Stuart Ford

I’ve much to thank the Internet for and I’m only sorry that it didn’t come along earlier. It certainly would be different without it.

It’s provided me with a career if nothing else, although since I’m an old-school educated software engineer I can in theory turn my hand to any kind of software development, regardless of the application. It just happens that I cut my teeth on web software applications.

When I was coming out I didn’t have access to the Internet and neither did the Internet have the sort of resources for gay people it has now even if I did have access to it, so I was pretty much fending for myself. I can only imagine how different my life would have been had I been born ten years later.

Glamourous visions of the future in old films told us that we would have flying cars and have almost everything automated. They never predicted that the whole world would one day be connected in the way that it is now. A flying car would be great, but I wouldn’t swap it for the Internet.

Decided to give Formspring a go. I will answer most questions but if you want to insult me then please do it to my face.

I  started my new job in Birmingham city centre (specifically, the Jewellery Quarter) on Monday, for Glide Utilities, a firm that sells household utilities (gas, electricity, telephone, broadband and TV licence) as a package to renting house-sharers, passing on a portion of the cost-savings brought about by bulk deals made with suppliers.

As I mentioned in my previous post, instead of paying separate suppliers directly, who will insist that accounts held with them are in one name only, house-sharers all pay a fixed sum every month to Glide who then handle the rest. It makes for easy budgeting and reduces household administration which can otherwise be a bit bewildering to people who are living separately from their parents and not in university halls for the first time. Glide is currently unique in its market and by all accounts seems to be doing very well.

My job is, with another member of technical staff, to maintain and enhance the somewhat complex software system that runs the company, which does virtually everything from internal company administration, accounting and billing right through to live ordering and status checking of utilities from suppliers. As with any existing system being started on by a new developer I will need a suitable gear-up period, but I’m making great inroads into it and I reckon that by the end of the week I’ll be able to make some initial recommendations as to procedure and future development.

It’s really good to be doing what I do full time again. It occurred to me on Monday morning that the last time I got up in the morning to go to a full time job in an office somewhere my life was very different, better in some ways and worse in others. It’s very different now, still a long way from ideal, but I do know that I’m going in the right direction to get to where I want to be. Doing what I am good at every day is a critically important step towards my goals rather than wasting time on the amount of sales and marketing that self employment demands of me, because I’m absolutely hopeless at both. I’m creative and technical, always have been, always will be.

I’ve been told to get the train in on Friday and not drive in. I can only assume that this means there’s going to be some sort of new-starter party in the afternoon/evening. It’s a young company and everyone who works there is around my age or younger, so I think it’s a fair bet that that’s what it’s going to be.

I’m delighted to report that on Monday I start a new job as a Software Engineer for a utilities management company in the Jewellery Quarter in central Birmingham. The reality of being self employed is quite different to what is perceived and I was very much struggling with the sales and marketing side of working for myself, so I decided to move back in to full time employment in order that I may concentrate on and spend my time on what I’m actually good at rather than incur frustration at spending time on having to do things that I’m not so hot at. I’ve never been a salesperson and I never will be. You have to be a certain type of person to do that I’m just not that person. I’m creative and technical, always will be.

The company is unique in its market. It provides a service to landlords and tenants whereby all members of a shared rented household pay one fixed monthly sum for all their utilities, including gas, electricity, water, telephone and broadband. Primarily aimed at the student market where house-sharing is most common, the company uses its buying power to negotiate cheaper rates from utilities providers and passes a portion of those savings on to their customers. It’s an exciting young company and I believe that I can make a difference to their operation and improve it through the ongoing enhancement of their existing software systems.

It’s an 11 mile commute into central Birmingham every day, which is fine, it should take me around 45 minutes each way. I don’t have to be in the office until 10.00am each day so that should allow me to avoid the worst of the traffic, which is ironically enough on the roads leading into and out of Sutton Coldfield rather than central Birmingham itself, once I’m past Sutton it becomes a lot easier. The equivalent train journey is less pleasant at 90 minutes in each direction including the two walks from the start and destination stations, so using the car is the way to go.

I’m looking forward to it.

After spending half a day on this I’m admitting defeat and calling on the great wisdom of the WordPress-using community.

As many WordPress users will have done recently, this week I upgraded to WordPress 3.0. The upgrade went without a hitch and I also upgraded all the various plugins that were presenting compatibility updates. Noting to report.

However, the other day I created some static pages, and now the default URL of the site redirects to one of these pages rather than showing the normal ten latests posts. I’ve checked the settings under Settings -> Reading, setting it to a static page and then back to “your posts” even, but to no avail. The main URL of the site continues to redirect to a static page.

As a hack I’ve put a redirect in the Apache configuration so that it forces a redirect to the 2010 archive, which for the time being is alright because I don’t have many more than ten posts for the entire year, but this isn’t always going to be the case and by the end of the year the main page is going to be huge. Not only that but as soon as I make my first post in 2011 I’ll have to change the redirect to the 2011 archive and only one post will be shown.

