Horse play

Normally the slow pace of Sydney's various transportation systems is cause for complaint. On Easter Saturday it was a source of pleasure as we sat atop horses slowly ambling around the grounds of the Sydney Trail Riding Centre.

Alex rode Kahlua, whilst B and I were on girlfriend and boyfriend Mindy and Rex. There were eleven other guests and a couple of staff along as well. The day was clear and there were views across the south of Sydney. A powered blimp, advertising Appliances Online, drifted overhead.

Alex slid off Kahlua at one steep point in the ride, but did it in such an expert fashion that we couldn't help but be impressed. It was only his second time riding a horse, only the third time B and I had done a trail ride.

On the way back we stopped at the nearby Darrell Lea factory outlet, not that we needed much more chocolate and licorice considering the nature of the holiday. Then lunch at Cabramatta, a reminder of why one should pay little attention to TripAdvisor restaurant reviews, and home.

The game of limited choice

Do you dream of riches and a place where anything that you desire can be yours?

I often dream of the opposite.

One of my favourite fantasies is of something I like to call the Game of Limited Choice. It goes like this:

Imagine that you are in a situation where your options of things to buy, see or do are limited. Use your creativity to innovate and make the best out of the situation.

I've played this game for a long, long time. When I was little our family would holiday in farm cottages where the indoor entertainment (sometimes the weather wasn't great) was limited to old war adventure and Readers Digest paperbacks and maybe a black and white television.

Later on I would make lists of the minimum number of Star Wars toys and model train items I would need, imagining that I was in a country town with only a few shops (pretty easy to imagine, as I was living in a caravan in the country at the time with most of our possessions in storage).

An updated version of it might be:

I'm at the airport with only my phone, wallet and passport. Use the shops to buy everything you need, likes clothes and travel goods, for a trip overseas.

Another more recent one:

It's Christmas Eve and you are stuck in a motel with your family and no food or presents for the next day. The only place open is a petrol station convenience store. How can use their limited stock to make a Christmas celebratory meal and give everyone presents?

Computers are a favourite and one where the game has been very real, especially trying to complete university assignments on old or software limited devices like an IBM XT clone or a Sharp Zaurus hand-held while travelling around Europe. You certainly wish that you had freedom of choice when everything takes longer than it could, but you also feel like you are getting the most you can out of the machine.

Sometimes a plethora of choice can itself be stifling while the Game of Limited Choice is a creative challenge. See how many times you can spot it in my writings here and elsewhere.

Reaching Utopia

After many months of work I finally released my first complete WordPress theme Utopia today and I'm pretty proud of it.

Unlike some of my previous attempts which were based on the Underscores starter theme, Utopia was pretty much built from scratch. The theme, which will be used on CSIRO Research websites, is designed to address many of the feature requests and deficiencies of the previous themes we've used on the site and elsewhere.

My colleague Taranii, with some help from Kate, another member of the team, did the design and CSS markup while I was responsible for the PHP coding. It was a remote collaboration due to the distributed nature of our team, but I thought it worked really well, thanks to some of the fantastic tools on offer.

We used Atlassian's Bitbucket, Sourcetree and git for source code management, which made it really easy to deploy on both our Windows development machines and Linux servers. Atlassian's Jira was used for bug tracking, along with Jira Capture for test sessions. Finally, most of our contact was via Cisco Jabber.

The Utopia theme, along with the post grid plugin we developed alongside it, has a number of very cool (to me) features. These include different colour schemes, the ability to use page, post and category feature images in the individual page headers, social media buttons, a local contextual menu, support for different page and post templates and a page and post listing grid with lots of options and the ability to be included as a widget or shortcode.

Another group in our organisation went to an outside specialist WordPress development house to build a theme for their WordPress blog. The result, which took quite a while to complete, was a theme that relied mainly on a somewhat expensive base theme and set of commercial plugins whose licenses are still causing us grief, especially as the users want more features.

So I'm proud that we built our feature rich theme ourselves! We do use some third party plugins, but after I looked at following a similar development path to the blog I realised that it would never satisfy the myriad of little issues and needs that our users always seem to have. At least this way we really understand our code a lot better.

I was up until the early hours finishing off some basic usage documentation and building the new top level site for the release. Exhausting, but very satisfying to finally get it out there to the users.

So, does the name Utopia mean that theme is perfect? Nope, there's plenty left to build in future! In fact it's all about building. Or trying to.

Gravitational waves observed!

So gravitational waves have been detected at last! The waves were observed from coalescing black holes 1.3 billion light years away. Rating the quotes from the linked Article's taken back to the more recent, though personally distant past, as an undergraduate at the Australian National University about 20 years ago.

Professor Dave McClelland was my optics lecturer. He and his team were heavily involved with designing a Laser Interferometry Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) in outback Australia away from human induced vibrations. Unfortunately the Australian observatory was never built, otherwise it would probably have participated in this observation and enabled observers to triangulate the source.

Despite the lack of an Australian observatory, the ANU team, and CSIRO, have contributed to the design and manufacture of the technology used in the gravity wave detection.

It just goes to show the kind of lead times involved with groundbreaking scientific research, something that certain science administrators would be wise to remember.

Welcome to 2016!

