I end up using the IP Webcam Android application for all sorts of things. It’s really easy to prop or jam an Android device pointing at something you need to keep an eye on or even push the device somewhere where you just can’t get your head. Then fire up a web browser and monitor the output stream.
Today’s issue was that I forgot to boil some eggs for lunch, so I propped my Wildfire S against a spare pan and went back to the office. There I monitored the webcam and started the timer when I saw the eggs boiling. They were ready in perfect time.
…British APCO, or simply BAPCO is the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials. At Seed we produce not only communications systems for the emergency services but many of the applications that use them: in-vehicle systems, hand-held systems for mobilisation and data capture and our Command Control mobilising system.
So being represented at BAPCO’s large annual event is important for us. In previous years we’ve piggy-backed on some of our partners’ stands but this year we decided that our portfolio was significant and mature enough that it warranted its own stand.
The results were pretty amazing, there was a real buzz around the stand with people from all over the emergency services and public safety spectrum coming to talk to us and find out more about who we are and what we do.
It was a lot of hard work though; it’s nearly a week later as I write this and I’ve just about finished tidying up all the admin. For the other guys it’s been a much longer road. I was able to simply turn up to the stand on the first day. There were weeks’ worth of preparation effort before that – design and planning. Then the guys had to put everything in the van, drive it to Manchester and get the stand set up. We don’t have people to do any of this for us, so it was great experience for our young software developers to be part of the process right from the graphical design to screwing shelves into the wall.
They were also in the front line on the stand, talking to people and demonstrating our software. In the average business only very senior technical people get to do this, so to be able to give them that kind of experience – and just the experience of being at such an event – is a great benefit.
It wasn’t all work and no play though. We had some fun, such as the reaction training (computer) game at the official dinner – well there was only ever going to be one winner of that! We now know who plays the most shoot-em-ups too, and it wasn’t who we thought.
As a business, BAPCO 2014 gave Seed some great opportunities. Firstly we were able to connect with our existing customers and partners. As we don’t have any customer relationship managers every opportunity to spend time with the people we currently do business with, to talk about openly about their needs and where they see those needs going is really important. Getting those discussions out from drab meeting rooms and into an environment of seemingly limitless possibility is also important because at Seed we’re always looking forward, trying to work out ways that we can use technology to benefit our customers and our society.
We were also able to get the message of who Seed are, what we do and why we’re different to a much wider audience. Sure just about everyone in the Fire Service has heard of Seed but not many knew that nearly a third of England’s Fire Services have a Seed system. Not many realised that we started back in 2005 and that since then we’ve grown a lot; we’re not just in-vehicle terminal (MDT) providers any more, we have a full portfolio ranging from data capture to our own Command and Control mobilising system.
Seed is not limited to the Fire Service either – some of our products are as applicable to other emergency services as they are to Fire and further even that that. Our mobile forms product for instance is applicable anywhere where field workers have to fill in forms that need to be centrally collated.
Being able to stand in a room where most of the UK’s public safety organisations are represented and give those messages loudly and clearly is a hugely positive thing for us. We’re all very glad we did it. I enjoyed it too, sure it was tiring but it was very definitely worth the effort.
This is my mobile phone, or cellphone if you will. It’s a HTC Wildfire S running cyanogenmod 9. Sure it was never an expensive phone but I didn’t get it because it was cheap, I got it because it was small.
I am notoriously hard on kit. Something like a mobile phone just gets shoved in my pocket and ends up doing whatever I do. Scaling roofs to find mobile phone signal is perfectly normal in my world, as is climbing into the loft, crawling into tight gaps and running out in a howling gale to rope the remains of the fence to something a little more stable.
Amongst my friends, many of whom have the same attitude to life as me, there is a catalog of broken phone screens. My little Wildfire S has lasted a few years now without any serious damage.
It is however getting a little long in the tooth. It never had even remotely enough memory to start with and fiddling it to make it think that a portion of the SD Card is actually internal memory isn’t the most reliable. It’s also suffering a bit with a lot of modern apps which are a getting a bit slow.
So I’m in the market for a replacement – I figured this should be easy as there are a lot of new “mini” phones on the market. Only they’re not, the new “mini” phones are only mini compared to their tablet-size counterparts.