I’ve done all the usual Googling but I cannot find anybody else who seems to be having this problem. I’ve found people who are having the reverse problem, and there seems to be fixes for this, but not this way around.

I’m reasonably sure that it’s a 3.0 thing since I’ve created static pages in the past, before the upgrade, and this didn’t happen. If you know what it might be please leave a comment :)

I’ve been working on the next stage of the IT and AV installation job I’m doing at a friend’s house in Eccles this week. It’s second fix now which means the plastering, tiling and (most of) the painting and decorating has been done, so the job this week was to attach 69 CAT6 sockets to the CAT6 runs pulled through the house and solder all the home cinema faceplates on the speaker cables that we ran through the walls (all 10 of them). Fiddly jobs in places, but no major snags or hiccups, so far at least. When we come to test each and every cable will of course tell us whether we don’t just believe that we’ve done a good job!

All but two of the speaker cables terminate on this one plate, which all has to be soldered.

The next and final stage before equipment install (i.e. the final infrastructure installation stage will take place in a few weeks once the builders have finished the basement, where all the cables terminate and the equipment rack will be situated. Although I have all the bits we need to finish this I can’t do it because the basement to the house is not yet secure. Once the walls are finished and the external doors to the basement are fitted I can move the equipment in and finish it. Then it’ll be the big test.

There are also 12 runs of CAT6 that I’ve not yet been able to do anything with simply because the walls on which they will sit haven’t yet been built, so I’ve just run the cables to the ceiling or floor at the point at which they will eventually be and left sufficient length coiled up ready. Part of that was lifting up huge slabs of concrete out of the floor in the new kitchen which, with hindsight, would have been better done wearing a pair of gloves.

Once it’s all done my “client” can then think about home cinema and computer networking equipment. Right now he just wants to concentrate on getting the builders finished and out so that he can move back in again. I hope he doesn’t think that he “over-egged” the installation. Certainly, a 69 run CAT6 structured cabling system is definitely on the upper end of what you would normally put into a house, even of that size, and he may not even be able to buy a Dolby 9.1 home cinema system for a while. The point is that the infrastructure will make the house very future-proofed, which is what he wanted.

Finally, after nearly four years, I have a new laptop, a 15″ MacBook Pro, with all the trimmings. It’s not brand new, I bought it from a friend who, perversely, wanted a smaller laptop after owning this one for six months. I wasn’t going to complain though, as it’s two grand’s worth of kit with two and a half years’ worth of AppleCare left for just over half its original cost.

It’s the 15″ 2.8 Ghz Intel Core Duo model (the fastest processor currently available in a MacBook Pro) with 4Gb of RAM, a 500 Gb hard drive and the second separate NVIDIA graphics controller with the separate 512Mb VRAM, although I don’t see myself using that too much since it absolutely hobbles the battery life and I’m not a big games player. It’s nice to know that it’s there should I need to though.

I’m very pleased with it, it’s a nice bit of kit that’ll last me a fair few years. If a base model original Macbook can last me three and a half years then I should get a fair amount of mileage out of this one before needing to replace it.

For the past week or so I’ve been working on an IT and AV installation job at a friend’s house in Salford. It’s a large Victorian house which he bought and is in the process of having it gutted and extended.

As part of this he wanted a fully integrated IT, telecoms, TV and and audio system installation, which he’s asked myself and Chris to do since we’ve some considerable experience with such things. He knows nothing about such things since he’s a GP, and so is trusting our judgement on what to install and buy. I hope he doesn’t regret doing so!

Phase 1 is first fix, so basically the hard work of pulling 80 runs of CAT6 and loudspeaker cable through the house (67 runs of CAT6 and 13 runs of speaker cable, including outdoor cables to the gardens). Once this is complete (on Thursday) we then have to wait for the builders to finish ready for second fix (where the cables are connected to sockets and patch panels). This forms Phase 2.

Phase 3 then becomes the really fun bit where we install all the specified equipment, including a computer network, a 9.1 speaker home cinema system, a distributed satellite TV system, a zoned audio system and other smaller features. After that comes the housewarming party where our friend gets to impress everyone with our work :)

It’s a manual job but it’s a fun job and it’s something I’ve done many times before so I don’t mind doing it. It’s not every day someone asks for a structured cabling system in their house, let alone on the scale of this one. Luckily, since it’s an old house, it has a cellar and lots of voids through which cables can be run. Ironically newer houses are harder to retrofit in this way unless it’s done at initial first fix because they simply don’t have such spaces, usually in the name of cost saving and profit maximisation on the part of the developers.

Here are a few geeky pictures of Phase 1. Apologies for the poor quality, they’re iPhone pictures. I’ll replace them with nicer ones if I remember to take any.

