On exhibition from Saturday at IVC · 9 hours ago by Michael Dales
February 13th till the 17th sees the 2010 Art Exhibition at Impington Village College, and nestled amongst the usual array of paintings will be some of my photography! Laura and I have been along in previous years to have a look at the local art output, and there’s usually something for most tastes, and we’ve even bought a nice abstract oil painting the last time we went.
This year I decided it’d be fun to submit a few pictures of my own. They’ll probably stand out slightly, as almost all the other work last time we went was painted rather than printed, but it’s fun to mix things up a little. All art work is for sale, so if you ever fancied owning a nicely framed Michael original, now’s your chance :)
The exhibition starts on Saturday evening at 7pm with a special event (£3 on the door) with wine and nibbles and a chance to meet the artists. :)
Why do you do this every single day? · 3 days ago by Michael Dales
Spotted on a block of offices in Norwich. I wonder what their staff retention levels are like…
Scotty · 3 days ago by Michael Dales
Scotty, who organised the excellent NSConference 2010 which I went to last week. There’s lots more pics I took over here.
python-cmemcache considered harmful, sometimes · 4 days ago by Michael Dales
Just thought I should put this on the Internet somewhere: if you’re using python-cmemcache, then you might want to move to python-memcached (or other alternative) if you plan on moving from just one memcached server to multiple ones.
We had an issue last week at Camvine when we moved from running our main django app on one server to multiple servers. We use memcached not just for caching, but also for storing transient state that we don’t mind if it’s lost occasionally. To access memcached from django we’d been using python-cmemcache, as it’s a bit faster than the pure python python-memcached.
When we moved to a pool of servers we did the standard thing of sharing the memcached across all machines as one large memcache. This is fine, except we found that randomly we’d find inconsistent state between the machines. It turns out, after 24 hours of chasing, that python-cmemcache was occasionally losing responses from remote memcached instances. Looking at the logs on the memcached instance you could see it replying when asked, but from the apache logs on the machine asking, you could see the reply from cmemcached was “no data”. Switching python-cmemcache for python-memcached cleared the issue up immediately.
We’ve ran python-cmemcache for ages, without issue. It was only as we moved to more servers we hit this issue. It seems to be something specific to it running in apache, as I couldn’t recreate it from the command line. The python-cmemcache page itself says it’s time to move on to other libraries, as it’s no longer supported, but I imagine there are many out there who have been using it for ages and haven’t thought to look. Hopefully this post can save someone a day of their life :)
The lego people get Apple fever · 10 days ago by Michael Dales
Preparing for NSConference :)
I tend not to do much composition work with photography, but I’ve been following I Drink Lead Paint/Mr Flibble on Flickr, and he does some amazing composition work, which has inspired me to start giving it a try.
Local photography · 10 days ago by Michael Dales
My Snow Angel picture got picked up by our village newspaper!
They also carried a little piece about the Flickr group I created for Histon & Impington – many thanks to the Histon & Impington Courier for promoting it.
We’ve had some great pictures of the villages submitted – I’m particularly taken by the ones submitted by Bongo 61005 of when the A14 was being constructed. If you don’t live here, the A14 is interesting as the old road connecting Cambridge to our villages is still there, only blocked by a mound of soil upon which sits the dual carriageway! It’s a hint that things changed, so it’s nice to see what it was like before the A14 cut through the area.
The computer for the rest of us · 12 days ago by Michael Dales
I’m ashamed to say that, like a lot of people last night, I caved and watched the live news feeds of the Apple event, thanks to Matt Wood’s excellent MacMash (even if I only came in 33rd on the keyword bingo :). And thus was we given the iPad, which seems to have quite a mixed reaction, but I think is quite important. I’m going to rant a little, but if you want the quick version of my point, watch this advert from 1984, but replace each occurrence of the word “Macintosh” with “iPad”:
Computers, even my beloved MacBook Pro, are still too complicated for general use. When all you want to do is read some web pages, check your email, process your holiday photos, and play a few games, why do non-technical users still have to worry about the file system? Why is Finder or Explorer still the default interface? There’s lots you can mess up in a file system. For those of us savvy enough on the Mac we’ll use something like QuickSilver) or LaunchBar to bypass the file system, but that’s because we’re techies who know how to seek out things, or indeed we know they exist to start with.
To me, what the most important part of the iPad launch presentation was when Steve Jobs described the aims at of the product before it was revealed. It’s that attention to detail that’s meant previous tablets were clunky toys – they were just your existing, annoying for non-technical people, Windows UI. Even Mac OS X, which is a lot better in the user friendliness stakes than Windows, wouldn’t translate to something with not mouse or keyboard. You need to marry the hardware and software well. The iPad is designed to let non-technical people do the few tasks they want without the main of managing a full computer.
It’s the computer for the rest of us, again.
