Saturday 26 April 2008

Facebook - bringing back the village shop

Leaving aside the 'serious' side of social networking for the moment - journalism, marketing, education, research and all that stuff - I've been thinking around what social networking is doing to/for people in general.

And it's replacing the village shop.

Now there's well publicised research and academic stuff which suggests that humans are evolved to live in relatively small groups, a couple of hundred individuals or so, and it's a pretty convincing story.

It's not a big jump to suggest that our mobile society, in which friends move away and become less easily accessible, creates significant psychological stress as we try to deal with people we are emotionally attached to but never see. I know it stresses me. Because every contact, rather than being an informal two minutes as our paths cross in a common environment, becomes an event, which has to be got right, and I don't know what's going on with them right now, and maybe I'll have a think and do it tomorrow.

And facebook (and bebo and myspace, I'm sure, but I don't go there) is bringing it back. I have some idea what they're up to, so long as they do the status update thing. I know that they have similar info about me. And they seem less distant. Facebook is the new village shopkeeper, who tells you that Norma was in last week, and one of her kids has had chicken pox, and you tell him that you've been busy with your new hobby...

Now I'm not suggesting social networking will fix everything, nor that it doesn't bring new problems. But it's here, it's staying, and it's a way to live our hectic diconnected modern lives that we're not really eveolved to cope with.

Or maybe I should lay off the barley wine for a bit.

Wednesday 23 April 2008

MS Access - the best of apps, the worst of apps.

Microsoft Access. It's possibly the most painful application our users run. It does some fundamentally stupid things:

If your default printer is set to automatically select a paper tray, Access will fail with a deeply cryptic error when you try to preview a report. In fact, once you know what's going on, it sorta makes sense.

The problem is that if Access is going to print preview a report, it needs to know what size of paper it's going to print on, what the printable area is, and probably other stuff. And so it checks to see what the default printer is set up to use. And if the printer is set to select the tray dependent on the paper size requested, then Access can't find out. As I say, it sorta makes sense. But surely

'Your default printer is set to select an output tray automatically, and so Access doesn't know what size to print this report. Please select a paper size....'
wouldn't be that hard?

There's others, but that's the one that bit us AGAIN today. I'd happily advise my colleagues 'this MS Access? Yeah, it looks nice, but to be honest it's a piece of crap. Don't bother with it.'

But I can't. Why not? Because there's nothing else that does the same job. It's easy to build a moderately complex and sophisticated database application, with integrated reporting and stuff. And when I say easy, I mean easy for actual humans, who do actual jobs.

The truth is, for all that it's buggy as hell, and doesn't scale well, and uses perversely tweaked SQL syntax, and on and on, Access is the killer application, competing in a field of one.

There's nothing else out there which does 'desktop database application' well enough most of the time to compete. Show me I'm wrong.

Sunday 13 April 2008

Selected photos from a trip to Glasgow

Mist rising from a hillside
A 3d map on a pedestal 
View by day 
View by night 
Nice lines 
Power and wealth

Blogged with the Flock Browser

If you can fake sincerity.. more IT Support philosophy stuff

I'd like you, my reader, to imagine yourself a user of IT Services. You're having trouble sending email to a particular institution, and there's a deadline approaching. So you pop into IT Services to see if anyone can help.


Scenario 1
There are three technicians sitting at their desks. You can see one of their screens, and he seems to be shopping. The technicians ignore you. You wait. Eventually one of them turns away from the screen. You explain your problem. The technician replies "We can't do anything about that, you'll have to put a job on the system, and the email team will have a look at it". You leave.

Scenario 2
There are three technicians sitting at their desks. They all look up as soon as you walk in, and one asks if they can help you. You explain the problem, and the technician replies "I'm sorry, that's something the email team will need to look at. I'll help you put a job on our job system now. Have you used the job system before? Don't worry, I'll show you what to do. Here's a job reference number. You 've got a deadline? Don't worry, I'll call one of the email team now and ask them to treat it as urgent". You leave.

Now I'll not insult your intelligence. Scenario 2 is the good one. Scenario 1 happens all too often. That's obvious, and it's not really the point.

The point is that in neither scenario did your problem get solved. The people you approached couldn't help you themselves. But in scenario 2, I'll wager you'd feel confident that someone would help, and probably in good time. And you'd be more likely to come back for help again. And less likely to moan about IT Support.

Moral:
Customer Service is a lot about serving the customer, and a lot about making the customer feel served. And it's easy and costs nothing to do the latter. And they'll love you for it.


Disclaimer: This is a hypothetical scenario, and in no way represents any situation that has actually happened, nor anyone who actually exists. Honest.

