this blog is girtby.net

Software That Goes Clunk

In the world of the manufactured consumer item, there has long been a tradition of techniques which convey an impression of underlying quality to the prospective purchaser. For example, it is never going to hurt sales if you display the words “Made in Germany” prominently on your item’s packaging. And I’ve heard that disproportionate engineering resources are typically expended on a car’s doors, in order to get just the right “clunk” to impress potential customers on the showroom floor.

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Great Designers Steal, And So Do I

Welcome to the new girtby.net site design. If you’re in an aggregator, please feel free to head on over to a browser and admire the countless hours of work that I’ve put into … stealing someone else’s site design.

For a while now I have been in awe of Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction blog, with its amazing and minimal black-and-white design. Since first discovering it I had intended to shamelessly copy it, if ever I decided to redesign my own blog.

The original plan was to follow Matt’s recommendation and customise the Sandbox wordpress theme into some reasonable facsimile of Khoi Vinh’s site, without being too noticeably similar. While casting around for other sites to steal CSS from, I came across a wordpress theme which looked to provide most of what I wanted, so I used that instead of Sandbox. Thanks to Derek Powazek for his DePo Clean theme.

My version of the theme has departed slightly (or perhaps radically, depending on your point of view) from the original. Instead of a 5-column fixed layout, I’ve gone with a mostly-fluid layout. Maybe it’s the coder in me, but it just feels wrong hard-coding magic pixel numbers into the stylesheet…

The fluid layout may turn out to be a mistake, and indeed I’m already concerned about the mismatch between the columns in the footer and those in the body. By the time you read this I may have already changed my mind, and reverted to a fixed-width layout.

One addition I am moderately proud of is the linkroll at the bottom, which is sourced directly from delicious via javascript and styled to match the theme of the site.

For the most part everything has come together nicely but I’m afraid I would be lost without the assistance of the awesome CSSEdit, which as you can see, enables a dilettante designer like me to butcher the creations of others with ease.

I have some further creative additions to the site planned, not to mention some actual content, as well. Happy 2009, folks.

Becoming a Bronzed Aussie

This weekend I passed my proficiency test and will soon be awarded a surf lifesaving Bronze Medallion.

This means I am not only qualified to wear a red and yellow fashion statement, but also to go on patrol and rescue you when you get stung by bluebottles or caught in the rip or any of the other hazards of Australian beaches. No need to thank me, it’s all part of the job.

In order to become a surf lifesaver you have to be able to perform basic first aid and CPR, rescue people from the water using boards and rescue tubes, and have extensive beach and surf lifesaving knowledge.

Most importantly, you have to be able to swim in the surf. This was the hard part for me, because I am a pretty terrible swimmer. To pass the exam, you have to do a 200m run on the sand, followed by a 200m swim (out to sea and back again), followed by another 200m run; all in eight minutes. Needless to say, I trained quite a bit for this part.

Overall, it was quite a challenge and hugely satisfying to have passed the test.

I highly recommend getting involved in a community volunteer organisation such as a surf club. It’s a fantastic way to meet new people, and my fellow bronzies were such a great bunch. Much respect and appreciation to our instructors, whose dedication and commitment to our success was limitless. Everyone at Bronte Surf Club should be proud of them.

See you on the beach - and don’t forget to swim between the flags.

Blog Migration Secrets

So given that the world (still) lacks a decent common export format for blog software, you might wonder how I managed to move the collection of assorted nonsense that is girtby.net from Mephisto to Wordpress.

Actually, there’s a real chance you might not wonder this. But let’s press on anyway for the sake of Google and future generations.

All the hard work was actually done by Daniel Dave Murphy over at schwuk.com who published the script and a bzr branch. Jason Morrison added MySQL support and published a diff.

I’ve made some changes of my own and published the results. You can get either:

• Just the latest m2wp.py script incorporating Jason’s and my patches, or
• A bzr branch, continuing the spirit of being all modern and distributed.

So what sort of changes did I have to make?

Well, Dave’s script extracted the rendered HTML into the Wordpress database. This is OK but it means you can’t go back and edit old posts in their source form (in my case, Markdown format). So to use my version of the script you need to set up your content filters in Wordpress to match those in Mephisto.

There are a couple of other minor changes, specifically handling NULL as well as empty content (for whatever reason I had some of these fields in my Mephisto database), and a minor formatting problem which prevented the “Read More” links from working properly.

Anyway that’s my version of the script, and now that that’s out of the way I can get back to procrastinating about doing anything with CSS.

And We’re Back

So girtby.net has been a bit quiet lately. You might have assumed that $WORK or $LIFE had both gotten crazy busy. In fact they had, but that’s not the only reason why girtby.net was in stasis. There’s a story behind that, but the short version is that I’m back. Not quite the same as before, but back.

Now, the long version.