The look of horrible confusion on the face of a mobile phone stores salesperson is one I’ve got well used to, “sorry, I’ll just repeat that. I’m looking for a small, tough smartphone. Not a 6 inch mini-tablet that will break as soon as I attempt to climb a ladder with it in my pocket.”
I’m never far from a PC, a laptop or a tablet. I don’t need a mobile mini-tablet, what I need is a smart-phone, something that fits in my pocket and allows me to check social media and run a few tracking and navigation apps and maybe listen to Buddy Guy.
Reading Time: < 1minuteActual Bread! From My Oven!
It’s not a big thing, especially considering all the culinary adventures I’ve had, but up until 7pm this evening at no point in my life had I ever attempted to bake bread. Those two mini-loaves on the right are my first ever attempt and not only do they look like bread they actually taste like bread too!
As a child I was fascinated by how my mother would mix the dough and kneed it. Then the magic started – the dough would rise. Then she’d bake it and we’d have bread. My mother made bread, wonderful smelling soft bread. Most people had to buy bread, but my mother could make it. To my child’s brain that was very impressive.
This probably explains why I’ve been entirely happy to undertake some ludicrously complex and technical culinary challenges but to date not bread baking. I was scared. I was scared that I might not be able to do it and that if it didn’t work it would ruin the memory of that smell. It would ruin part of my childhood.
But it did work, and actually to me it’s quite a big thing.
Like any sane and right minded individual, since a young age a good portion of my Christmas lunch time has been dedicated to avoiding the terror of the Brussels Sprout. Tiny pockets of horrible the little green blighters stalk dinner tables up and down the land at this time of year. Leave just a tiny space on your plate and they mount a full assault, screaming their war cry, “Do you want any sprouts oh go on have one oops that was seven oh well they’re good for you!”
This situation is exacerbated considerably in my case. Living in a rural area has some great advantages, but it has its hazards to. In particular there is the danger of knowing a sprout farmer, which I indeed do. So for me not only is there the danger of copping a sprout grenade at a friend or relative’s house I’ve got two enormous stalks of green ghastliness sat in my pantry staring at me.
A little while ago though a good friend of mine took me aside and whispered in my ear. The trick”, he said, “is to cut them in half and roast them with butter and ginger – lovely!”
I didn’t have any butter but I did have some extra virgin olive oil and some ginger paste, so I put a good glug of oil on a baking tray and mixed in half a teaspoon of ginger paste. After taking the outer leaves off the sprouts I then halved them and put them cut-side-down on the baking tray, threw a pinch of salt over the top and chucked them in the (fan) oven at 180 Celsius for 10 minutes.
As promised they were indeed lovely – the outer leaves a little crispy and slightly sweet and the inner full of ginger-laden flavour.
Like many things the problem with sprouts is not the sprout itself, it’s the fact that many people have no idea how to cook them in a way that I like.
I lost last weekend, although not in a hotel in Amsterdam[1]
I lost the weekend trying to find out what was wrong with my central heating system. What follows is one of the most bizarre journeys of home maintenance that I’ve ever been on.
It all started when I was woken on Friday by a nasty groinching noise – the sort of groinching nose that an expensive electro-mechanical device makes shortly before it relieves you of the contents of your wallet. Worryingly the only two candidates in the next room were the central heating pump and diverter valve, both of which definitely fall into the category of expensive.
I crossed my fingers that some sort of airlock was responsible so bled the pump and a couple of nearby radiators. Hey presto the system burst back into life so I went back to bed.
On Friday night however, whilst I was cooking, I heard a very similar nasty groinching sound coming from the boiler. My wallet yelped, then ran away and hid. Praying to the gods of home maintenance that I wasn’t going to need to call a plumber I hoped that the boiler was simply resonating a sound that came from somewhere else. Regardless, the system was clearly unhappy so I went upstairs and turned the central heating off, but for some reason I can’t quite fathom left the hot water on.
It’s at this point I need to mention that we have a Y-Plan system – the water that the boiler heats can either be used to heat the hot water tank or the radiators depending on the position of the mid-position (diverter) valve.
What happened next surprised me slightly. The boiler fired up and the pump started running – no nasty sounds. So the problem was clearly not the pump and I started to look very suspiciously at the diverter valve. Motor valves are notorious for failing, jamming and just generally going wrong. So I grabbed the “manual” lever and waggled it about. It moved freely but something else interesting happened – the boiler stayed running no matter whether the diverter valve was sending water to the hot water cylinder or round the central heating circuit.
