Delays

Raindrops are glass snakes
Trains slither slow and blind
Signal failure again.

Grey clouds weep
An urgent need to sleep
Trust in failure.

The thought

I had a little thought
It popped into my head
Round and round inside it swam
On other thoughts it fed
Consuming, growing, crowding out
Though nothing was ever said
Then I cut myself with a knife
And out that thought bled
Now I have no more thoughts
Uh oh, I'm dead!

(No, I'm not depressed, self harming, etc. etc.)

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.