&c.

Cycling to work

As I tweeted yesterday, Emma picked up an awesome bicycle on Friday so that I can get started on cycling to work.  I have two motivations for doing it; to get fit and to save some money on petrol each month.  Getting fitter is the reason I am looking forward to doing it though.

Today being a Sunday, I figured it would be a good chance to do a trial run before the commute tomorrow, so that I have an idea of how long it will realistically take me.  It takes 30 minutes in the car to travel the six miles to work, so I am hoping on the bike it will take about the same time, as traffic will be less of an issue.  Will update below the fold when I return.

1999 to 2009 in review

2009 is nearly over, and I thought I would have a look back on some of the things that have happened in the past ten years that have most affected me.

The first is the proliferation of the Internet into everything I do.  In 1999 I was in my second year of Upper School, with no idea of what I wanted to do with my life.  The Internet was there, but it was slow and the content was difficult to find.  It sparked my curiosity though, and over the next ten years I would research it and play with it, setting up servers of my own to see how they worked, eventually leading to my current position as a website administrator.  Part of this learning was sparked by the growth of Google, which in 1999 was new and no-one had really heard of it.

1999 was also about the time that I started creating my own websites, though I wouldn't register muzz.co.uk for another four years.  It was hosted in various different places, initially being all hand-typed and later using blogging and CMS software to manage the background elements.  Whilst I did not keep the content across all the different versions (which could be both a blessing and a curse) I have always had a site, and tried to put some vaguely useful information on there.

around 2001–2002 I discovered GNU/Linux and Free software.  I wasn't initially impressed with it—I could never get X11 to work and it caused me more frustration than anything else, but in my determination to get it working I gained a better understanding of it and came to love the power and the flexibility it offered.  As I learned more about it I started to dig into the history of the system, which led to a passion for UNIX in general and the BSD operating systems (namely OpenBSD) in particular.

In 2003 I got my first full-time job as a systems engineer, building high-powered workstations and servers for the animations industry.  The experience I had gained from experimenting with GNU/Linux paid off massively here, and I was able to build on it massively as I would now be using it daily on the systems we were building.  I learnt to configure web servers and mail servers, understood TCP/IP routing and network design, and was given a lot of challenges that would enhance my understanding of computers and networks.

2006 saw my move from the hardware side of computing to the administration side, when I got a job as a network technician at a local college.  It was my first real taste of corporate networking, and I quickly learnt the challenges involved in running a network of 300 people instead of just five.  Patching, incremental updates, user account issues and Active Directory were all completely different beasts on a network of this size, and I learnt that even the smallest changes need to be tested and performed with great care, particularly if they needed to be made in the middle of the working day.

2006 was also the year I started dating my future fiancée Emma, getting engaged in the February of 2008.  We had a lovely engagement party in the June of that year with both of our families coming together for the first time, and everyone had a brilliant time.

In the summer of 2008 I was promoted to the position of Systems & Web Administrator, which meant I moved from running campus-level projects and hardware to managing systems that would affect every user and campus in the college.  This was a big step, and I hit the ground running by taking command of the SharePoint portal, three college-wide public-facing websites and the main internal Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).  Within a year I would roll out an entirely new VLE to replace the old one, manage the installation of a new web- and mail-filtering system, and assist with the deployment of new learning platforms across every campus and school that we managed.  It involved a great deal of planning, preparation and training at every level, and I loved every bit of it.

I wouldn't like to guess what the next ten years will hold for us, because with the current pace of technology I know that I would be completely wrong.  There will be new projects that no-one has heard of yet, and existing ones that everyone believes to be unstoppable may be completely forgotten.  But I do hope that the next decade is as interesting and as challenging as the previous one, because I have enjoyed it immensely.

Merry Christmas 2009

I would like to wish all of my friends & family across the country and around the globe a very merry Christmas.  I hope it brings you everything you wanted, whether that be a PlayStation 3 or having your family together for the first time in ages.

And in the immortal words of Bill & Ted: be excellent to each other.

Advertising on Twitter

If Twitter wanted to run advertising on their site I believe they should follow the lead of Google and use highly-targeted text ads displayed down the right hand side of the page.  If they were to put advertisements into the Tweet stream they would simply annoy the users, as it would disrupt the flow of information.  But placing ads based upon tweets they have just sent, or that their followers have just sent, could get a decent click-through rate.

Also, they could probably do well to combine it with the Trending Topics that are highlighted on the front page.  If many people are tweeting about Topshop, for example, they could put discreet text-only ads about clothing or something related onto the side bar.

This is just off the top of my head and I have not put much more thought into it than this, but it would probably be the least annoying method of displaying advertisements to users and potentially making a profit from it.

As much as I dislike advertisements, I do understand that they are where a lot of the money is on the Internet and any company the size of theirs needs to seriously consider them.

