1. 35118 Tet the High-Elf Mage, Level 25
Killed by Shagrat, the Orc Captain on dungeon level 15 (Max 16)
(User 500, Date 2008-11-22, Gold 3659, Turn 3036336).

:-(

From a recent LJ news item: Our San Francisco data center is taking a little downtime for power maintenance, which means so are we

Errr... why? For a site as busy as LJ to be based solely in one data centre seems to be bordering on negligence to me. Sure, there are some issues with having multiple data centres, particularly if you're running them in active-active mode (I know, I've done it). But to not at least have an active-passive setup with a standby data centre? I don't get it. Why would you want to put all your eggs in one basket like that?

Also... Outage from power maintenance? In a datacentre? That's why they have redundant power, so you don't have to have an outage when they need to do stuff like that. I'd be horrified if my data centre did that to me.

I was at the race track over the weekend. During that time, my file server died. The symptoms indicated a faulty power supply. Fortunately, I keep a spare around for just such occasions. I swapped the new power supply in this morning (new as in brand new, still shrink wrapped), and powered it on. I wasn't expecting to be greeted by a loud bang, a flash of blue flame and a shower of sparks. I mean, I've had power supplies nominally "explode" before, but this is the first time I've actually had a real, physical explosion. I just hope it didn't fry the motherboard in the process. I'll find out when I get home this evening...

I make no secret of the fact that I think Firefox is a poor excuse for a browser. It just happens to be the best of the bad bunch that is currently available. Apparently, great strides have been made in terms of memory usage with firefox 3. And to give them credit, that does seem to be mostly true. It does appear less memory hungry than earlier versions. But I still had to kill it off this afternoon, when the firefox process had grown to 2.4GB. That was a bit of a problem on a machine with 2GB of physical RAM. Swapping never makes for a pleasant desktop experience...

So we were sitting around at work yesterday, and one of my orkers of bovines asked if anyone could remember the name of the utility that allowed a non-readline enabled application to use readline. I'd never heard of such a thing, but one of the other developers piped up: rlwrap. Wow. What an amazingly useful little app. There's something to be said for working in the same office as the rest of your team. What you lose out in terms of privacy and quiet coding time, you more than make up in terms of information exchange.

Well, my brief dalliance with Facebook lasted less than a week. In general, I've avoided MySpace and Facebook because there's simply nothing there of interest to me. But a friend had been playing Block Star, a Tetris game, on Facebook, and had found that none of her friends were able to come close to her score. So eventually, I gave in and create a Facebook account so I could play Tetris. Sure enough, I beat her high score, which gave her something to aim for. She was pleased. I was pleased. All was good.

But then, Block Star was withdrawn, and replaced with Tetris Friends. But the general consensus seems to be that Block Star was a much better game, and a lot of the Block Star players are now upset that their favourite game has been removed, with only an inferior and less playable version in its place. They're promising to implement some of the features that Block Star previously had in the coming weeks. But they're not there yet.

Of course, I wouldn't know about that, because I can't play it. Firstly, it's now in Java, rather than Flash. It seems that not only is it Java, but you need a Java 6 plugin, where I only had Java 5. WTF? You can quite easily write Tetris in Java 1.1. Why the need for the latest and greatest? Morons. But it gets better. My friend still wanted to see how I did on the new version, so I grabbed the new plugin, only to be told that I couldn't run the game anyway. You see, it doesn't work with Linux. There's a note on the first screen, explaining that it doesn't work on Macs either. So, Windows only then. Well done. Java's "write once, run anyway" mantra has never been true. But for a browser plugin? I'm sure you need some special talent to make an applet be platform specific.

Firstly, when you have a working application with a large base of happy users, replacing it with a substandard application is never a good idea. Yes, the new one uses the officially licensed Tetris engine and brand. Do you think any of the end users care about that? How do you think they feel about the Tetris brand now? At the very least, waiting until Tetris Friends was feature compatible with Block Star would have been a smart move. And the decision to move to Java 6, *and* to make it Windows only? Dumb.

Ho hum. Here endeth my Facebook experience.

As some of you might have seen, Camden Town was badly damaged by fire last night. Camden has long been somewhere that those with alternative lifestyles congregated. The high street is full of tattoo and piercing parlours, places selling punk and metal clothing, record shops and the like. In addition, it has several markets, which all offer something different than you'd find in a normal faceless corporate shopping centre. The extent of the damage isn't yet clear, but it looks like it's mostly the eastern lock market that's suffered.