Friday 11 April 2008

Post Networkshop

In my previous post, I expressed my intention to blog and twitter all the way through networkshop 36. I so failed. For several reasons, I think.

  • Connectivity problems: at least initally, I couldn't get network access. There were technical dificulties with the installation, but there was wireless available. It's just that my eeepc hasn't been set up to do 802.1x, and that's what was available. This was resolved by the beginning of the first full day, but by then I'd not started at the start. Just to be clear, there were initial technical difficulties, but I could have gotten around it. I didn't. Ah well.
  • What to say? When I was in a position to twitter live from the sessions, I sorta stalled, couldn't think of anything to say that would make any sense or give any value out of context.
  • More connectivity problems: I tried to make up for not twittering on Tuesday by writing up a blog post Tuesday night from the hotel. But the hotel's proxy server was broken.
Enough with the excuses. I took some pretty cryptic notes, and will be posting a distilled version of what I found interesting/insightful from those.

For now, three highlights for me were;

The network monitoring BOF.
(Birds Of a Feather session. I don't know why). There seemed to be some agreement that we, the delegates, could benefit from trying to be a bit more of a community outside of networkshop, and share techniques, scripts etc related to monitoring and the configuration of monitoring systems.

There's a mailing list (I don't know if I'm supposed to advertise it's address, so I won't), and there was talk of a wiki. There seemed general agreement, so we'll have to see if we can make it happen. I'll give it a run, hopefully I won't be billy-no-mates.

One thing that strikes me often, and struck me during networkshop several times, is the apparent expectation amongst the academic networking community that everyone runs cisco kit. And everyone's happy to build systems that rely on cisco specific services. Which doesn't help me very much. And doesn't it sorta help cisco perpetuate lock-in? Perhaps I'm just feeling left out.

Alan de Kok.

The lead developer on the freeradius project, and by far the slickest speaker I saw. Sorry guys. More on this one later. Suffice to say that by the time he'd finished, I was grinning like a fool.

Celtic Music Radio.
Every year, there's a couple of sessions with a less narrow focus. This was one. There was a bit of networking involved, not much. But the speakers described building systems, with little money, and plenty of problems to work around. And a boat ferrying sewage and pensioners was involved.

And if you noticed me drifting off while you were speaking, I'm so very sorry. I'm past 40 now, and the afternoon nap is becoming an inevitability. At least, that's my excuse.

Monday 7 April 2008

Getting ready for #nws08


Tomorrow morning at stupid o'clock
, I'll be leaving sunny Birmingham, and will be off to Glasgow, to attend Networkshop 36.

I've attended several times now, and each time it's been way too late before I've started to prepare, each time there's not seemed enough time whilst I've been there (perhaps earlier bedtimes might help there), and each time I've come home tired, inspired, and with suprisingly little in the way of details remembered.

This year it's gonna be different. I have a plan. I'm going to try to document what I gain. I'll try blogging here, and I'll try twittering.

#nws08


It's my intention to tag all my posts #nws08 (I originally considered #networkshop2008, but it's a little long for twitter's 140 char limit, and it's a pain to type on a phone). I'd encourage anyone attending who's blogging or twittering (or anything else-ing) to do likewise.

Hopefully, my blogging/micro-blogging at networkshop will

  • help clarify any thoughts I have (unlikely, I know) during the conference, and
  • give me something semi-coherent to show for my attendance after the fact. Y'know, to justify the expense of sending me to Glasgow. Although I get the impression that my employers consider the few hundred pounds a small price to pay to get me three hundred miles away.
Now it's time to go get the suit out from the dog's basket.

Sunday 6 April 2008

Emergent game on twitter

I've been approached by a local artist working on emergent game «Σ». I've built another bot, which uses the twitter api to search for twitterers located in the emergent game, then uses the XMPP interface to make a private account follow them.

Then we chuck the 'with friends' feed through a yahoo pipe, for two reasons.

I'm pretty sure twitter needs you to be authenticated to see the 'with friends' feed. Yahoo pipes has a 'private string' object, so we can (safely?) embed a username and password in the feed url.

If (when) there's a parsing error in the bot, the yahoo pipe can filter the private accounts own updates, so we effectively get a 'just friends' feed.

Which gets displayed on the game blog thus.

Take your hands AWAY from the keyboard..

Just a tiny post to mention a personal rule.

take your hands AWAY from the keyboard..

whenever I'm doing something potentially risky ( you know what I mean, like running chmod whilst logged in as root ), I type the command, and lift both my hands theatrically up to my shoulders while I read what I typed and decide if it's gonna cause me pain.

It's saved me innumerable times.

