The Day Today

Every year I have just one true resolution, and that is to do something substantial that I will remember. My memory is an odd thing - I will remember stupid things like dictionary definitions word for word but then will forget something simple like the first movie I saw with my girlfriend or how I managed to get water in my snazzy keyboard. That’s a private joke between me and my girlfriend who doesn’t even read this blog. Sorry, I’ll not do that again.

Anyway last year (2007) I got into digital photography, went to Australia for 3 weeks, had a fantastic meal at Claridges with Sharon Osbourne, got made redundant (sort of), and turned down two jobs. Obviously I did more but those are the big things that come to mind. In previous years I count things like moving into London, getting a job, passing exams, jumping out of a plane, etc.

This year will be a big year as I will be moving out of my flat in London and will be living with my girlfriend. That’s about all I know for sure at the moment. Will I move to Florida? Will I ever be made redundant? Will I finally get a Macbook?

I guess what I am saying is that you should always get to the end of the year knowing that you took a few risks and that at least some of them paid off. Unfortunately 2007 wasn’t a fantastic year for my family, but great things did happen. Here’s to more great things in 2008!

By the way, rumours are mounting for an Macbook announcement in a couple of weeks. I may have that Macbook Pro before the end of January - what a way to start the year!

Oh yes, and the first movie I saw with my girlfriend was Bruce Almighty. I tried to think of something I couldn’t remember but I couldn’t remember anything.

I have the week off from work and have new things to think about. The more I looked into contracting the more interested I became, however there seems little point in setting up a company as practically the same benefits are available if you become a ‘flexible employee’ through an umbrella company. This path would probably be temporary, but there appear to be a few contracts out there that deal with 2nd/3rd line support, and systems/server/network administration.

The other path that has now presented itself is a permanent role in Tampa, Florida. This is where my department’s function will continue within the company (the aquisition of a company in FL resulted in the redundancy of the UK staff). I would be supporting the application as I have been, as well as several other applications. Of course this is tempting, especially if they sort out the visas but there are a few hesitations.

Could I move so far away from friends and family?
Okay so it’s not Australia, and many of my friends have already said they’d love to visit but this is possibly the hardest part of my decision.

Would I have the same cost of living?
What I mean here is will my pay be relative to my pay in the UK, or will it be more/less?

Do I still want to work for the same company?
I have to decide if I want a completely clean break or if I am happy to work for the same company. In the last year we have experienced several cut-backs, or maybe this new location will have more autonomy? Also, if I leave I get redundancy (severance) pay that I was already planning to spend on a Macbook Pro and put the remainder towards property in the UK.

I have asked some of these question of our Human Resources team, and am currently considering during this for a trial period (not sure how long that trial will be). If things weren’t to work out I may still be entitled to my redundancy money.

Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays!

This is the big thing I’ve had in mind recently. I will soon be made redundant from my job and need to find something new. This year I have been for a few interviews (both before finding out about the redundancy and since) and have been offered two jobs, both of which I turned down for different reasons.

As the redundancy applied to an entire department I have seen people leaving already and one of these turned to contracting and started his own company. This has an appeal to me, even though I don’t specialise in application development as he does. I have now started to look into contracts that involve systems engineering, application support, helpdesk support, et cetera, and there appear to be a fair number out there.

This isn’t about making more money - although I’d be disappointed if I made less - it’s about variety and independance. I have almost come to the decision that I will try this path as there’s practically nothing to lose. If it doesn’t work I simply go back to a permanent job.

Today I started my research into contracting, and there’s plenty to read. I’m starting with ITContractor.com as there seems to be some good advice there. I’m also keen to hear your thoughts/advice either as a comment to this entry or send me an e-mail. If I do go ahead with this then you can expect me to write about the whole process.

Finally, if I start my own company then I’ll need a company name. I’ve had a few suggestions but nothing that’s really grabbed me so if you want to help me out there then that’d be great.

The night before I left for Australia I took some photos for a local band and then downloaded them to my parents computer (I was staying there because I was getting a lift to the airport) in order to maximise space on my memory cards for the trip. When I got back I intended to grab these photos before returning to my flat in London, however I returned to find the folder I had downloaded them to was empty.

It’s not clear what happened, but somehow (I think an over-zealous parent with a delete key) these files had vanished. Now I wasn’t being paid to take these photos but I was asked to take them based on some I’d taken of the band at a different gig, and I hardly wanted to say to the guys that I couldn’t show them the photos because my mum had deleted them!

