Wir sind Helden

Posted on May 9, 2012 by hds

About a month ago I was looking for something to listen while waiting for a train. I found Wir sind Helden (We are heroes), a german band who I had never heard of. Obviously a friend had passed the music on to me and I’d never gotten around to listening to it.

I really enjoyed it and have listened to each of the discs that I had on there a few times since then.

Yesterday I looked up the group on the internet, to see whether they had any more albums I could buy. It turns out they do.

However according to Wikipedia they broke up, the week before I “discovered” them. So there you are, I’m the inverse of an early adopter, I only get into something after it’s just finished.

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That post-a-day-in-March thing

Posted on April 20, 2012 by hds

So, I was going really well. I had two weeks under my belt and I’d only missed a couple of days.

Then it all went wrong.

It wasn’t even for lack of material. I still have a list here with four or five possible topics on it that I never used.

But for someone who works too much as it is, making the effort to sit down for even 15 minutes to write a web site post turned out to be just too much.

Now it’s the second half of April and I seem to be making up for all the posts in March, it’s been a month since I wrote anything here.

I’ll try and change that now.

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Moving and what physical object means home

Posted on March 20, 2012 by hds

I moved on the weekend, which is as good an excuse as any for my three-day lapse in posting every day of the month.

I moved in with Andrea (that’s my girlfriend for anyone who stumbled upon my page from google), so I’m now much closer to uni, although I’ve left my beloved Gràcia behind. At least for the time being.

I’ve got a lot of stuff, I’ve been living away from Australia for 7 years now, and as much as I try getting rid of my things, I’ve still got a lot.

I started moving a few things here a couple of weeks ago so that it wouldn’t be such an enormous hassle all at once. I started thinking about what the essential item was that, once relocated, would mean that I’d effectively moved from one residence to another.

The item which would be important was the one that I would not move until I knew that I’d be spending all my time at the new place.

It’s not my cloths, they’re important yet not essential to my sense of home.

It’s not my collection of books, as important as they are I just haven’t had room to show them off for a long time, so a lot of them are actually just in storage.

It’s not my bedding either, or my music (which is mostly digital), and its not a lot of other things that I had to move.

In the end it came down to two things. One is my laptop, the other my set of kitchen knives.

The laptop is important for work, I can’t work from home (wherever that is) without my computer. However since these days I do my best to work at uni and leave work there when I leave I think it’s probably the least important of the two.

Which means that kitchen knives are the most important thing for my home, which may sounds a bit odd I know.

The reason is straight forward. I enjoy cooking, and both houses had just about everything I needed to cook, except that neither had a decent set of knives (except mine).

So there we are, in the end it’s kitchen knives.

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Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga

Posted on March 16, 2012 by hds

A number of years ago I got into comics by reading the entire Marvel Civil War event that got passed to me. Marvel’s events are basically big stories that involve many of the members of the Marvel universe and have some sort of lasting impact.

Civil War was one of the biggest ones to date. There were over 20 comics each month which were related. Of those, one really stuck out for me, it was a cross-over between Young Avengers and Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways.

Runaways is the story of a group of kids who find out that their parents are supervillains and run away from home and end up confronting their ne’er do well ‘rents. The stories are involving, I loved the characters, and the dialogue is fantastic – and all this from a concept which is perfectly suited to the Marvel universe, full of superheroes and villains.

Vaughan also wrote Y: The Last Man, an epic tale of what happens when every male mammal on the planet suddenly dies, every one except a barely-not-a boy and his monkey. Y: The Last man ran for 60 issues, I’ve been reading through and am almost at the end, it’s been great.

Wednesday marked the release of yet another comic series from Vaughan. Saga starts off with a very Romeo and Juliet theme story. Set to a war between the inhabitants of a planet and those of its moon which has been outsourced across the galaxy, a couple formed of the two species on opposite sides of the conflict give birth to a child.

I can’t give much else away because it’s only just started and now I’ve got to wait until next month to see where it goes. In any case I’m expecting it to be a fantastic story, a saga if you will. Vaughan has already promised more “space helicopters and naked robots.”

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You work how much?

