Dander 2010: Yorkshire Three Peaks
So it was that time of year again: another dander! After the success of Malham last September, we opted for an August jaunt around the Yorkshire Three Peaks, a somewhat more challenging trot.
Once assembled at Kings Cross, your intrepid danderers (Matt White, the brave / crazy Alison, The Wookiee (plus his long-suffering wife Aliki), and yours truly) were good to go. We grabbed a train to Leeds, and then met up with Eileen Fitzgerald for the branch line out to our destination, Horton-in-Ribblesdale. I should note now that we travelled last Friday. Yes, Friday the 13th. Hmm.
Once in Horton, our accommodation was but a five minute walk from the picturesque railway station, so we settled in for a few drinky-poos and a nice big meal, storing up energy for the weekend’s shenanigans. For those interested, we stayed at The Crown Hotel, a fine pub with comfortable rooms, splendid food, and wonderful beer. What more could the unflinching traveller ask?
Saturday started early. We were punching our cards at the Pen-y-ghent Café a little after seven thirty, in readiness for a full day’s dander. The Yorkshire Three Peaks walk takes in, as you might guess, three peaks. These are (in order of ascent), Pen-y-ghent, Whernside (the tallest, at 2,415 feet) and Ingleborough. There’s a fair amount of trekking between these three little hummocks: road, bog, grassland and limestone slopes. All in all, a challenging walk, with the aim being completion within twelve hours.
Photo courtesy of Eileen Fitzgerald
Wisely, Mr. White and his good lady opted for an earlier finish after Pen-y-ghent, taking in some of the local sights instead of slaving up mountains. Grand notion, and what’s more, they were on hand come the end of the day to furnish us with much-desired refreshments outside the Crown! Thus it was that the Wookiee, Eileen and m’self soldiered on with the dander.
It was one hell of a walk, but most rewarding (especially when the ibuprofen kicked in, and I could stop malingering down the slope of Whernside). We finally punched in at the café a wee bit before 7pm, bringing our walk to eleven and a quarter hours. Not bad at all, and probably could have been quicker if it hadn’t been for my gimping on Whernside, and the general congestion around Pen-y-ghent (we walked on a very busy Saturday).
That first pint after such an endeavour is the sweetest thing, ambrosial one might say…
So, a recommended dander! If you want to know more, read Eileen’s take on it in her post,
Yorkshire Three Peaks. August 2010.The Social Software Platform You Already Own - now out!
It’s out! My chums and colleagues at Elguji Software have released their position paper, The Social Software Platform You Already Own.
Well worth a read, and needless to say coming from Mr. Elgort, it’s beautifully presented.
Zappa to IT in one vague ramble. You’re welcome.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa lately. I love Frank’s music, and have been re-discovering forgotten gems from my youth such as The Man From Utopia and Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention (amongst many, many others, such was Frank’s amazing work-rate). Anyway, I started listening to the notorious Broadway The Hard Way, a live album which sees his late-1980s-era band in fine form before it all just, well, disintegrated (some of the band, by all accounts, hated each other).
One of the more out-spoken (and frankly, interesting) characters in the ’80s Zappa band was Scott Thunes, the bass player. Listening to Broadway piqued my interest, and I ended up reading an abridged interview with Thunes, by Thomas Wictor (as an aside, I believe the interview excerpt came from Wictor’s book, In Cold Sweat: Interviews with Really Scary Musicians which looks to be well worth picking up). Here’s what Thunes had to say about his work as a bass player:
But I never thought of myself as a bass player; I was a musician. The actual role of the bassist does not interest me, and I don’t know how it could interest anybody else. It’s the ultimate non-glory position. Singers, guitar players, drummers, bass players-that’s how it goes, in order of importance. Though the function of the bass is very important in a rock band, I’ve never ever been able to perform that function without irony.
[…]
The joy of playing the bass is having my voice come out on an instrument; I don’t understand how that makes me a bass player. I also can’t understand how that makes me a chosen role model, because it’s the voice that’s important, not the instrument.
