Down South

Thanks to a deeply confusing set of circumstances, yesterday I went down to London for what I thought was a permanent C++ developer's position only to find that it was actually a three month contract for a build manager, no programming involved. Perversely, I'd be happy doing the job especially because it's a short-term role, but it would have helped rather a lot if I'd actually known these things in advance so I wouldn't have looked quite so gormless.

Nice to see the underground looking even more sci-fi dystopian with loads of the station advertising billboards replaced with flatscreen panels. That and the constant PA announcement ordering "INSPECTOR SANDS TO THE SECURITY ROOM" really adds to the atmosphere.

Whatever coded announcement "INSPECTOR SANDS" is about doesn't seem to involve scary exploding terrorists, worse luck. I was strangely looking forwards to being blown to mince and had to take great care to sit on the stainless-steel cripple seats at the back of the platform to reduce the risk of any impulsive one-under incidents on my part.

It's also entertainingly true what people say about no-one in London acknowledging the existence of anyone else when commuting, as my automatic response to say "sorry" when bumping into or being bumped by people got me some very surprised looks.

Had a big long chat with a random stranger at Euston station, though. On the other hand, it turned out that we both live a couple of miles apart and shop at the same branch of Tescos, so this cannot be used to prove/disprove the alleged unfriendliness of Londoners.

Question: Who at Virgin Trains thought "Virgin Invader" was a good name for a rather phallic high-speed pendolino train? Was it a case of inspired awesomeness or abject stupidity?

Word to all students, especially girls: When travelling on a train, everyone else on the carriage will hear every word you say and will want the train to crash just so the horrible voices stop.

Word to all evil lawyer/business-types: The above goes double for you, and your constant telephone conversations about selling white South African farmers land to White Zimbabweans and ideas for insuring at usurious rates the equipment of NGOs operating in war-zones for the sole idea of making a boat-load of profit out of the suffering of people half the world away will induce a murderous rage in the fat guy sat opposite you, your life only being spared because fatty had to do some walking today and is now very sleepy.

What goes around comes around

When I first started my decade-long career in mobile phones, I was lured into the business by the prospect of working on an amazing piece of technology known as the Seiko-Epson Locatio, a Japan-only gadget now lost to the mists of time.  

The Locatio was an amazing piece of kit for 1999; it was comprised of a pen-based PDA computer with a tiny i-mode phone module attached to the bottom with thumbscrews, a QVGA-resolution camera module on the top of the PDA and a GPS unit screwed to the back of the unit with the same sort of thumbscrews as the phone module. Assuming you lived in Tokyo and could read Japanese, you could use the GPS and PDA to do a location-based search for nearby restaurants, browse their web-pages for menus, use the phone module to phone up and book a table and then the GPS again to navigate your way to the restaurant.  The camera module could be used to take photos of you drunkenly vomiting in the gutter outside and then you could email said photos to all your colleagues.

For comparison, in 1999 Western phones had text messaging. Except in America.

In 2006, I was working on camera UI software for a large Finnish phone manufacturer (rhymes with blockier). I was the lead engineer on the camera application for the N95, a highly spiffy smartphone with a 5-megapixel camera and gps built in. With this phone you could use the mapping application to navigate you to a local restaurant, phone up to book with the phone functionality and use the frankly excellent camera software and hardware to take unsettlingly high-resolution photographs of all your drunken antics, suitable for MMS messaging to all your mates. Truly my career had come full circle, with me finally implementing the same features on a Western market phone as I had on the very first mobile device I'd ever worked on. Only smaller, smarter, higher resolution and without the touchscreen because I hate those. The N95 was the best phone I ever worked on and I was a proud owner of one from the launch.

Now in 2010 it's one step worse. I had to cancel my mobile phone contract and switch to a pay-as-you-go SIM. Orange rather kindly sent me a new phone as well as the SIM, a Nokia 6700 classic.

The Nokia 6700 is a Series 40 type phone, which doesn't use Symbian as the base OS.  When I worked with Nokia, Series 40 was the platform for the lower-to-midrange phones with the Symbian-based Series 60 phones being reserved for the high end Smartphones with all the shiny features.  I worked almost exclusively on S60 devices except for Nokia's brief dalliance with Series 80 as used in the super-high-end 9210, 9300 and 9500 smartphones, all of which I worked on.

Anyway, series 40, non-Symbian mass market phones, right?  Well my new 6700 is feature-for-feature a match for my old N95.  GPS? Check. Navigation software? Check.  5-megapixel digital camera with DVD-resolution video recording? Check.  

It's also smaller and slightly more elegant.

The only two downsides seem to be battery life (which is unsettlingly poor compared to the already-poor battery performance of the N95) and the camera software which just isn't anything like as nice as that on the N95, even if it shares most of the features.

So, what's the problem? Nothing really, it's just that it feels like having all that functionality on a Non-Smartphone non-Symbian phone (the Locatio was non-Symbian, but my employers had written the OS it used)  is like the phone industry is saying "Bye, Zinc; we don't need yous no more!"

They don't really, but I would like to pretend that they do. :(

Things to do on a limited budget

Hey kids, try parking your car on single yellow lines when visiting the dole office, because you can't afford the £4.50-an-hour that the closest car park charges.  If fortune favours you, you'll get the heady rush of adrenaline that you used to get from stealing all the jaffa cakes from the biscuit jar at work; if fortune forsakes you, you'll lose half your week's dole money in parking fines (assuming you pay within the 1/2-price discount period) and have something to blog about that doesn't involve scripting languages.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam...

Today's episode of Dole Cuisine brings you Spamcetta Bolognese with wholewheat fusili.