So I left the valve in the mid-position sending hot water to both circuits and we had heat in the radiators. Until the hot water cylinder got up to temperature, which was rather too soon for my liking.
It’s times like this I’m glad that I have a chunky wood burner.
I had things to do on the Saturday but I did manage to get rather a lot of reading done – service manuals for everything in the system and at the end of it all everything was still as clear as mud. One thing that did occur to me though was to measure the boiler input voltage. When the system thought it was heating hot water – regardless of what it was actually heating – there was a something around 240V at the boiler.
If I switched it to central heating it dropped to 150V. So the nasty groinching sound – the sound like something failing to start was probably not because of a mechanical failure but because of a lack of juice.
I breathed a sigh of relief – the fault was electrical. The only component unique to the central heating circuit was the room thermostat my beady eye of suspicion fell upon it. Basically a thermostat is just a temperature controlled switch so I decided to bypass it, just to test. In theory this was a perfectly valid thing to do – if the central heating worked with the thermostat bypassed it would point very strong indeed at the thermostat being at fault. The problem was that the central heating control circuitry is a mixture of two different manufacturer’s wiring instructions and I misinterpreted. So instead of bypassing the thermostat I actually shorted out the output of the programmer. I had a pretty good idea what I’d done when I flipped the “On” switch and heard the almost instant clank of the trip switch flipping “Off”. I may have sworn. Quite a lot. This is because I’m a trained and apprenticed electronic technician and as such this kind of control circuitry is as much, if not more my domain of expertise as an electrician. So making this sort of cock-up is highly embarrassing. I swore some more, to make sure there was enough swearing to communicate just how annoyed with myself I was.
Then I removed the erroneous link wire and prayed once again to the Gods of home maintenance, hoping this time that my stupid mistake hadn’t fried anything expensive. After checking the circuity and components for any physical signs of damage I crossed my fingers and flipped the switch back on again. Initially I did think I’d got away with it. Nothing fizzed, popped or banged, there were no strange smells and nothing appeared to be getting hotter than it should. Nothing that is apart from the boiler which was merrily heating water and the pump was happily whirring away. This was odd because both the central heating and the hot water were turned off at the time.
At least I knew I didn’t need a plumber. I knew who to call; Ghostbusters.
Now I’ve never been particularly frightened by the paranormal so I thought I’d take this opportunity to do some investigation. If I turned the thermostat up to 30 degrees the boiler stopped. If I turned it down to 10 degrees and the boiler started again – the boiler, pump and thermostat were working perfectly.
The real issue though was that I’d made matters worse. Not only did I have the problem of the nasty groinching sound to solve but my central heating was now being operated from beyond the veil. So I grabbed a plastic colander, put it on my head[2] and began my journey into the supernatural. I’d recently short-circuited the output of the programmer and now there was a switching malfunction. I had a pretty good idea what the problem was. Inside the Danfoss CP75 programmer are two relays, one for the hot water circuit and one for the heating. With it all safely isolated I popped the case off the central heating relay and found precisely what I expected – a miniature poltergeist with a teeny-tiny arc welder had mischievously welded the contacts together.
The real explanation is a little more mundane – this is not unusual for a relay that had been massively, but only momentarily, overloaded (say by some idiot shorting the output). As the contacts meet the sheer amount of power melts the surface and they weld together. The breaker then cuts out and prevents further damage. If you’re lucky the damage is only superficial and a little tap will break the weld.
I was lucky. What I did notice however was how much crud there was around the contacts. A few minutes with some fine grade wet-and-dry soon had them looking like new.
I put the programmer back and hey presto the system now works perfectly both for hot water and heating. Apparently so much crud had built up on the relay contacts for the central heating circuit that it was no longer making proper contact at all.
Danfoss CP75
A good result in the end. Sure calling a “heating engineer” might have saved me quite a lot of time – someone with experience would probably have identified the programmer much more quickly than me. But then I wouldn’t have got to run around the house with a kitchen utensil on my head singing old Dean Martin tracks[2]
They’re also unlikely to have identified the output relay directly. Those programmers are no longer made so not only would a “heating engineer” be charging me a premium for a new programmer I’d be facing a substantial bill for wiring it in, too.