The story starts about 6 weeks ago when my hosting provider kindly decided to upgrade the server I was hosted on. I had, and still have, a shared hosting account which means that they will do things like this from time to time. Most of the time it’s a good thing.

This time it was a bad thing.

Previously I was running my blogging software (Mephisto) on Rails 2.0.2 on Ruby 1.8.6 on CentOS 4.7. In the server migration, CentOS went to 5.2 and Ruby went to 1.8.7. Rails 2.0.2 doesn’t like Ruby 1.8.7.

During this time almost no one noticed that anything was awry at girtby.net, thanks to the fact that most of the site was being served directly out of the cache that Mephisto keeps/kept for performance reasons. Without any blogging software behind it, the site became a zombie. Minus the staggering gait and hunger for brains of course.

For the next couple of weeks in my copious spare time (which wasn’t much after $WORK and $LIFE) I was trying to get Mephisto to work with Rails 2.2 which could work with Ruby 1.8.7. It soon became apparent that I was about the only person on the internets that was actually trying to do such a thing. And, well, screw that.

So I caved. And after dallying with the Rails floozy for all this time, I went grovelling back to old faithful Wordpress. Fortunately she took me back…

In my ~2.5 year absence Wordpress has addressed few of the gripes that I had about it previously, but it still looks like the best blogging platform available (which includes the surrounding development ecosystem).

There is some more blogging software navel-gazing to come, but that’s enough for now.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to making this place look respectable…

Why You Should Learn C++

Not all software development projects can sustain a reasonable living. Anyone who has worked as a professional developer will take this truth as self-evident. It’s a sad occurance, but often developers for notionally worthy projects find themselves having to abandon their dreams and find gainful employment elsewhere. The failed startup and the abandoned open-source project are all-too-common manifestations of this.

I don’t have a solution for this problem, but I mention it in order to define a set P, which is the set of all software development projects that can sustain a reasonable living. Now let’s divide P into the subsets I and B.

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In Defence of C

Some of the criticism of the Blogging Horror article was based on my insistence that knowledge of the C language is essential for all software developers. Some even said I was “bigoted” for such a viewpoint, because there are many other worthy languages out there. And there certainly are. But they are not all created equal.

I had tried to explain my reasons for C’s special place in my list, but maybe I was not clear, so let’s try again.

Here’s the thing: C is everywhere. Recently Tim Bray made basically the same point; all the major operating systems, all the high-level language runtimes, all the databases, and all major productivity applications are written in C. And there are many other categories of software that I haven’t even mentioned, all written in C.

So can you as a developer choose to ignore it? Live in high-level language land for your entire career? I would say almost certainly not. High-level languages often provide abstractions that relieve you from the burden of dealing with the platform on which you’re building. Which is great, but sooner or later a crack is going to open up and the abstraction is going to leak.

Some day you’ll need to go spelunking into the depths of your runtime environment. Maybe you’ll need to call some other C-based API for which you don’t have a convenient wrapper in your high-level language of choice. Like, say, mmap-ing a part of a file instead of the whole thing. Or maybe you’ll just want a bit of a performance boost. And on that day, boy will you wish you knew C.

It’s for this pragmatic and entirely non-bigoted reason that I promoted C to the top of my language pantheon. If you’ve never learned C, it means you’ll never be able to delve too deeply into the foundations your programming environment and find out exactly what is happening under the surface, or to extend it in any way.

Of course there are many other reasons to learn C, such as those discussed in comments previously, but this is main reason why it’s on my essentials list.

Bayes’ Theorem 1, Mandatory Filtering 0

Unfortunately the Rudd government are pressing forward with their proposal for mandatory internet filtering. Recently, Electronic Frontiers Australia summarised the results of an analysis of current ISP-level filters commissioned by my old mates at ACMA. The figures are frankly begging to be plugged into Bayes’ Theorem, so let’s do that.

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A Serious Compact

These days, everyone’s a photographer. There can be no doubt that the advent of the digital camera has provided vast numbers with the means to explore their creativity through photography. As such there is a vast and growing industry just to support the great unwashed in their quest to take better photographs, or at least to advise what camera to buy.

So there is absolutely no need for anyone else to be dispensing photographic advice. But here I go anyway!

My unique angle, such as it is, is that I recently had an … unscheduled equipment upgrade. Otherwise known as a burglary. This meant starting afresh with all-new shiny toys, courtesy of the insurance company.

This is the first of a series of articles in which I gloat review some photographic kit and provide some hopefully helpful advice along the way.

But firstly let me disclaim that I have no photographic credentials to speak of. You probably know more about photography than I do. But then again maybe you don’t. Maybe you can view my shots (below) and decide for yourself.

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Wide Finder 2: The Widening

<movie-trailer-guy> Many months ago he attempted Tim Bray’s first Wide Finder in C++, mainly as a coding exercise. Back then the goal was readability and conciseness. This time … it’s performanceal. </movie-trailer-guy>

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