As yet, the cause of the fire is unknown, but I can't help thinking that it's awfully convenient for the corporate interests that have been lobbying to pull down much of Camden and start afresh. Camden has always had a vibrant feel to it, but I'm sure the fire damaged property will be sold off to the highest bidder, who will tear the remains down and replace them with yet another set of bland, faceless shops and offices, eroding just that little bit more of Camden's soul :-(

Last night I met up with Jorg. He'd come over to London for a short holiday, and I'd arranged to have a few drinks with him after work. He's the first person I've known online that I've later gone on to meet in real life. We're both fairly introverted, and even though he's someone I know and like online, I was somewhat nervous that it would be a case of long embarassed silence if I met him in person. Fortunately, it worked out somewhat better than that, and we chatted away reasonably freely for a bit before I had to head off and help my girlfriend prepare for her art exhibition.

So what's he like? Physically slightly taller than I'd imagined. For some reason, I was expecting him to be shorter than that. Vocally, he had more of an accent than I had anticipated. His written English is so good, I rarely think of him as being a foreigner. But even so, he embarassed me with how good his English is. I could have conversed with him in French or German, but it would have been slow and awkward as I fished for the right words and struggled with the grammar, but in English it was smooth and free flowing. He's not only fluent, but uses many of the mannerisms and nuances of language that are the mark of a native speaker. Overall, it was a successful event. Of all the people in the circle (as was), he's the one that's most similar to me, and I'll certainly take the time to meet up again should our paths coincide in the future.

So today was the big sales pitch for the product I've been developing. We'd gone into one of our largest potential customers, a multi-billion pound company, and a big win for us if we can sign them up. The meeting started well. I had none of the expected problems getting the laptop working with the projector, and the presentation was pretty slick. Magicpoint rocks.

Then came the part where I had to demo the software. I'd taken a snapshot of my development code from when it was fairly stable, and copied it over to the laptop. I'd done a trial run in the office before we left, to make sure it all worked, and having satisfied myself that it did, I didn't touch anything, just in case it broke. Which, of course, it did, in the middle of my demonstration. Fortunately, just enough of it worked that they could see what it was meant to do, but I could really have done without it going wrong. It's fair to say I'm not exactly in my boss's good books right now...

Despite that, I think the pitch went well, considering the circumstances. We'll have to wait and see whether it materialises into a deal, but they seemed reasonably interested.

My net connection has been essentially non-existent since Thursday last week. Apparently there was a fault at the exchange, and one of the machines between my end of the ADSL line and my ISP was dropping packets. It was dropping enough packets that my router was unable to connect most of the time. When it did connect, rather than my usual 7000+K down / 768K up, I was getting a paltry 128K down (curiously, the upload speed was unaffected). Even that would have been usable, but not when combined with 30% packet loss. The connection might as well have been down.

I'd say my net access has been down for probably 95% of the last week, and the remaining 5% has been either barely usable, or completely unusable. Today I wasn't feeling well, so I didn't go into work[1]. That meant I could phone my ISP's technical support line, which I can't normally do as it's only open during working hours... when I'm normally at work. In total, I've spent probably an hour and a half on hold today. Bear in mind that over here, we don't get free local calls like I believe you do in the US. They claim that the fault at the exchange was fixed on Monday. A line test shows no faults, and they're claiming that all should be well, when it quite obviously isn't. I finally got through to someone that agreed it was a bit suspicious that my problems started with the fault at the exchange, and things haven't got better now that the fault is supposedly fixed.

My ISP doesn't work weekends, so there's nothing more I can do until Monday. Apparently, Easynet, the LLU provider does work at weekends, and will continue to look at the problem. But there's no way for me to contact them, so I just have to cross my fingers and hope.

My ISP was started by a friend with whom I went to university. He initially had a single SparcStation 5 on which he ran the company, and then it grew until he was one of the UK's largest broadband providers. That brought him to the attention of Pipex, who bought out the company for a large sum of money (enough for him to never need to work again). That caused an immediate drop in performance (although reliability was still good), but over time, the service improved to the point where it was as good as it had been before, if not better. So far, so good. Then Pipex were bought out by Tiscali, and it's all been downhill since then. Both performance and reliability have dropped through the floor. I think this has probably been the final straw, and I'll be looking for a new ISP. I'd been holding off because my current line comes with a /28 IP range, which is nice, and not easy to get hold of from other ISPs. But I just can't live with a company that gives me 8+ days of downtime, and does little to fix the problem when I tell them about it.

Curiously, after my last support call today, my line miraculously started working. It's at the glacial speed of 448K down / 576K up, but I'm no longer getting packet loss, so as of a couple of hours ago, I have my first working net connection in over a week. Yaaay! It may be slow, but it's good to be back. I'll wait and see what the rest of the weekend brings, but hopefully it'll stay up until Monday, when I can try and get an update from my useless ISP.

So, uhhhh... belated happy birthday SW!

[1] I left work early yesterday afternoon due to a splitting headache that left me unable to concentrate on anything, and went straight to bed. I woke up some hours later and nearly vomitted myself to death, which was... interesting. I was also too dizzy to be able to stand up. I'm better today, but still far from 100%, so I thought it better to just take the day off, rather than try and play the hero.