[1] If you don’t get the reference search for Lloyd Cole & The Commotions – Lost Weekend [2] Insert “as is the tradition of my people” or “as my faith demands” as you choose.
An accidental feature has just bitten us in the butt. I thought it worth a quick mention because it’s one of those things that happens quite often in the software industry and it’s more complex than it might first appear.
In this case it’s the ordering of a list – the customer had noticed that the list was always in a particular order. They wrote their training notes and indeed their operational procedures based around the fact that this list was always in that order.
We didn’t explicitly program the list to be in that order, we didn’t declare it as a feature that it’d be in that order, nevertheless it so happened that it was. Then we fixed a bug and as a result the ordering of the list changed slightly.
Now we have a bug report complaining that we’ve broken the list.
There are certain elements of the software development world that now would be waving their in-depth specifications at us crowing about how bad Agile is at this kind of thing and how if we’d “done it properly” then it would have been clear from the start that the list was in no guaranteed order.
They would be mockingly waving those specification documents if a) they could move them without a fork-lift and b) they hadn’t been put out of business years ago by Agile software houses like Seed.
Would it really have helped though? Perhaps – maybe the customer wouldn’t have relied on the ordering of the list or maybe they’d have spotted that it wasn’t ordered and asked for a change in the specification before the initial delivery.
Actually that isn’t so likely. Such specifications are often so complex and confusing that they never get much distribution within the customer organisation and if they do the number of people who understand them is limited (often to zero). The likelihood that the people who needed to know that the list was not in a guaranteed order actually knowing this is rather far from 100%.
Naturally there is also the risk that no matter how detailed the specification that particular detail was omitted.
So it is by no means certain that having an in-depth specification would have prevented this from happening. The only thing it is likely to do is make the contractual situation unequivocal.
That’s not the real question though, what we have to consider is what the result of us batting it back to the customer with the comment “well we never said it would do that in the first place” would be. Even with a water-tight contract such a response would have to be carefully considered.
The software industry today relies on good customer relations, repeat business and reputation. We want the customers that are using our software to continue using our software, not least because they pay an annual licence fee. Even if you’re an app developer for smartphones you have to be careful – if you annoy your customers they post bad reviews and there’s only so many bad reviews you can face down before you app dies in favour of someone else’s that has better reviews.
From a purist software development point of view this list ordering is a feature request, indeed that’s what we’ll call it internally. The relationship with the customer however is a far more complex matter – every customer tries to get at least some of their feature requests through as bugs in the hope that they’ll either get them for free or that they’ll be treated with a higher priority. If you let the customer walk all over you then you’ll be in trouble. On the other hand the age of profiteering has long passed and if the customer thinks your trying to charge them unjustly to fix genuine bugs then you could find your reputation damaged and your business will suffer as a result.
We may think of Computer Science as a logical, scientific profession but the reality of being a good software developer is that you not only need to understand logic, but you need a good grasp of politics too.
There’s almost a throw-away comment in my last article, The Internet and the Office Roof, “I was prepared”. We all knew about the St Jude storm and we knew fairly well when it was going to hit. But what does “prepared” mean? What did I do and what do I have that made me well prepared?
In many ways that story is far more important than me jumping on and off the office roof trying to find some mobile Internet. There’s some kit I have that’s useful but let’s start here because it’s simpler;
Things I Did Before the Storm
Loose objects outside are problematic. They can get blown around and damage themselves, other things or simply get blown away. So the day before the storm I had a wander around. Bins are a classic problem but ours have a little pen they live in and I thought them safe.
Garden furniture is another problem but ours is folding, so I collapsed it all and weighted it down. It’s quite heavy so in that state I was confident it wouldn’t budge.
I also surveyed the structures around the house – the decking, the fencing, the bin pen, the Wendy house. Were these in good condition? Were there any parts loose or vulnerable that might need fixing down?
Water Container
I took the time to draw some water into the camping container. Some large scale power outages were possible and there are a lot of electric pumps in the water network. Although we didn’t lose water there were disruptions nearby.
Rechargeable devices are great, but useless if they’re not charged. So the day before the storm I made sure that everything that I use and all out battery packs were on charge well in time for the storm.
