Some Doctor Who bits

The website of one of the Doctor Who concept illustrators.
Neil Gaiman will be writing an episode for the 2011 season.

Maybe I don't need a holiday after all

Much better day today.

I presented The Boss with an idea for improving the efficiency of a key part of our software. The idea came to me yesterday evening; I had thought it through as best I could on my own and without the code in front of me, and it seemed to hang together. It turns out that the database guys had thought of the same idea, though for different reasons. We spent a bit of time thrashing out the details, and it's likely that it'll be implemented sometime this month. We have a huge suite of automated tests for this functionality; after we're done, if the software runs faster and all the tests still pass, we'll know it's a success.

I'm looking forward to getting this done. If it works as well as we all think it will, our product will be much improved.

That's how a day at work should be.

I need another holiday

Urgh, work. It's only a been month since the Christmas holidays, and I'm already feeling frayed around the edges.

It's a combination of the failure of the outsourcing project, and the fact that I'm the only systems programmer on the team and thus get interrupted several times a day. Minor things are irritating me far more than they should. One of my colleagues had an accident with a code file that he hadn't checked into source control and lost an hour's worth of changes that I'd made for him last week. It was no great trouble to redo the changes, but I got thoroughly annoyed and ended up snapping at another colleague completely unfairly.

(I apologised shortly afterwards. She wasn't very gracious about it, but hey, I didn't deserve any grace).

Being the only systems programmer is bad from a psychological point of view. I'm overestimating my own importance to the project, and probably overestimating my own abilities. (If I were as good a programmer as I think I am, my colleagues wouldn't be interrupting me because of their system problems, would they? ...)

Round 3.1

It's gone cold again. I woke up to a light dusting of snow this morning.

It was very shallow, no more than a couple of millimetres, and had all melted away by mid-morning, hence "round 3.1" rather than "round 4". Still, Angela got her wish, if only for a few hours.

Bat-reminder

The third annual International Batman Day is only two weeks away.

For those of you who don't know, International Batman Day is a holiday I made up a couple of years ago so I'd have something to do on February 14th while the rest of the world exchanges chocolate hearts and lines Hallmark's coffers. I celebrate by dressing in black (although my once-black jeans are now more of a faded charcoal) and watching Batman films or cartoons on DVD. Why not join in the fun? It's easy, you just have to do something Batman-related on the 14th.

Two weeks and bat-counting...

Star Trek change

I paid for a £2.99 item with a £20 note. I got £17.01 change. It made my day.

My router just spontaneously rebooted itself. I don't think I've seen it do that before.

Outsourcing

The Management sent some work overseas, to be done for us by a company based in a country where programmers are cheaper to hire. We got it back today. I was asked to review the systems code and report my findings.

It would be both unprofessional and a breach of my contract to discuss the details here. Instead, I'll let some popular fictional characters do the honours.

Welcome to the machine

Awkward things to photograph, watch movements. Fiddly little bits that confound the camera's ability to focus, and lots of stuff for the flash to reflect off. Getting some natural light on it by putting it on the window sill helped. You get a slightly better look if you click through and go for the magnified view.



The wheel at the top left with the purple-coloured bearing in the centre is the balance wheel. That's the timekeeping component that moves backwards and forwards, 21,600 times an hour. The purple bearing is an artificial jewel: the vital bearings in watch movements are made of crystal rather than metal in order to reduce friction. The semicircular panel with "Twenty-One Jewels Seiko Time Corp 7S26B" is the rotor. It is weighted, and free to rotate on its axle. As it moves, it winds the watch.

Wristwear #2

Following on from last week's photo, here's my Seiko SNK809 on the other NATO-style strap I bought a few weeks ago. Click through for a better look.

Bittersweet

Kraft has bought Cadbury.

I've read a lot of Chicken Little-esque comments on various web forums fearing that Kraft will change the Cadbury recipes to make the chocolate taste like American chocolate. This will not happen. Kraft hasn't paid billions for a foreign confectioner only to change the product into one that British customers won't buy. (Note to Americans: the "Cadbury" chocolate you can buy in the USA isn't Cadbury. It's made by Hershey, using the name under licence).

It's Cadbury's other brands that I wonder about. Will Kraft leave Green & Black's alone, or will they decide to concentrate on cheap candy and dump the good stuff?