual support costs for technologies such as Red Hat et al are now no longer, de facto, cheaper than Windows).

The development teams we have engaged are Croatian, and that’s proving interesting as well, for a variety of reasons. Again currently my focus is on sorting out the working methods we will need to adopt for near-shoring. I’ve been playing around with Fogcreek’s Fogbugz product for the bug reporting, always liked Spolsky ethos and approach, and it looks like a good product, so I think we will trial it on the hosted basis.

Wiki search

Some interesting things going on here; Google’s recent announcement that they are setting up what is, in effect, a rival to Wikipedia, struck me as a long term game play; giving one the impression that Google are well aware that the nature of searching is never going to stand still and Wikipedia does represent a threat to their interests. There is a small but growing % of people who are not satisfied with the Google results and often use sites like Wikipedia for their initial “look-see”, I count myself amongst that group. And now the converse - Wiki is moving into search (also here). This is going to be an interesting area to watch and I wonder if it will be reminiscent of the MS vs non-MS battles that occured during Microsoft’s climb to power.