I had a good look at the house too – did everything look in good order? Again anything loose or vulnerable could cause big problems. Chimney pots for instance are pretty big and heavy, you don’t want a loose one crashing through your roof.
Things I Have that Might Help
An “A” rated freezer like mine is a far better place to store cold food – even if it’s turned off – than a cool box. However the greater the thermal mass in the freezer the longer it will remain frozen. If you have a load of cool blocks it’s worth chucking them in the freezer a day or two before the storm (which I did).
I always keep a stock of tinned and packet food in as well because this is the country and things happen. A few days worth of relatively nonperishable food is a good thing to have regardless. I make sure that I always have rice, lentils, dried egg noodles, soy sauce and spices. You can make a stir-fry with all sorts of things, most notable vegetables which you can store for a good period of time without a fridge and you can always make lentil curry.
I have a lot of camping gear – stove, lights etc. I made sure they were all easily accessible. It’s nice to have a kettle rather than just boil water in a saucepan, but it’s by no means essential!
Batteries
A lot of camping things are battery powered rather than rechargeable so I make sure that I always have a small stock of (the right) batteries.
Three of my favourite (portable) lights are these.
Nightsearcher Trio
The NightSearcher Trio is available from a number of places. It’s a rechargeable LED torch and it’s exceedingly bright. It has a big handle that’s easy to grab and a flat bottom which means that it can be placed upright – pointed at the ceiling. In that mode it will happily light an average sized room. It claims to work for up to 23 hours. I can’t vouch for that but I can vouch for the fact it lasts many hours indeed.
UltraFire Torch
The Ultrafire Q5 is another torch, but it’s a pencil variety. It can run off its own special battery (expensive) or a pair of AAs. It’s nothing like as bright as the Nightsearcher but is pretty impressive for the size.
Tilley Lamp
A Tilley Lamp – this is a pressurised paraffin lamp so you really need to know what you’re doing to use (and maintain) one of these safely. It throws off a reasonable light and will last several hours on a tank of paraffin (kerosene). Its big advantage is that it also throws off a lot of heat as well so if you’re stuck with neither light nor heat it’s ideal.
The most dangerous thing about these is getting one lit. After that – with reasonable caution – they’re safe to use indoors.
Powergen
The Powergen is a mobile phone power pack. It’s essentially just a battery with 3 USB ports on it that provide power. It also has a LED torch on it. It’s good for about 4 charges of a modern smartphone.
Old Corded Phone
A corded telephone – when the electricity fails generally a cordless phone base station stops working. The resilience of the UK Telephone network is actually quite good and the chances are that even if the power is out the phone will actually still work – as long as you have a phone that doesn’t need any power other than from the phone line itself. This particular phone lived in a workshop for years, hence the sawdust.
Nokia 6310i
A Nokia 6310i. It’s an old, stupid mobile phone but from a disaster-coping view it stands out in 2 ways.
The transmitter and receiver on this model were particularly good.
It has a genuine 3 week standby time.
This gives me a pretty good chance of being able to communicate even if everything else goes wrong – and for some time too. Although I still have to sit on the office roof (or walk up the nearby hill) to use it.
Tea Light
Tea Lights – small self-contained candles that apparently can last up to 8 hours. They last 4, but they’re cheap and can be used relatively safely without the need for candle-sticks.
12V Power Pack
A 12V power pack. These are actually designed to start cars that have a flat battery but they come with a range of accessories, notably torches and car accessory sockets. We have one primarily to keep our smart-phones topped up for a week or so when we’re camping well away from power. There are a lot of things you can run from a car accessory socket. Some power packs even have inverters so you can use normal household appliances with them (although probably not for long).
Pure One Portable Radio
A battery powered radio – in this case actually a DAB and FM / AM radio. Local radio is often the most reliable source of information when all other forms of communication are failing.
Bombay Sapphire
Gin – it’s good for cleaning wounds and in dire circumstances it can be used as fuel. Apparently some people drink it, too.
Work Related Things
Half of your county might be without power but the rest of the world doesn’t stop. You’ve got to try to continue to work as best you can. Naturally I have back-up plans.
My main machine is a high-end laptop with an SSD that I normally use docked. This has two advantages.
It’s effectively its own UPS.
I’m mobile. I can work anywhere I can put the laptop down without having to move a lot of stuff.