Posted on March 15, 2012 by hds

Today I read an interesting article on how the 40-hour work week came about and its demise in recent years.

The first thing that I thought, reading this article was, what demise?

Then I thought about my parents and what their work weeks were like before retiring, how I always used to skip most of my lunch hour working in the UK and so on.

I’m lucky in many ways, I’ve not spent very long working a full time job, as after a few years of that I started studying again and have been working part time (and from a different country to my employer) ever since.

Yes, I work long hours, but I’m trying to study (at least) full time and work part time, so it goes with the territory.

This article spoke of all the poor sods who get into jobs where 50 or 60 hour weeks are  asked of them, and this is not just the elite few getting paid huge amounts of money, but a lot of “normal” people as well.

Of course, this is based in the USA, where there’s no minimum leave allocation per year and according to some sort of research people find life fulfilment in their jobs more than people here in Europe, who find it in their, you know, life outside of work.

The end of the story is this, there is an enormous amount of research that has been done into the ineffectiveness of long work weeks, equally for manual labourers or “knowledge” workers – but that all gets thrown out the window when someone’s boss figures they can bump up the bottom line by demanding that their staff work more than they’re paid for.

Of course this probably just gets worse when jobs are scarce and it’s easy to replace an “unmotivated” worker for someone who’s willing to give the required 150%.

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My push notifications don’t work in production

Posted on March 13, 2012 by hds

This isn’t so much a post as a I-wish-I’d-read-this-somewhere.

When you distribute an iOS app, you do so via a provisioning profile. Distribute in this case means anything from putting it on your own iOS device connected to your Mac to debug to submitting it to Apple for the app store.

You have to create these things in a web based interface and then install them into Xcode and use them during the compilation of your app.

Earlier versions of Xcode had enormous problems with these that could have you uninstalling and reinstalling profiles, certificates and keys until you were ready to go back to writing shell scripts for a living.

Now it’s much better.

However you still have to update your provisioning profile every time you want to add a new device (when it’s not going to Apple) or, as I was reminded today, when you add a push notification certificate.

After submitting an app to Apple, I added push notification support and submitted the update. A bit later I realise that the apps weren’t registering with my sever, in fact they didn’t even appear to be asking the user  if they wanted to receive said notifications (and this happens before anything).

Yet it worked fine for the test apps.

After a fair bit of fiddling and reading old instructions it dawned on me that the provisioning profile I used to send to Apple was the same one I made for the first submission, before I set up push notifications.

I had updated the ad hoc and development profiles when I added new devices to test on, but not the app store one.

Now, this is all in the documentation I’m sure (although I’ve yet to look), and I should have read it. But I have already read that documentation for another app and so I wasn’t going to trawl through it looking for that one thing I’d missed.

What I really needed was for the developer portal  to warn me that my new push certificates would not work until I updated my provisioning profile.

That would have been good interface design.

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Obligatory new iPad post

Posted on March 12, 2012 by hds

So, there’s a new iPad. The same day that it was announced I had someone asking me whether it was worth having.

Which of course begs the question, what is an iPad good for.

I’m in the position where I have an iPad (2) for work, and therefore I don’t need to justify why I purchased one. I don’t even need to justify why my work purchased me one, I develop apps for iOS – there is no alternative to having an iPad for that work.

From the day I got the iPad there were two things I knew I’d use it for (aside from the development bit), reading comics and casual web browsing in front of the television.

The web browsing is good, but a smallish laptop is pretty much as useful for that (except in summer). For reading comics it’s far better than a laptop, whether they’re the sort that’d been scanned in for digital reading or the new breed of digital comics – a laptop doesn’t come close.

The one other thing that I use for iPad for is cooking, it’s great for having in the kitchen and referring to recipes, and somehow the screen doesn’t seem to get as dirty as a laptop keyboard.

However, at the end of all this, I’m now sure I could justify the cost if I were paying it, an iPad for half the current retail price would probably have me on board, but until then, it’s too much of a luxury.

This all of course isn’t specific to the new iPad. The bigger screen does look fantastic, and a faster processor and better graphics should mean that the larger screen doesn’t slow the whole thing down too much, but at the end of the day, it’s still a luxury item.