My working environment

It's not a good title. But I can't think of a better one right now. Here's a first hack at a diagram of my day-to-day comms setup. It's only a start, and doesn't cover a bunch of stuff. I'll add to it soon.

The green arrows represent places I input. The blue ones, places I (or others, more on that later) view stuff. Most data paths are labelled with the protocol or protocol families used.

Thursday 3 April 2008

I'm very proud

to announce that IPv6 has affected me, in actual real life.

We run a moodle server. It's pretty important. We run it in a DMZ, and it's protected by a commercial firewall product. It's running on Ubuntu Gutsy server, and we spent Monday and Tuesday upgrading all 30-odd instances from moodle 1.72 to moodle 1.9 . This went very well and proved very easy.

We also did a whole bunch of ubuntu package upgrades, which cowardice had caused me to shy away from till now. I mean, how comfortable would you be if aptitude upgrade told you the kernel would be removed?

Aaanyway, we did it, and it all worked. Except now, it was dog slow. Like 40 seconds to return a page. So, off I went on the now familiar hunt for the wotdidIdowrongthistime bird.

I'd noticed a long pause at the start of every aptitude download, and there was the clue. I ran a sniffer on the moodle box, and it's name server. And there was the problem.

Each time the moodle box needed name service, it would send four DNS requests for AAAA records, which the nameserver just never saw. Then the moodle box gave up waiting, and tried for an A record, which the nameserver saw and responded to, and on we go.

Turns out that our firewall didn't want to pass AAAA requests, or the ubuntu box was sending them up it's own bum or somewhere else sub-optimal. After a few minutes googling and wincing at the ubuntu forums, the answer turned out to be this:

in /etc/modprobe.d/, create bad_file with the line alias net-pf-10 off.

And all is happy again. S'pose I ought to be talking to firewall vendors soon...

Wednesday 2 April 2008

Going google - progress report

After some months in internal debate (internal to me, that is), I've decided to go google. And last weekend I shifted 6 year's worth of stored email up to gmail.

And I have to say, it's looking good. It's quicker than IMAP (certainly when dealing with big chunks of messages), and the spam handling is at least an order of magnitude better than mine. And the interface is pretty nice.

We don't need no goddam folders.

Previously, I'd been using a middling complex procmail setup to auto-file everything I wanted to keep into auto-named folders, with the folder names generated from the from: address, and all actual mail folders grouped in folders according to initial letter. So all mails from bill.gates@microsoft.com were filed in the IMAP folder /b/bill-gates . This made it considerably easier to find old mail when I wanted it, without relying on me to manually file it correctly (which would have been a non-starter).

So when I transferred to gmail, I kept the folders as labels. Big mistake. Because searching 12,000 messages via gmail is so quick, there's no need for filing. So I spent two hours removing labels from everything. Big win. Preceded by a coupla hours of big loss.

Instant Messaging.

I realised on Tuesday, once I was settling down to actually using the thing, that if you're using the chat widget which lives in gmail, the conversations are archived in with your email. Which is expletively neat. What's rubbish is that the chat I had with a person who clicked on the 'chat with' button on the blog wasn't automatically archived. 'Cos actually I needed to keep that. Happily, I'd not closed the window yet.

Now part of the reason I'm doing this is about changing the way I work. I've had enough of relying on installed applications for run-of-the-mill stuff, and the work that goes into managing that.

The other part is that I need to be better informed as to how well this can work. I'm seriously swayed by suggestions that institutional IT support should let the likes of google focus on providing commodity applications like email, word processing and document sharing, and we focus on providing better and better access to those services. 'Cos google are just gonna do it better.

It's important to me that I point out here that I'm not outlining my employer's policy, nor speaking for my employer. These are my own versions of other's thoughts. Not my employer's. Is that clear enough?

Tuesday 1 April 2008

motorway junction geocoder

It's a yahoo pipe, which for some major subset of UK motorways, takes the motorway and junction numbers, and returns a geo thing.

This came out of an idea I've mentioned here, and which Ive since discovered is the basis of this product.

But while I was playing around, I realised that none of the big mapping providers do this - or at least I couldn't get them to. Perhaps you'll do better than me, "M6 Junction 6" always landed me in Manchester. Not where I wanted to be.

So I searched, and searched, and found a couple of GPS waypoint files listing UK motoroway junctions. None of them in any kind of useful format. Still, where there's a will...

So out comes gpsbabel, and a few 'tests' later, I've got a GPX file, which works. The rest of the pipe is about getting the XML structure to work.

It doesn't do much, but as far as I know it's the only one of it's kind, and it does do what it's supposed to.

I'm pretty pleased with meself, me.