One other potential method could be to provide "Twitter appliances" similar to Google's so that companies can have their own private Twitter networks, but this may be harder to make a profit with as there are many microblogging platforms already available for free such as Laconica.

T-Mobile G1 finally working

After five trips to the repair centre it seems my T-Mobile G1 is finally fixed.  I had phoned T-Mobile to complain again and arrange for a delivery bag to be sent to my work.  When it arrived I popped the phone in, but noticed that the piece of paper describing the faults said only "screen not working."

Whilst this was true, it would not be at all helpful to whoever was fixing the phone.  I grabbed a pen and wrote a whole list of problems I was having on the piece of paper and dropped it in the envelope with the phone, being as descriptive as I could.

It seemed to work, as when I got the handset back it was working properly again, and so far I have had it for a few weeks without problems.

Web filtering improvements

I am not a fan of censorship at all.  Quite the opposite in fact.  In Education however it is a necessary evil, as the students seem to do everything they can to waste time in the classroom.  The biggest source of all this trouble is so-called Proxy Avoidance sites, where the student can access one website such as Facebook via another without being blocked.  The sheer number and variety of these sites makes manual policing a near impossible task.

As such, we are now in the process of implementing a new web filtering system.  I rolled the configuration out to the first campus at midday yesterday—with no visible change to the users—and I have to admit it was mildly satisfying seeing the list of blocked sites quickly populated with a few dozen proxy avoidance sites as the students unsuccessfully tried each one.

Owning a CB radio

In the evenings a group of us often go for drives around the neighbouring towns, looking for interesting places and buildings to investigate.  We have been up to the abandoned church in Clophill, the bridge over the derelict road in Nettleden, and the dark and noisy woods in Ashridge.

There will normally be a convoy of between two and four cars, and we banded about the idea of getting some PMR446 handheld radios for each car or passenger.  Someone then mentioned they had an old CB radio in their house, and this then developed into a plan to get a CB radio for each car.

Four of us agreed to install a radio, and within a few days they had been ordered and delivered.  An hour installing them into the cars, illuminated by the lights in Sainsbury's car park, and we were ready to try them out.  Our cluster of small cars, each with six-foot aerials of varying shape and colour, set off in a convoy, snaking their way to Dunstable Downs with each of us chattering away over the mics.

They are a lot of fun and immensely useful.  I have spoken to my friends across town on the drive home, and when one of them was unable to come out due to illness she brought her radio into the house so that we could talk to her from the top of Dunstable Downs.

I have also heard a few elderly boys in the evenings and spoken to one or two of them.  They use their home-based CBs to stay in touch so that they feel less isolated, and means they can hold group conversations without spending a penny on mobile phone calls.  It also avoids the difficulty of setting up conference calls or using a computer.  Push; speak.  Release; listen.  In a world of computers and technology, I love the simplicity of it.

Isle of Wight holiday

My fiancée and I have just got back from a brilliant week away on the Isle of Wight, staying in a caravan in the beach town of Shanklin.  It is a beautiful island, with miles of countryside and some incredible views.  The roads are wonderful to drive on, taking sharp turns and dipping down toward the coast, before rising back up again and twisting inland.

Those who have been to the Isle of Wight before may recognise the banner image on this blog as the view toward the Needles that I took last year during our stay on the island.

We spent a lot of the time visiting the villiages and towns around the island, seeing the craft villiage of Godshill with it's ancient 14th Century church, and spending some time in the larger towns doing some shopping.  We took a lot of photographs and I will try to get these uploaded onto here.

New college year

Some of the students have returned to college now, which means the start of the annual mad rush to get everything set up and working.  Usernames need to be given out for the computers, induction tests need to be running and the need to have the college VLE running becomes more and more critical.

Most parts of the Moodle install are completed now, with a bit of extra coding on my part, and I have learned a little about PHP objects in the process.  I needed to add a few extra lines of code to the database enrolment plugin in order to pull the full name of the course from our Student Records database, rather than just the course ID number.  After about an hour I had it set up, tested and working, so now staff and students are automatically added to courses in Moodle based upon their enrolment in the database, and the courses that are created automatically are given all the correct information.  Initial tests show it is working well.

The final steps now are to install the plugins that the college needs and to improve the appearance of the front page, but these are much less critical and will take less time to complete.

T-Mobile G1 repaired again

I finally got my T-Mobile G1 back from the repair centre yesterday, after what seemed like months trying to arrange it.  In the end I got fed up of waiting for the delivery packaging in the post and went straight to the store.  The repair note ominously said the phone had received a replacement sticker, which was one of the repairs it had already had before going wrong again the following day.

The phone has seemed okay so far but I am not getting my hopes up yet.

Edit:  Within minute of posting this entry the fault has occurred again.  This is getting past rediculous now.  I will take it back to the store today if I have time, or tomorrow otherwise.