http://xkcd.com/456/

That’s why I never made the leap to a Linux Desktop!

Nature is analogue, our senses are analogue, once upon a time the way we interacted with the world was analogue, and life was great.

But then, with increasing power of microprocessing, a steady creep of digital representations of an analogue world has been invading our lives, ready to take over control.

My first encounter with an almost moral objection I have to this process came in the 80’s with the introduction to the mass market of CD players - at the time I was deeply in love with my Rega Planar 2 turntable, Akroyd Coniston speakers and Nytech Obelisk amplifier - not extreme HiFi, but certainly enough for me, and I just couldn’t face the thought of losing the pure simplicity of an analogue system by introducing an alien technology in the heart of it.

To this day I’ve still never bought a CD player as a component - although my Rega isn’t hooked up to anything at the moment I still hold the view that the ‘proper’ way to listen to music doesn’t involve any sort of digitisation or digital signal processing along the way. Hissing and scratches are all part of the analogue world, but some of the weird noises you get when digital signals corrupt are just not ‘right’, let alone the ‘concert hall’ type effects that can be applied at a whim. But yet I have an iPod, because isn’t it so much more convenient carrying your entire music library in your pocket?

Next came photography - I’ve still got a pair of Olympus OM2 bodies with a selection of lenses, and I have a crude but functional mono darkroom in boxes on a shelf that I keep meaning to set up again somewhere. I had a blast trying out the various methods described by Ansel Adams etc. where you can almost ‘touch’ light. Yet all the photographs I’ve taken in recent years have been digital, because it’s so much more convenient than lugging round a bulky large format camera.

I’m a hypocrite - I want to remain in an analogue age, yet when it comes to the crunch I listen to my iPod more than my Rega, pick up my Fujifilm F700 instead of an Olympus OM2, and put up with all the other insiduous digital invaders like Sky+ because it’s so much more convenient.

But there is more to it than just convenience - the ‘miracle’ of technology opens up new possibilities to the average punter undreamt of in the analogue age. I never got into movie-making, but I know you can do an awful lot now with a digital camcorder and a PC for not a lot of money, compared to what you used to have to spend in the Betamax days. And if I were a composer or a musician I might appreciate the capabilities of the recording studio I could set up without needing a big win on the Premium Bonds (before the days of the Lottery!) like you used to need to afford all the gear.

But here is my real dilemma - digital technology offers almost limitless possibilities and potential for creativity, but I’ve found personally that my limited creativity is at its best when constrained - too many shiny spangly distractions get in the way of achieving simplicity and purity.

Back to photography, the limited number of variables available don’t stop the ability to produce stunning images. On a manual film camera, ignoring for the sake of this argument issues of composition, lighting, choice of film etc. you really only get to play with shutter speed and aperture, the combination of which creates an exposure on the film. Take that exposure into a simple mono darkroom, and you have a few more variables available to you, but it’s still somehow on a ‘human’ scale - how you process the film, what paper you choose, how long you expose the print, any dodging and burning effects - it’s all done mostly by hand and feels very natural.

I’ve recently upgraded my copy of Macromedia Studio MX to Adobe CS3 Web as it’s now marketed (must blog some time about my love/hate relationship with this suite of software) and I spent some time yesterday playing with Photoshop CS3 which is included in the package. Feeding it a RAW file from a digital camera is very similar to cooking your own film in a darkroom, but my initial feeling was being totally overwhelmed not just by the things you needed to do to make a technically correct image - that’s just me having to ‘pay my dues’ by learning a new set of techniques - but also by the unbelievable scope of creative tools that are made available, not only familiar ones like dodging, burning, filters, masking etc, but also control of things like tonal curves beyond the wildest imaginations of a simple darkroom setup.

Out of interest, here’s a comparison of a straight shot from my F700 on the left; on the right is a Photoshop manipulated union of an overexposed and an underexposed image which is starting to approach the dynamic range of the human eye (and incidentally a good photographic film!). Technically interesting, but it’s certainly not ‘art’. Is digital manipulation any more ‘wrong’ than what I used to do in a darkroom, or did I get any less satisfaction from it? Let’s just say it’s ‘different’.

OK, my interface to this analogue world is now mostly digitised, but I still can’t remember a sense of ‘inner piece’ listening to music on my iPod like I used to with my Rega, and although I get a buzz taking pictures with my F700 I’ve never felt as satisfied with the end result as I have when taking the time to construct an image on an OM2.

Thinking about it as I have been whilst writing, although I seem to be blaming the technology, I think it’s how I’ve been relating to it - digital devices and techniques seem to be too cheap and easy, I don’t put in as much time, effort and thought that I used to in a purely analogue world - there you used to think harder every time you pressed the shutter release, or picked an album from the shelf, because you knew you were going to have to put up with the result for a long time - you invested in the outcome much more.