Happy New Year! May 2016 be a good one for you.

One hour until Christmas

Better go to bed, don't want Santa to skip our house.

Going to bed before midnight would be nice. So would waking up to a quiet Christmas day spent with just the three of us (and dog). Sadly not. Instead it's a drive up to the Insular Peninsula for a party with one side and back south by the evening for a dinner with the other.

I'm exhausted. I've been pushing to get this super awesome WordPress theme ready for testing before my co-developer, the designer goes on holiday. Finally set up the test sites last night and then wrote up the authoring and admin instructions from about 7 am and sent them out an hour before work closes for the Christmas break.

Then there were all the other support requests.

Alex has been on holiday for a week now so I had to look after him at the same time, meaning a lot of the recent work was done late at night after he slept. Then there was Christmas shopping and preparing dishes for tomorrow.

I'm knackered!

Oh darn, I just remember I have to make another layer of jelly and let it cool before pouring.

Merry Christmas.

Why you think I hate Microsoft

Every popular, or once popular, operating system has its fans. Who doesn't know an Apple fanboy (or fangirl), with their fervent agreement with every utterance from Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook? Or the Linux freedom fighter, for whom a command line equals "desktop ready"? There are even those that can't let go of their Amiga.

But there is another group who are surprisingly not as well recognised. Surprising, because theirs is the most popular opeating system of all, at least as far as personal computers are concerned.

I'm talking about Microsoft.

Let’s be clear about something. I use Microsoft products and have done so for decades. My desktop computers all run Windows, including my work laptop. I used to program in Microsoft BASIC and more recently (though somewhat reluctantly) in C# and .Net. I've maintained Web servers running IIS and even used FrontPage. At work we use Outlook.

Microsoft do make some good and useful products. But in geekdom Microsoft has traditionally been seen as the Evil Empire, to be distrusted and opposed at every opportunity.

So it has come as a shock to find people jumping out of the woodwork to vigorously and publicly defend Microsoft products from criticism.

Fair enough, you say. If they make good products then they should be supported. However, a closer analysis of the defenders' arguments actually illustrates the flaws in Microsoft's traditional strategy and why it has been losing market share.

Yes it is cloud-based allrite, but the fact that you can use it simultaneously across multiple devices with proper version control, op-locking, etc. puts it miles ahead of iOS. Google's services are okay, but as 90+% of the corporate desktop uses Microsoft Office I don't bother with it.

And yes, SharePoint is an incredibly helpful suite if used appropriately. Poor user practices and system implementation does not make it an inferior product. But hey, you could always use TRIM or some other form of EDMS if you're prepared to put up with the pain and lack of mobile support.
SKay, December 11, 2015 
Microsoft Lumia 950 XL phone review: different, but not in a good way

The above comment illustrates very well the issues.

1. The comment author assumes that the only corporate environments matter and that only Microsoft is suitable for enterprise environments.
2. They blame the user for not using the product properly rather than the usability of the product.

SharePoint is my tool of choice for revealing the true corporate Microsoft fan. We once did a competitive evaluation between intranet content management systems and invited representatives from Microsoft to pitch SharePoint. They arrived terribly cocky, assuming their product was the best and couldn't be bothered to answer the questions we'd sent them, dismissing them away as "You would need to program it"rather than providing them out of the box like the eventual winner did.

I've used SharePoint at work. It's had gaping usability, standards compliance and systems maintenance issues, yet the Microsoft fans insist that it's suitable for something other than a document sharing platform. Even then it's a version dependent pain compared with, say, Google Docs. Even Microsoft themselves don't seem to love it so much any more.

Now that Internet Explorer has won the browser wars.

That was a quote from a course I attended around three years ago about building websites using .Net. It wasn't true then and it certainly isn't true today (even Microsoft are dumping IE for Edge), especially with so much browsing done on non-Microsoft phones.

But the true Microsoft fan can't see that anyone would seriously use a non-Microsoft product. Their world is the corporate world of centrally managed systems where everything is Microsoft. They seem to struggle to acknowledge that there other enterprise players. After all, in their minds, who would use an Oracle database when SQLServer exists? There is a blindness to alternatives.

This course was funny in that it taught web application development from the perspective of a desktop application developer. They thought web pages should look like and act like Windows desktop applications.

Ha ha. Why would you make something that ugly?

Microsoft has a long history of making stuff ups with regards to the Internet and the Web. Rather than stick to agreed third party standards they subverted them with products that produced ugly and bloated code that only worked properly in Microsoft products. I have had enough of trying to fix Microsoft Office and FrontPage generated HTML to last me a lifetime.

You see, Microsoft has traditionally been the enemy of interoperability. You want to use something outside of their environment? You always run into some barrier they've erected, some proprietary extension that is required to do what other products can handle almost seamlessly.

To be fair I think Microsoft has been changing under Satya Nadella and embracing a lot more openness and standards, but many of their supporters still seem to be stuck in the old ways. To a Microsoft fan it's your fault if you want something different. It's the Microsoft Way or the Highway.

Me, I like the highway. It's more scenic, usually cheaper and full of interesting things to explore and learn from. And if the diehard Microsoft fan gets in the way? There's always an alternative route, they just can't see it for themselves.