You will need the following ingredients:

• 1x 200g can of Spam (actually 250g as they have a 25 percent extra free deal at the mo)
• 150g of wholewheat fusili (if it's been open in the cupboard for a while, be sure to pick out any biscuit weevils)
• 1 jar Bolognese Sauce (Tesco often do 2 for £1 deals on Ragu or what-have you)

Serves 2, but let's face it, it serves just you over two consecutive nights, you sad loser.

Put a big pan of salted water on to boil for the pasta, then while that's doing, cut the Spam into little rectangles about 1cm by 0.5cm.  

Sautee the Spam in a frying pan with the fat from the weekend's fried egg-and-ketchup sandwich. You're aiming for the Spam to start turning crispy and yum, as well as for some of the fat in it to drain out.  When done, leave on some kitchen towel to drain some of the fat off.

Once the water is boiling, throw in the pasta and bring back to the boil for about 10-12 minutes (eleven minutes is a good aimpoint)

Four minutes or so from the end of the pasta cooking time, chuck the bolognese sauce in another pan and add the spam.  Set the heat to "eh, that looks sort of moderate" and heat without letting it boil.  Be sure to stir regularly to stop it burning and to bring the spam-sauce mixture to a state of maximum entropy.

Drain the pasta, mix in the sauce/spam and serve.  Goes well with red wine, white wine, vodka, gin, buckfast, methylated spirits and that big bottle of Tia Maria that mum used for her New Year's Black Russian.  All mixed up in a big jug.

Actually, Spamcetta Bolognese is really nice.  Far nicer than it has any right to be.

Tomorrow's recipe: Spam and Super Noodles.

Ruby Newbie

I've just started looking at Ruby and I'm rather liking what I'm seeing, at least from a grammar-and-syntax point of view. This is probably partly due to me being an old C++ head and the object-orientation features of Ruby are quite close to those of C++ and Java.   Python is less strict about certain features like private inheritance, data hiding and encapsulation, which it doesn't really support, assuming that you the programmer are sensible enough not to stick your fingers into the whirring machinery of an object's gleaming guts.

At the moment, there's only two annoyances.  One is the performance, which for Ruby 1.8 is rather poor even compared to other dynamic languages like Python (Ruby 1.9 has a different runtime environment and is supposed to be quite an improvement over 1.8).  The other more subjective complaint is that constants are denoted as such by capitalising the first letter of their name. This strikes me as a rather easy-to-forget convention.

More (and less vague) Ruby talk if and when I learn new things.  I also have to learn how to program iPhones this weekend.

De-feeted

Ow.

I made a horrible mistake on Friday night by falling asleep on the sofa.  Waking up with the dogs snuggling up to me was sort of sweet, but this was offset late on Saturday when I made a horrible discovery.

No, it wasn't dog-hair related, nor was it a repeat of an incident in the early nineties when a famous and very talented programmer (and alcoholic) that I worked with came to work with a dried cat-turd stuck to his back after spending the night passed out on his kitchen floor.  No, this horrible discovery happened when I took off my shoes and socks.

Regular readers (heh) will remember that on Friday I went out and about in the big bad world after a week being snowed-in by er, snow.  What regular readers won't know is that thanks to a combination of unemployment making me poor and the peculiarly male habit of having as few pairs of shoes as possible, I was wearing deeply unsuitable footwear.  Instead of my preferred Doc Marten's eight-hole ankle boots, size ten, I was wearing a pair of Tesco's value trainers, price five pounds.  Oh, and a pair of Tesco's value sports socks.

Now don't get me wrong; it turns out that whatever third-world exploited labour it is that manages to produce a pair of shoes that sells for less than a tenner actually produces a surprisingly good pair of shoes. The problem is that they're not even slightly waterproof and once wet will in fact stay wet until put in front of the radiator or some such heaty thing.

Thanks to me traipsing about in the snow for several hours on Friday, my feet were thoroughly wet with the shoes and sports socks combo keeping them good and wet until I took my shoes off on Saturday night.

End result: I have trench foot of the left big toe (okay, immersion foot). Hurts like crazy as the skin has cracked and split as it dried out.

What can I say? I was very busy all Friday and Saturday and once my feet had warmed the wet shoes and socks to body temperature, I simply didn't notice how soggy my footwear was.  Now I'm walking around in bare (and chilly) feet hoping frostbite doesn't strike.  Although if I do lose my toes, perhaps it'll take me down to a cheaper size of shoe.

Horrible Insights, also lots of Television

I hate it when I finally put two and two together and come up with a horrible insight into how my mind works, A.K.A. four.

Last weekend I was watching 30 Rock for the first time ever, it being about the only programme that didn't involve talentless dribblers vying to become Britain's latest America's Top Got Talent Model in the Kitchen.  After a couple of episodes I was deeply in love with Liz Lemon.

Smart, thirtysomething, geeky glasses-wearing brunette, what's not to love? Nothing really, except that I also have an embarrassing telly crush on Lisa Cuddy from House, M.D.

So, I have a thing for smart, successful brunettes (who in real life would never touch me with a ten-foot bargepole, unfortunately. C'est la vie), what's the problem with that?  It's got to be better than when I was in my teens and was magnetically attracted to any female with red hair, dyed or not. Everyone knows red-heads are craaaazy, man.

The problem is with the characters they both play.  They act as enablers, allowing their male counterparts to run around being idiots and horrible to people whilst protecting them from the results of their behaviour.  It seems that what I really look for in a woman is someone who will let me do my idiot nerd thang and rescue me when I get myself in trouble whilst giving me all the glory for my successes.

It's probably a good thing I'm single.