After an initial panic and checking of the external backup drive (a backup had been done since the files were deleted but not whilst they were on the machine) I thought about attempting to recover them from the hard drive. It was at this point that I remembered the Recycle Bin, and that not everyone shift-deletes (as I tend to) or empties the bin frequently (also something I do)… Voila! The photos were there and I was able to restore them and prove the date/time they were deleted. I now have them on my USB key waiting to be put onto my machine at home. Sometimes we overlook the simple solutions.

All these photos are rapidly filling up my hard drive, so today I ordered a 500GB drive to replace my two 160GB drives currently in a mirrored array. Once I get the new drive working I’ll order another one and restore the mirror. The extra 340GB should keep my going for a while!

Well I’m back from the land down under and I had a great fantastic time. There wont be a proper post today because I’m incredibly tired and have over 250 e-mails in my office inbox to get through (suprised there’s not more after 3 weeks away!) Whilst away I thought some more about my work situation and will write an entry hopefully this week with my current thoughts as I wouldn’t mind some opinions from some of the people that I know read this blog.

(photo credit - jonbro)

I can get angry. Angry at a major lack of innovation in the computer industry. Sure, we have our terabyte hard drives, 100″ screens, and quad core CPUs, but still our operating systems and hardware fail to respond to simple commands in a timely manner. I’m talking about stopping and ejecting when the computer is confused.

It’s happened to everyone. You’ve put a scratched up CD in the drive, and the CD drive decides to whir the disc around at high speed to figure out what’s up. All fine so far. Then you press eject and… more times than not, the drive will keep spinning the CD, freeze up the computer, and generally make your life a misery. Eject should mean.. spin down and eject that disc now.

Even worse is when the disc starts out okay, you begin to copy a file across from it, but then it hits trouble. Rather than being able to press the stop or cancel button and get an immediate resolution, it’s more common to have it freeze up your operating system (or at least the shell aspect of it, on the Mac Finder will freeze but other apps run okay) but still not actually “stop”.

What’s up with all of this? Make stuff happen when we tell it to happen.

I’m off to Australia on a three week vacation from tomorrow so this is my last entry before I fly. There may be activity while I’m away from some of the other contributors, but I haven’t scheduled 15 entries (I thought about it) and I wont be writing whilst I’m down under. See you in December!

I managed to get Urchin 6 installed on my machine. The MySQL database needs to exist before you run the installation. Providing an account with enough privileges to create the database is not enough. I have now run into another problem with the Slave Scheduler service, which refuses to start. The Urchin team are aware of this problem as it has been reported by several beta testers but are currently unable to replicate the problem.

This one just came up at work. You started command prompt running under an administrator account using runas and you want to invoke Windows Explorer with these elevated privileges. I was sure I’d done this before using explorer.exe but this didn’t seem to be working. After a quick search I found that start "." works, and you can replace the "." with whatever path you want Windows Explorer to open with.

About 2 years ago I was asked to review the available analytics tools and propose one to purchase for use with a web based application. At the time I looked into the free options (like AWStats), the mid-range options (like Urchin), and the damn expensive options (like WebTrends). As cost was an issue but so was customisation I proposed Urchin, which combined impressive reports with what seemed like enough flexibility to be customised for our needs.

Something else Urchin had going for it was the (then) recent purchase by Google. I saw this as promising for future releases, and almost immediately Google introduced Google Analytics - a free version of Urchin where the statistics are gathered by javascript and hosted by Google.

My boss went ahead and purchased the base Urchin license and over the following few weeks I taught myself how to customise the reports to suit our needs. Ultimately we decided that we would produce our own log format (previously we were using Apache logs) and Urchin was also very well suited for these needs - this is just one of the reasons we needed Urchin Software over the Google Analytics approach. Learning how to configure Urchin wasn’t always easy, and the help text is fairly limited - Google seem to have adopted a model that’s growing in popularity where you can purchase support and also the expertise often needed for custom solutions.

Anyway all was going well, however while Google have been regularly improving their free online solution the software version (still called Urchin) was going stale. The improved flash reports in Google Analytics were showing up the dated SVG reports in Urchin, and several of the cool new reports were just not available.

Finally this looks like it’s about to change, with Google releasing a beta version of Urchin 6. They’ve simplified the cost structure (meaning it’s more expensive for anyone wanting the basics, but cheaper for anyone wanting all the extra modules such as load balancing, funnels, etc) but apart from that I’m yet to find out what’s changed. I have managed to get hold of the beta but it’s currently not installing - there seems to be an issue with MySQL that I can probably solve myself.

I will be sure to report my findings here once I manage to get it working!