Some people just plain rock.

I want a domain. It's from my past. It has essentially no commercial value (the company it once belonged to has long ceased to exist), but I'd like it for sentimental reasons. It's currently owned by a domain parking company, but it's due to expire in a few weeks.

Now as soon as the domain parking company get the idea that someone might be interested in it, I'm sure they'll slap an unpleasantly large price tag on it, and that'll be the end of it. So how do I go about maximising my chances of getting the domain when it expires?

Here in the UK, Nominet enforce a grace period when a .uk expires so that it can't be reregistered by another party for a number of months after expiry. Does the same thing happen for .com domains? I'm guessing the domain parking company will have some sort of automated renewal system. Is there a race condition where I could potentially get to register the domain before the renewal? Or am I just out of luck and the only option is going to be to buy it from the parking company?

Earlier this year, Imran famously posted about using FizzBuzz when hiring programmers. This was picked up by the geeky tech sites, and widely discussed (see, for example, Jeff Attwood's commentary). The basic principle is that when hiring developers, it makes sense to test their ability to actually write code in the interview. They might be able to give satisfactory answers to all of your questions, but that doesn't prove they can write code. So make them prove it.

FizzBuzz is a simple children's game. Count from 1 to N. If the number is a multiple of 3, replace it with the word "Fizz". If it's a multiple of 5, replace it with "Buzz". If it's a multiple of both, replace it with "FizzBuzz". Sounds simple, right? Too simple to be useful, really. Any halfway competent programmer can knock you up a FizzBuzz program in 60 seconds, so what does it prove? Well, you'd be surprised. We started using a simple test like this in our interviews. Not FizzBuzz, in case the candidate had seen it on the net, but an equally trivial problem. An astouding number of candidates struggle with it. I don't care if the program is syntactically correct. What I'm looking for is some sign that they can follow a train of thought and get an algorithm into something that looks like a program. I generally don't mind if they come up with a sub-optimal solution. It's nice if they can spot it's not ideal and come up with improvements. But most importantly, they need to be able to solve the problem, one way or another.

Today's candidate, for example, spent several minutes scratching his head. He started writing a suitable function, then scribbled it out shortly afterwards. Repeat several times. Eventually, he gave up and admitted he couldn't do it. He said if he was sat in front of a keyboard, he'd be able to knock it out in no time flat, but he just couldn't do it on paper. Nice excuse, but not remotely believable. Sure, he was nervous. But nerves only hold you back so much. Not only could he not write the code down on paper, he couldn't even explain the basic steps he'd take to solve the problem. The worrying thing is that I'm sure someone will hire him in the not too distant future.

And people wonder why so many IT projects fail. If anyone knows any Python coders comfortable with working on Unix, please point them in my direction...

So I have a web site. I need to be able to sell stuff online. Specifically, I need to be able to take credit card payments in a cost effective manner. For various reasons (both pragmatic and idealistic), an off the shelf proprietary package isn't an option. So I need to have either a hosted solution or an open source solution that'll run on my servers. It also isn't an option to turn my domain over to an external hosting company. I could point a subdomain at an IP they provide, but I need control over the rest of the site. So... does anyone have any recommendations? Yahoo store? PayPal shops? Etsy? Zen Cart with SecPay/WorldPay/Whatever? Something else? This is for a fairly low volume site, so minimizing the costs is important. I'll probably accept a slightly higher per-transaction fee if it means keeping down the setup fee and/or monthly service charge.

Well that was fun. Yesterday, I helped Tim move house. After loading everything up, I rode his bike to his new house, and he followed in the van. Once everything was unpacked at the other end, we headed off to the pub for lunch. Because I was wearing my bike gear, I didn't have any free pockets, so I asked him to hang on to my wallet, and somewhat predictably, I forgot to get it back from him afterwards. I remembered just after he'd dropped me back at my house, but by that time he'd already left to head back home.

But then it occurred to me... I'm already wearing my leathers... the bike's around the back, and he's only in a van. I guess by the time I'd got my lid and gloves on, unlocked the bike and got it started, he probably had around a 4 minute head start on me. So I set off to try and catch him up. I could have taken a short cut or two to make life easier, but I didn't want to risk getting ahead of him, in case he'd been stuck in traffic, so I followed the route I knew he'd be taking. That meant a mix of traffic and open roads. The traffic actually worked to my advantage, since on a bike I could cut through it quicker than he could. And on the open roads, it meant I got to play with the bike a bit. Wow. It really comes alive once you get above 8000rpm or so. It's a completely different animal compared to riding it into work, where it barely gets above 5000rpm. And despite it not being a racing bike by any stretch of the imagination, it certainly moves when you open it up. He had a sufficient head start that it took me until Watford (about 12 miles) to catch him up. But I had a rather wide grin by the time I did. I really ought to do that more often...