I still seem to yearn for the analogue life, but yet for convenience my life is mostly digital

http://xkcd.com/417/

http://xkcd.com/386/

As posted earlier, I’m going back to my roots after 6 years in the relatively comfortable life of an employee of a large agency, and specifically as someone who has had a sabbatical from mainstream development whilst managing a team of developers.

Now I’m back on my own again I’m reviewing my skills and experience, the current state of the industry and best practice, and sorting my tools and techniques out ready to get busy (hopefully).

It’s amazing how much has changed in the intervening years and yet how much is the same. Packing up my desk and hunting down the books I took to Soup, many are well thumbed from regular use despite their age they are still relevant. I’ve also been compiling a wishlist on Amazon of titles bought for the company library that I will want to get copies of, but to be honest there aren’t many essentials - good references for PHP, MySQL, CSS, Apache, JavaScript etc. But even then can be found online - it’s much easier to type http://uk.php.net/explode to remember what order to pass parameters to explode() for instance than to find the book - but I digress.

I’ve been rebuilding a few sites I first built oh-so-many-years-ago - one was even still using Dreamweaver Templates <hangs head in shame> - but they are still doing the business for the owners and all they want is a quick design refresh and a bit of new content. “Oh, and while you’re at it could you just add a news section we can update ourselves?” So the quandary begins - how much do you reuse and how much do you rebuild, and what technologies do you use?

Perhaps unlike many working by themselves on ’smaller’ sites, my recent background has exposed me to all shapes and sites of web content delivery technologies, from full on Enterprise level Content Management Systems such as Vignette and Stellent, other commercial ones like RedDot, or open source ones like Drupal or Joomla! or in between like Expression Engine, and then of course there’s all the custom applications that get written for specific applications, or reusable frameworks and libraries that can give advantages in rapid deployment / development.

And then there’s the platform to build on - once is was a choice of flat html (with some help from Dreamweaver perhaps) or Perl (or the new kid PHP) or ASP. Now there’s all the Java based technologies, Python based (I still reckon Zope should have become more mainstream) ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, and of course my old favourite PHP is going from strength to strength. And it doesn’t stop server-side, with the advent of AJAX and frameworks such as jQuery, so much more can be done on the browser.

I understand and buy into Standards Compliance, Accessibility, Search Engine Optimisation, Usability and all the other buzzwords. I’m able to gather requirements, write specifications, manage projects and carry out quality reviews. I’ve been involved in projects that have been great successes, and others that have spectacularly failed, enough to know how to avoid the pitfalls.

But does all that knowledge and experience help in my current situation and perhaps give me an advantage over someone only just starting in the industry? It’s a mixed blessing because although I rarely have to say “I have no idea how to do that or what’s involved”, the opposite is also a problem because I know of perhaps too many possibilities and alternatives, and how things could be done ‘properly’.

As a little aside, I’ve often observed that any sort of development or design or construction or problem solving that is done in a constrained environment is likely to have a much more creative and pleasing outcome than if done with the luxury of infinite possibilities - it makes you focus and think and consider relative merits of alternatives with a clearer vision of the ultimate goal rather than being dazzled or distracted by niceties.

So how have I tackled these rebuilds? Well the Dreamweaver Templates site is hopefully a textbook example of how to use PHP to make a relatively simple brochureware site more maintainable. The templating features of Dreamweaver (ah yes, I remember them well!) have been replaced with PHP includes - so common elements like html <head>, top level page layout, navigation etc. are all shared. A ‘page’ is represented by a PHP file which sets variables such as page title, navigation state, calls the relevant includes for the top of the page, have the body content hard coded, then calls the footer includes. The one dynamic page is the news section which calls content from a MySQL database, with a little utility script allowing the client to manage news stories.

Why didn’t I use my first project as a freelancer again to flex my muscles and show off all my skills? Because the requirements didn’t need it. This application is beautifully simple, very easy to host and maintain, blisteringly fast, and hopefully will go another five or six years before its next rebuild. Any half competent developer could look at the source and figure out how to make any changes within minutes of getting access to the source. And it only took a couple of days to complete - including me trying to come up with some sort of new visual design and I’m no designer!

This approach has been used by me and my team for many years with great success, from small 6 page site to large corporate sites for FTSE100 companies. If it meets all key requirements what’s the advantage of making life more complicated? Admittedly the finer details of how to implement it have changed - using css for layout rather than tables for instance, good clean semantic markup, secure against XSS and SQL Injection (hopefully) and obscuring email addresses from spambots, with a sitemap.xml and Google Analytics tagging, and it’s all under version control …

I’m starting planning a much bigger site that needs more content management, and have reviewed several frameworks and applications to make life easier, but have still settled on the approach above with one small change - using Smarty to separate logic from presentation, and moving more of the content into the database. But it’s still clean, simple, fast and reliable.

KISS - if it’s getting too complex it’s probably wrong.

Last Friday marked a milestone for me - my last day of employment for digital marketing agency Soup.

If I’d held on another few days I would have been there 6 years - and what a ride it has been. Think back to what the Internet was like in early 2002, and what the job of developing for it was then, and what it’s like now.