Sure, it’s no good if you want to do complex tasks like programming, and if you want to run many apps at once. But outside those of us know either like to know a deep knowledge about computers, who wants to be exposed to a computer’s complexity when they’re just checking email and websites over breakfast? I recently converted my parents’ household to all Macs, but clearly I started that process two years too early, as this is exactly what I got my Mum an iMac for – to let her process her digital photos, to keep in touch by email, and to let her surf the web. It’s not that she’s not smart enough to understand a full computer – she is, but why should she when it shouldn’t be required to do those tasks? There’s more fun things in life to be getting on with.
As CTO at Camvine I always argue that our job as a technology company is to take the complexity of technology away from the user – let us solve that, that’s what we’re good at. Let the user just get on with what they want to do, and then let them get on with the rest of their life. That’s exactly why I think the iPad, whether it’s a success or not, is a step in the right direction.
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It was all someone elses idea! · 17 days ago by Michael Dales
Making the web easier in Cocoa · 20 days ago by Michael Dales
Having come back to Cocoa in this last year from having spent a few years writing Python, I’ve taken a much more holistic approach to writing Mac and iPhone code. Where as before, having come from being a C hacker, I was writing lots of low level code myself (and to be fair, six or seven years ago, or whenever it was I wrote things like osx2x, there wasn’t a huge alternative) now I find myself looking around to see what libraries exist to help me get on with the interesting bits. This is one of the really great things about Python – it’s library support, both in terms of the standard libraries and what’s out there in the internets, is fantastic, and now the same applies for Objective C.
So, I thought I should post about a couple of the more useful ones I’ve been using recently. As a full on webhead these days, a lot of the client code I write is to interact with web services (as Nik Fletcher said recently, it seems like writing a Twitter client is the new “Hello, World!”). I’ve been using two libraries to help me here: one to make the requests, and the second to help decode them.
First up is ASIHTTPRequest from All-Seeing Interactive. This library makes it really easy to start firing off requests to web services without having to worry too much about the code. It comes with very good documentation with examples, and has lots of advanced stuff I’m yet to take advantage of, such as automatically updating progress indicators in your UI, talking to S3, etc. I’ve been playing with the form request functionality, which makes it very easy to do an authenticated POST of data to a web service as part of an API. If you’re talking to the web and you’re using Cocoa’s standard libraries for network interactions, you really should give this a look.
The second recommendation is json-framework. JSON is becoming a fairly common marshalling language for web APIs to talk – it’s less verbose than XML, it’s still human readable, and it’s easy to code with. The JSON framework simply adds categories to NSString to generate NSArray or NSDictionary objects from strings containing JSON, and to NSArray and NSDictionary to generate an NSString containing the JSON encoded data. Very easy to use, and I’ve used this one lots with no issues.
There you have it, two very useful libraries that work well on both Mac and iPhone, that I highly recommend if you’re doing any web API work.
Getting into eBooks · 30 days ago by Michael Dales
It seems that you can’t open a browser or listen to the radio (perhaps even watch TV, but I’m not into that sort of technology ;) these days without hearing talk about electronic books. The debate seems quite polarised – either they’re here to take over the world and you can burn all that pulped wood you have littering the house, or they’re going to fail totally as you can’t get the same tactile relationship with a Kindle as you do a nice hardback novel.
But if we ignore the hyperbole, I suspect there’s room for both, and they don’t have to be in competition – it all comes down to what you want your book for. Despite still finding paper books much more comfortable to read, I’ve found two uses where I’d buy the ebook version either as-well-as, or instead-of the paper version.
The first use case is for technical books. Typically when I want at technical books it’s whilst I’m sat at my computer trying to work something out. Or I’m trying to learn something, which also involves trying things out, so again I’m at the computer. Frequently though, I’m not near the book the moment I need to reference it: it’s at home and I’m at work, or it’s at work and I’m at home, or very frequently I’m hacking away in a coffee shop. In any case, the book isn’t where I am, which is most frustrating. But the common element in all these cases is I have my laptop with me. So recently I’ve been buying technical books that are for DigitalFlapjack in PDF format. I’ve bought a couple of iPhone and Macintosh development books from Apress, and I’ve been very pleased with the results. I’ve always got the book where I need it, and for tutorials I can cut and paste bits of sample code rather than have to type them all out by hand.
The second use case is for travelling. I’m currently reading through Neil Stephenson’s Anathem, which has been an excellent books thus far, except it’s a very large and heavy hardback. This is fine when I’m at home, and indeed it’s how I ideally like to read this sort of book, however at one point late last year I was required to travel up and down the country over a few days, and the thought of lugging the dead tree version around didn’t appeal. But I didn’t have to – I got the excellent Stanza ebook reader application for my iPhone and bought the ebook version of Anathem (or rather I had a friend with a US credit card help me, as you can’t get it outside the US yet, rather frustratingly). Thus I was able to keep reading my book as I travelled, and could switch back to the hardback when I got home.
An unexpected side effect is that I can now dip into the book at times I didn’t expect to – one the bus, in the Dentist’s waiting room, etc. I don’t carry a stack of books around with me usually, but now I do, as I have several ebooks on my phone that I can dip into should I have a spare moment.
I’ve been quite pleased with the appearance of ebooks. For me they’ll not threaten the paper version (at least not on current technology), but they provide a good complement to the paper version.
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