I have a good quality laptop backpack bag. This means I can cycle easily with my laptop – useful if for whatever reason the car in unavailable or, let’s say, the local roads are strewn with broken branches, fallen trees and other debris.
I did consider getting a mobile broadband deal but I end up without Internet / WiFi so infrequently that it just makes no sense. For the amount that I need it I can tether my phone instead.
My parents-in-law are in easy cycling distance and they’re on a different telephone exchange and use a different ISP which means that the chances of the Internet failing in both locations is fairly small. There are also (actually) a few WiFi hotspots in the local town and there’s another town that’s not too far away that has loads.
I have a SIP phone which means that I have a telephone – the same telephone – wherever I can find some Internet with half reasonable bandwidth.
I thought I’d got away without any ill effects from the “St Jude” storm on Monday – not so. My Internet failed yesterday morning; I felt like I’d had an arm cut off.
I’m a remote worker – have been for 2 years (a fact that I really should blog more about). I knew the lack of Internet was going to cause problems but I didn’t realise exactly how much.
Some Internet, at least!
The first thing I had to do was call the ISP to find out what was up. What’s their phone number? Well it used to be on a piece of paper under the router along with all the technical (but not security) details of the connection. The paper was missing. There’s no mobile phone signal at my address so the next image I would like to present to you is me, stood on the roof of the office at the end of the garden waving my phone in the air because if you’re really lucky on a clear day you can get some mobile signal there. Eventually I got enough mobile Internet packets to find their phone number.
Apparently the Internet problem is due to local power problems and they can’t give me a fix time because the power company won’t give them one.
No problem I say to myself – my team know what they’re doing they can survive without me as long as it’s not days. I’ll just let them know. Precisely how am I going to do this then? I’m usually pretty easy to contact, Email, Skype, MS Lync, Google Talk, SIP phone, none of which are going to work. I don’t even have any of the team’s mobile numbers. Telephone again then. The next problem is that I never actually call the Departmental Office so I don’t know the number.
That’s me on the roof of my office again waving a mobile phone around for 10 minutes trying to find the number before I realise that although Outlook won’t connect I will still have my email and the office number will be in someone’s signature – sorted.
Now down to business and for the first time I’m ahead of the game. I know I won’t be able to connect to the Team Foundation Server so I take a back-up of the source tree and then open the solution offline. The problem I’m working on is a complex one, the code didn’t make much sense – I mean I understood what it did, but what it did didn’t seem logical. I needed some context so I wondered if it had always been done like this. Usually I’d look at the module history, but that’s all in the Team Foundation Server that I don’t currently have access to.
Never mind I think, I’ll tackle a different problem, one that’s SQL Server based. Quickly I realise that I can’t remember the syntax for the OVER / PARTITION aggregate functionality. So I have a go, get it wrong and then hit F1 for some help. Which is online, so that’s a non-starter.
But I do have a book on SQL Server that I can refer to. In Safari, the online book system. That’s not going to work either.
Clearly this lack of Internet is becoming quite a problem. I am inventive though and I’ve got a spare satellite TV dish. I wonder to myself if perhaps I mount my mobile phone at the focal point of the dish and direct it at the most line-of-sight phone mast I might just get enough signal strength to tether the phone. I suspect that the answer is a strong no but maybe there is something sensible and practical I can do to improve the signal. I’ll just Google… oh wait, no I won’t.
Small scale disaster planning though is something I blogged about a while ago so I should be on top of this right? The primary backup plan for power / internet loss is to go to my in-law’s house in the nearby town. The problem is that they’re at work. My wife has a key but she’s away on business. To be honest this kind of suits me because I find laptop screens rather limiting, I far prefer the large pair of monitors I have in my office so if I can manage without Internet that’s better for me.
Nevertheless it would be good for me to get some Internet at some point, check emails, make sure the team are OK etc. The secondary backup plan is to find some public WiFi. There’s none in the village (and it wouldn’t work even if there was) so I ponder popping into the local town for lunch – the car is also away with my wife on business but the weather looks OK and I have a bicycle and a laptop backpack bag. I wonder what the weather forecast will be for later though – I’ll just look that up on the Internet… erm, no. Oh well, I can risk it, I have wet weather gear. I’m certainly not going to risk it though unless I can guarantee a cafe or coffee shop that has WiFi and I don’t remember seeing any adverts when I was last there. I’ll just Google… oh no, wait, no I won’t.