I was freelancing when I approached Soup for some work - they offered me a permanent position. I was finding it tough on my own at the time, so accepted to keep me out of trouble for a few months. I grew as a developer with the company, and we worked on some cracking projects. As the development team grew I became a manager (or perhaps a developer of teams rather than of code?) - a different challenge that I didn’t expect, but took it on.

I feel that the time is now right to get back to my roots as a coder - I’m a good deal older, and hopefully a bit wiser. There’s an awful lot I want to be doing rather than watching others do it, and I fancy another crack at being my own boss.

It’s a really scary feeling to be jumping into the unknown from such security, but incredibly exciting at the same time.

Thanks Soup, all the best!

From TrainBlog:

“The zombies of Colchester who in the half light walk the train of despair desperate for a space to stand and mutate in to middle management. Help, can no one show them the light?

Go towards the light, work from home!”

Best wishes to Karl Minns, and all those caught up in the aftermath of his recent clash with Norfolk lowlife - I’m a regular at the Nimmo Twins Playhouse shows and was due to go twice this week - once as part of our works festive jollities, and later on our regular pilgrimage with friends and family.

I’m trying to think of something humorous to say about it, but it’s not remotely funny. I can only hope that no permanent damage is done and he soon returns to normal (for Norfolk!) - and I eagerly anticipate the show if it goes ahead.

It’s the Microcontroller equivalent of ‘Hello World!’ - getting 8 LEDs to light signifying that you’ve put a data port into ouput and changed the bits from 0 to 1.

It might not seem like much progress towards an autonomous (or semi- autonomous) vehicle, but in reality it’s a big step, because it means I have all I need to program 16 bit controllers.

I had a bit of a dud start yesterday - impatiently I dove straight into instant gratification and tried to get one of the higher value examples going, but nothing seemed to play ball.

So, calmly, one step at a time, RTFM and surprise, surprise, it does what it says on the can.

As long as progress is being made, no matter how small the steps, then all is good. After all if it all happened too quickly and easily, it would be no fun would it?

I’ve lived in Norfolk most of my life, and in North Norfolk for the last 10 years. So why is it that I’ve only just had my first real experience of the Norfolk Broads?

Yes I’ve been on a couple of boat trips from Norwich, and in my hazy memory I recall an 18th birthday party held on a Wherry out of Wroxham, but I’ve no real appreciation of the Broads and why so many people come here on holiday. I do know that it’s difficult to get from A to B by road sometimes if there’s a river in the way, and there are big chunks of the region I’ve never been to because there’s no useful through route (by road)

I needed a break, big time, and really fancied the idea of a boating holiday - a good reason to do nothing, with a bit of changing scenery. Peace, relaxation, and a great chance to unwind. I did quite fancy the idea of a canal holiday, but Mellie felt more comfortable being closer to home so we settled for a week on the Broads.Last Saturday, we joined the throngs at Richardson’s Boat Yard at Stalham Staithe to collect our cruiser and get our quick bit of tuition. ‘How hard can it be’ I thought? Well it wasn’t rocket science, but it did take a bit of getting used to.The boat wasn’t keen to go in a straight line, and didn’t hardly steer at all going backwards, and visibility behind was very poor it made mooring etc.quite ‘exciting’.

Apart from one day that rained heavily almost constantly we were very fortunate with the weather. Pootling along was indeed very relaxing, with plenty to look at - I was pleasantly surprised how much variety there is along the Broads - every section has its own personality. We deciding against trying to cross Breydon Water our first time out so were restricted to the Northern Broads, and given the high waters we couldn’t get through Wayford, Potter Heigham or Wroxham bridges further reducing the area we could investigate, but that still left an awful lot to see and do, and I think we had a fair stab at doing as much as we could. Neither the dog or the wife were perhaps quite as enamoured as I was with the whole experience, but they both seemed to enjoy bits of it - some wonderful walks, and some stunning scenery.

Living on a boat I imagine is much like caravanning (no exeperience of that either, but I don’t feel an urge to rectify the situation) in that you’re in relatively cramped environment with limited comforts and amenities. It’s all a bit of a fiddle, especially if you’re 6′6″ in a boat that was onviously not desined for six footers - peeing standing up is a bit of a challenge, and having a shower almost an impossibility. Waking up in the morning and everything is cold and damp … well actually I really enjoyed it - brought back memories of camping in the garden when we were kids.

We were worried about morring, and had it not been for the dog it would have been no problem at all, but having to find somewhere to stop with a bit of a path to walk along limited things a degree - you couldn’t just drop a mudweight in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere were we unable to moor, but some popular locations e.g. Neatishead and Horning got a bit ‘interesting’. If you didn’t want pubs etc, there were some fantastic moorings out in the middle of nowhere.

All in all a toally enjoyable week, and I’m hoping that we will do it again some time. More photos on Flickr

But it does make you appreciate the comforts of home.