You can read more in the article, Scott Thunes: Requiem For a Heavyweight?
Now, what I wanted to highlight—hence the emphasis—is his outlook on music and his role in it: he came to the bass by default, and found his expression that way. Thunes’ words resonate when I read about the various language / platform / other wars that plague our wonderful world of IT: none of that crap matters, it’s the applications, stupid!
OK, so back to the Thunes website: one of his front-page posts links to an excellent article about life as a software developer, and it’s this link I want to finish with. In Thunes’ words, This article states my understanding of what I said way better than I could ever do. I guess I should have stayed in computers longer.
—it is one hell of a read:
So you’ve just been hired by an IT department…
DominoWiki case study on ibm.com
Ed tells us that a case study was published fairly recently, in which both Lotus Traveler and DominoWiki get a name check. This is good stuff—not only is it heartening to hear of people still using the ole’ wiki template, it’s exciting that OpenNTF solutions continue to add value and fill that applications, applications, applications void in the Lotus Notes & Domino world.
Link, and read more here: Ed Brill, Great DominoWiki case study now available.
jonvon says goodbye
A superb piece of analysis which will have many heads nodding—go read it:
IBM isn’t selling it. IBM isn’t marketing it. No one, at the customer-corporate level, knows what the engineers working on Domino are doing. They don’t know, and they don’t care. Why? Because, apparently, Domino does not show up on “the quadrant”. When corporate level strategy folks are trying to make decisions, they don’t have any guidance from IBM, or the analysts, or the trade magazines, or anyone, concerning the actual core capabilities of Lotus Notes, because Notes isn’t allowed to compete with Websphere. “IBM Lotus” shows up on the quadrant for “Social Software”. What does that mean? It means Connections and Quickr and Sametime.
jonvon.net - Lotus Notes: The Long Goodbye.
What really motivates us?
This RSA video has been tweeted here, there and everywhere (hat-tip to m’colleague, StickFight). It really deserves ten minutes of your time. You don’t need to watch it (although that’s fun), just listen. It’s a talk at the RSA by Dan Pink, all about what really motivates us.
Lots of techie mentions, notably Atlassian and Wikipedia, with quotes from Steve Jobs and Skype.
If you have managers, they need to see this. I can’t guarantee they’ll get it though :-)
A little Ant tiplet
When putting together an Ant script, it’s common to maintain some sort of hierarchy of “targets” which get invoked in a certain order (by setting dependencies for each). A typical script goes something like this (pseudo-ant!):
target name = "clean"
target name = "build"
target name = "test"
target name = "deploy"
Now, for a clean target, I used to do something like this:
<target name="clean">
<delete dir="src" />
</target>
Simple and to the point eh: get Ant to delete your source directory, ready for the “build” target to, well, re-build it. Super, smashing, great. But if you use source control (and of course, you do) you may run into a whole world of trouble with this approach. For example, one of my clients uses Subversion, and I started to see these sorts of errors when attempting to commit the changes resulting from the build:
Working copy not locked; this is probably a bug, please report
svn: Directory '/Users/SeymourButtz/Workspaces/Eclipse/Naffproject/src/.svn'
containing working copy admin area is missing
Lawks! “Fear not” I said to myself, and popped off to the Ant manual “Delete” page. Once there, I discovered that I simply needed to get down with the kids, and update my Ant skillz. Don’t use the square old delete dir=… directive! Use this badger instead:
<target name="clean">
<delete includeemptydirs="true">
<fileset dir="src" defaultexcludes="true" />
</delete>
</target>
Slightly more verbose, but also a lot cleaner (pardon the pun): it wipes out your src directory as before, but having that defaultexcludes flag means the operation preserves any “required” sub-folders, which typically comprise such hidden gems as .svn and .cvs
Hip hip hooray!
(By the way, more on the Subversion error can be found in the FAQ).
» More? Hit the archive.