Just as I’m thinking this something pops into the back of my mind – I’m sure I remember reading when I signed up for my broadband Internet access that they had a backup dial-in option. The details of that will also be on that missing piece of paper but I remember printing it out from an email. So it’s back onto the office roof for me searching through my email history to find the details. They do indeed, but sadly it’s a national call rate number which means it would get expensive very quickly – but it was enough just to check my email.
At about 9:30pm the situation got even worse, I lost electricity as well. I live in the country where there is no street lighting. I was on the stairs and it suddenly went dark. I was prepared for this – there were torches at strategic points around the house and I got the candles and lighter out so I could find them in the dark.
What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how dark it was, it was pitch black. So I sat down with a view to waiting until my eyes picked up some light. Unusually for the house however I had my mobile phone in my pocket so a few seconds later I was carefully making my way down the stairs to one of the torches.
Electricity is another strange thing – it’s easy to overlook how important it has become to our lives.
The freezer was defrosting. As I had no idea how long I’d be without power the only thing I could do was put some towels under it and hope it wasn’t too long.
The central heating is gas, but of course the pump and all the controls are electric. Fortunately I have a multi-fuel stove which is definitely not electric in any way at all and being honest it wasn’t that cold.
Fortunately the cooker is dual-fuel, which means that the gas rings still work. It does leave me without a grill or oven though which limits what I can cook.
The house phone is a cordless model – the handset might work but the base station won’t. I keep an old fashioned corded handset just for this, so I was able to plug that in. It is worth noting that you shouldn’t assume that if you’ve got no power the phone won’t work. In reality it usually does – in the UK at least.
My alarm clock is a Lumie Bodyclock – it’s great most of the time but it is very definitely mains powered. I don’t have a mechanical alarm clock, but I do have a mobile phone so there was a solution there.
The weirdest thing though was this – it was night and I didn’t know which of the house lights were turned on and which off. This meant that if the power came back on at say 3am (which it did) some of the house lights would turn on, possibly without me knowing.
This morning I had power but still no Internet, so I’m currently sat at my in-law’s dining room table borrowing their Internet and just having to deal with the tiny laptop screen and horrid keyboard.
Being well prepared was definitely worth it – clearly I knew that losing electricity would be a serious inconvenience but just how much I rely on the Internet surprised me considerably.
It’s week one again in the university calendar which seems like a good time to welcome our new students, our new interns at Seed and in fact everyone who’s starting university this week.
There are plenty of articles on university life etc. so I’m not going to repeat what they say. What I want to talk about is that feeling when you start a new job or even a new could that you have no idea what you’re doing and that you’re floundering. It’s entirely normal, I think it’s something that most people go through. When you start a new job the amount you have to learn is pretty substantial. You might be able to code well enough in C# but when someone hands you a 200,000 line project it’s going to take you some time to get your head around it, and I don’t mean a few hours. For a project that size it will take months before you’re fully up to speed with the code base.
Also, although you may know systems like TFS they way the new firm use it will probably be different. Even silly things like the fact that you won’t know their internal procedures very well so admin tasks will take longer meaning that you have less time available for development.
Many of the people around you might seem like they’re wizards in comparison to you but the reality is that they’re just further down the road with the code, the methodologies, the systems, the business and even things like they might have known the original developer so they might understand why some things are done they way they are.
This is especially true if you’re a new graduate or intern – the realities of software development are very different to the academic environment and it’s going to take you a while to adjust and to get up to speed with everything that’s going on. This is normal, don’t worry about it and do ask for help and advice when you feel unsure.
Be aware also of “impostor syndrome“. It’s pretty common in the world of art, music and comedy where artists are often confused by their success, not believing that they’re actually very good or deserve the attention they’re getting. From the people I talk to it seems fairly common in the computer science world too. If you’re feeling that you’ve somehow lucked your way into a position that you don’t really deserve or that you’re surviving not by a talent for developing software but by conning people into thinking that you’re doing a good job then this might be something that you need to be aware of.
I end up using the IP Webcam Android application for all sorts of things. It’s really easy to prop or jam an Android device pointing at something you need to keep an eye on or even push the device somewhere where you just can’t get your head. Then fire up a web browser and monitor the output stream.