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My first piece of furniture

Posted on March 11, 2012 by hds

I’ve been living out of home for a bit over 7 years now, and lived in as many different flats, apartments and share houses. But they’ve always been furnished, and I’ve managed to go through all this time without buying so much as a bed side table (although I did once have a washing machine).

Well, all that has ended. Last week Andrea and I bought our first piece of furniture. Perhaps that should have been the name of the post, but it’s my web site so I’m going with a bit of creative license.

We now have a purple pouf, which aside from being very comfortable to sit on and the right height for my feet during the siesta also opens up and doubles as a storage space for all the yarn that we have!

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Me, TV, and books – it’s all entertainment

Posted on March 9, 2012 by hds

This is one of those stories that most people who actually read this blog already know, but it’s Friday so here goes.

When I was about 12 a new rule was instigated at home, during the week my brother and I were banned from watching TV, playing computer games or whatever other digital entertainment was about.

I can’t actually remember ever being upset about this, although I’m assuming that at the time I was. In any event, it had different effects on the two of us.

Evan watched TV whenever he got the chance, in fact if he’d been given the opportunity I’m sure he would have spent the hours between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening in front of the TV.

I stopped watching TV almost completely. Aside from the shows we watched as a family (X-Files and the Simpsons) I didn’t watch free to air TV. This had no impact on how much I enjoyed movies, but the whole regularly programmed television thing was lost on me.

As a blog post, there are a few different directions I could go from here. One is how I only later got back into TV once I could download it and watch it on demand. The important one is reading.

I don’t read a huge number of books a year, I know people who go through one book a week, but I’m a long way from there. One or two a month is probably close to my average.

What I learned to love, not watching TV was the stories in books. I wonder if I would have come into it as much if there hadn’t been a ban on TV. I’m still not sure, but I’d like to think that it would have happened anyway.

Reading for me, is what watching TV is for so many people these days. It’s how I switch off, relax and lose myself. At the end of the day they’re all just stories, the rest is a question of method. I love reading because the stories I love aren’t always the ones that have a big enough audience to justify an HBO budget.

Maybe reading is better than watching TV, maybe it keeps your mind active more, but at the end of the day I enjoy the story, and there are so many more stories in books than there are on the box.

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The free education revolution

Posted on March 8, 2012 by hds

A couple of days ago the free Cryptography course (run by a Standford professor) over at Coursea went live. When I first heard about this course I signed up straight away.

There are a lot of universities (specifically in the USA, but that could just the ones I’ve read about) that are playing with free course models.

MIT was the first large one, with their Open Courseware project. This gave free access to whatever material was available to students online. Of course, as anyone who’s been through university knows, this can be a lot, or practically nothing.

More recently projects have sprung up offering entire subjects, lectures, homework tasks, exams and so on, all for free. I’m currently following a free course on Abstract Algebra from Harvard that follows this model. Basically the material from a course run a few years ago, including video lectures, is available online and you can go through it as you like.

This cryptography course goes even further, its an entire course designed to be taken online. The material for each week is cut up into smaller chunks that the usual 50 minute lectures, and all the homework assignments are interactive and available on the web site. This of course means that they don’t need humans to mark the homework of the thousands (at least) of people who have opted to take this free course.

Of course, you don’t actually get the same qualifications from any of these courses as anyone who shells out the big money to actually attend one of these prestigious universities, but in a lot of cases you’re getting almost the same level of education, and I’m sure that in many cases, where local universities don’t have the breadth of subjects, this may offer education to individuals who otherwise couldn’t have it, for no other reason than the country they live in.

Yet, I don’t see this taking anything away from university education, especially for the big institutions which are currently involved. The first, and least important, reason is that going to a job interview claiming that you watched some videos on the internet is not the same as having that degree in your hands.

The real reason is networking. For the people who go to expensive universities (and we’re focussing more on the USA again here), it isn’t the piece of paper that is going to be the biggest advantage that they get for the marks they needed to get in (and the money they paid to attend).

The biggest advantage is the people they meet, the people who will help them get jobs, funding, or whatever later in life.

And so far, I’ve yet to meet a single real person.

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