AV cables ready for home cinema installation

Many of the cables run through the cellar

The smallest bedroom is being set up as an office and so has trunking

Plant room in basement, where cables will terminate in a rack (image helpfully rotated by WordPress)

For the first time in a number of years now I have purchased a new computer. The last computer I purchased for myself (i.e. wasn’t a work computer) was my Macbook in 2006, itself now on its last legs and due for a replacement. My new computer is a new (face-lifted) Mac Mini, which replaces my old Mac Mini, which is also of 2006 vintage. The new computer has a dual-core 2.53 Ghz processor, 4Gb of RAM and a 320Gb hard disk. This is in stark contrast to my old one, which has a single core 1.5Ghz processor, 1.25Gb of RAM and a 60Gb hard disk, and as a result had become remarkably difficult to use over the past year ever since it became my main desktop machine. It’s now been turned back into a media centre, which it seems to be much happier doing. The new one is unbelievably fast. Its only bottleneck is the graphics controller which shares the main memory, but it’s not as if I’m going to use it for any hard-core gaming anyway (the most hard-core it’s going to get is Homeworld 2 and Spore).

One of the main advances of the face-lifted Mac Mini over the old design is the fact that it supports dual-monitors. Up until the release of this model last year if you wanted dual-monitors on a desktop machine you either had to get a Mac Pro or connect a second monitor to an iMac, both expensive options if you’ve already got your own monitors from a previous machine, so it was a dream come true when they added two monitor ports to the Mac Mini because it’s such a cost-effective option.

So yes, I’m very happy with it. Next is my Macbook as mentioned before, which gets replaced with a 13″ Macbook Pro later in the year, or whenever my Macbook gives up, whichever comes sooner.

Google’s new brower, Google Chrome, certainly isn’t a new thing. But it is only recently that Google have finally released a version for Mac OS, so I’m a bit late on this particular bandwagon.

Chrome is based on the WebKit engine, which is the same engine used by Apple’s Safari browser. WebKit used to be a little ropey but ever since the release of Safari 3 it’s actually been very good, certainly comparable to the quality of the Mozilla engine, which is what Firefox is based on.

Its best feature is that it’s very lean and fast. Certainly, it seems to use less CPU than Firefox and Safari. It also uses a different thread for each tab, which means that while it may use a little more memory it also means that should a web page crash or become non-responsive due to a badly coded Javascript procedure or a crashed plugin it won’t cause the entire browser to quit, like it would in other browsers. Chrome simply kills off the non-responsive tab and the others carry on as normal.

Development tools are the same as Safari’s (the WebKit Inspector). These aren’t quite as well developed as the Firebug plugin for Firefox but they do an adequate job. I use Firefox to do most of my development with anyway and then test and modify sites to work in Safari (and other browsers if necessary).

There are of course a few niggles. If a page contains advertisements and an ad-server isn’t responding, this can cause Chrome to believe that the entire page is broken and it will refuse to render the page, eventually killing it off as a non-responsive tab. It would be better to ignore problems generated by loading content from non-responsive servers if they are not the same server from which the main page is being loaded.

The design of the master window means that most of the time you can never read the full title of a web page, since the title of each page is only displayed within the tab, rather than the title bar of the window, which in Chrome does not exist. This can be a little annoying when, for example, you have multiple BBC News pages open, since the title of each one is prefixed with “BBC News | Section name | …”, which usually takes up the whole width of the tab, meaning that all BBC News tabs appear labelled the same in the tab bar.

Other than that there’s not much to moan about and I’m sure it’ll improve with further development anyway. I would recommend it to anyone who’s tired of their existing browser, especially Windows Internet Explorer users. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

I am often asked by friends and family about which broadband service to buy and time and again my honest advice is ignored in favour of price and/or offers. Recently, certain amongst my friends have come-a-cropper as a result of this and have learnt their lesson, so I have decided to impart my advice to everyone, officially.

First, there are four simple DO NOTs:

1. Do not order BT Broadband.
2. Do not order Sky Internet.
3. Do not order Virgin Media Internet.
4. Do not order broadband from your mobile phone operator.

I don’t care how cheap these services are or whether or not they’re bundled with anything else. They’re bundled and/or cheap for a reason and with broadband it very much is a case of you get what you pay for. That’s the harsh honest truth. If you want a fast, reliable and un-crippled Internet connection then you’re going to have to stump up a bit on your monthlies.

Once this is established, this is my definitive, boilerplate, standard advice:

1. Buy this router. That one. Not a cheaper one, that one. No, you cannot use your existing BT Internet, Sky Internet or Virgin Media router.
2. Order this service, or this one (the “Pro” version) if you download lots of movies or use iPlayer (and similar) frequently.

This isn’t the cheapest router in the world, nor are they the cheapest ADSL services in the world, but there’s a very good reason for that. They work. All the time. You get what you pay for. It really is not worth trying to save what amounts to a matter of a few pounds per month for what is nowadays an essential service.

You are of course free to ignore either or both of these, but do so at your peril and if you get into difficulties with your broadband service having ignored one or both then I at no point want to hear about it.

I would also take this opportunity to point out that whilst Wifi is a useful technology, you should not leave yourself dependent on it. Most wireless networks work fine, but at the end of the day there is no substitute for eight strands of copper. There is a plethora of variables that can affect the performance of a wireless network, so if your Internet connection is critical, use a cable.

YMMV.