2010 – Page 2 – John's Adventures

Yearly Archives of: 2010

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It’s Not About The Dog

April 30, 2010

I’ve always been a cat person. Maybe I liked to think of a cat as the animal equivalent of me. Sleek, lean, athletic, an independent thinker, a ruthless killing machine – no wait, that’s not right. OK, the real reason is that I like the fact that cats look after themselves, they’re low maintenance with maximum reward. So you can sit in your mountain-top fortress scheming and planning while stroking your cat on your lap, getting all that relaxation and concentration you need to outwit the good guys. And when you’re done you can throw the cat away, get one of your minions to feed it and then it’ll walk itself – low maintenance!

But over the past couple of years I’ve started to change my mind about cats and dogs. The more I’ve interacted with friends dogs the more I’ve started to see the benefits in having one. They’re lots of fun, give unconditional love, they encourage you to get out and exercise, they’re like a member of the family and best of all, unlike a wife you get to tell them what to do and they do it! 😉

Emma's Lhasa Apso Anyway, the more dogs I saw the more I started to like them and when another friend brought their very cute and well behaved Lhasa Apso to the house (pictured right) I really started to think that maybe we should get a dog. Around this time we started watching The Dog Whisperer. For those of you who’ve never seen it, the premise is that people with problem dogs (aggressive, out of control, etc) call in dog expert Cesar Millan who comes along and very quickly sorts everything out. But the most interesting thing to me is that in all cases it’s not the dog that’s the problem, it’s always the owner.

Every few years in the UK there’s a horror story about a pit bull attacking a child, causing hideous damage and the press (and Government) bang home the point that certain breed of dogs are dangerous and should be exterminated. Indeed if you own a pit bull in the UK it’ll be destroyed under the Dangerous Dogs Act. But you know what? It’s all complete bullshit. The only reason dogs like pit bulls become aggressive is because the owners, unwittingly or otherwise, let them behave that way. The problem is that humans instinctively humanise dogs, treating them like they’re children and expect them to respond in the same way that children do.

What The Dog Whisperer demonstrates episode after episode is that dogs are instinctively followers, and when they are they’re calm and submissive and easy to live with. But if they feel that there’s not a pack leader (to a dog you and it are members of a pack) then they’ll step up to the role which means they’ll be more aggressive since defending and disciplining the pack is the job of the pack leader. If they see another dog they’ll impose their authority and try to dominate that dog too. However if you’re the pack leader the dog will hold back and look to you because it’s your job to decide if another dog is OK or not. But the real problem is that a dog only sees the world through a dog’s eyes and if you don’t assert yourself as pack leader in a dog-understandable way then you won’t be the pack leader in its eyes.

People will often shout at dogs to try and get them to do what they want. But really to communicate to a dog you don’t need to say a word, it’s all about your posture and body language. If you watch how dogs interact with each other you’ll notice they do it silently. A touch in the right place at the right time with the right intensity communicates in a far more meaningful way to a dog than a thousand words can. Dogs also mirror your emotions – so if you’re tense and nervous then the dog will be tense and nervous. If a nervous dog meets a couple of relaxed dogs you’ll notice that in most cases the relaxed dogs will pick up on the other dog’s nervousness and then you’ve got 3 fidgety dogs!

If you’re hesitant or not assertive when you instruct your dog to stop eating your shoes then your dog will take that hesitancy as a sign of weakness, look down on you as a lower pack member and carry on chewing. But if you prod it to switch its attention and “own” the shoes by standing over them in a confident way, the dog will get the message and back away. At least, that’s the overly simplified summary. Cesar has a complete understanding of dog psychology and can read situations before they occur and correct a dog before it gets into an excited state.

I guess that’s the thing us mere mortals can’t do so easily but it’s fun to see it done properly. And it shows me that with a bit of work and understanding of a dog’s point of view you can have a happy, calm, submissive dog and a happy life. And with the right owner a pit bull can be a far nicer, safer dog around children than an overly-pampered, humanised chihuahua. It’s not about the dog, it’s always about the owner.

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Why I Stare At The Sky

March 26, 2010

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I remember being a small boy looking up at the night sky in a state of awe. Awe at what I was looking at knowing what I was actually seeing. I was one of these geeky kids – quiet, thoughtful, sensitive, but above all curious. Whatever I saw I wanted to understand. I’m told by my father that as an even younger child I used to cry when the wind blew in my hair – I like to think that I wasn’t a wuss, I just didn’t understand what the wind was and didn’t like it. (I’m sticking to that excuse!).

When I looked at the night sky and saw twinkling stars I wanted to understand what they were. So I read books and learned that what I was looking at wasn’t the sky as it was, I was looking at history. The stars were so distant that the light from them could take millions of years to reach my eyes and I wondered what they looked like now – were they still there? Was somebody looking back at me? That’s when I started to understand the scale of the universe out there. Cycling to the next village seemed like a long way, yet I knew that the planet we were on was a tiny dot compared to the star we’re spinning around, which itself was pretty small as stars go and there I was looking at countless stars in the sky just like our sun impossibly far apart.

The Orion Nebula

But my eyes were really opened when I looked up at the stars in a remote part of Scotland with no villages or towns nearby – so no light pollution – and for the first time in my life I could actually see the Milky Way. Far from being a chocolate bar, it’s actually a side-on view of the galaxy we’re a part of and there are so many stars in them you couldn’t count them (I couldn’t count up to a billion back then). The feeling of wonder I had just standing staring out into infinity is the sort of thing you can only experience as a child. I was open minded, full of imagination, wondering what the view was like from these far flung places and wishing I could travel between the stars exploring in a vaguely Star Trek way (but without the skin-tight uniforms). Realising the distances were so enormous I started to wonder how I might get there within my lifetime.

Being a child I could think without boundaries or limitations and this led me to wonder about the nature of space, time and gravity (I did say I was a geeky child). I remember explaining to my parents how I reckoned that if you could create enough gravity between two points you could travel from one to the other without going through the space in between and they had no idea what I was on about (many years later my mother watched a programme about just such a theory and thought I was a bit less crazy from then on). Staring at the night sky captured my imagination and I could stare for hours at pictures of galaxies and nebulae wondering at the vastness of the universe and how I was stuck on planet earth staring at it through a telescope rather than being out there experiencing it.

More Galaxies Than You Can Shake A Stick At

I’ve never lost that sense of wonder about the universe and whenever I see photos or video from space looking back at earth I always feel almost emotional to look at where we are. I’m of the opinion that if everybody could go into space just once and look down on our planet as the blue marble that it is – so fragile with a tiny, wafer-thin band of atmosphere that makes our life possible – then the world would be a better place for it. Maybe in that case the first world would stop exploiting and plundering the third world for resources and enable our civilisation to last long enough that we can get out and explore the incredible universe we inhabit rather than destroy the beautiful planet on which we live. As I grew from childhood into adulthood I could see that people’s perspectives change. Instead of looking out into the world and beyond with a sense of wonderment and awe people shuffle along looking at their feet, eyes and minds closed, sleepwalking their lives away. Maybe it’s human nature.

But I’ll always be that kid staring up at the night sky with my mouth wide open imagining what civilisations have risen and fallen in the time taken for the light to travel from the stars to my eyes. How tiny and insignificant we are, how short our lives are in the grand scheme of things and what a miracle it is that I’m standing here staring at all. And fortunately I’m not the only one who thinks that way.

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FogCreek Kiln, Distributed Version Control Systems And Me

March 12, 2010

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FogBugz I’ve been a long time user of FogCreek’s bug tracking / project management / customer support / jack of all trades / master of all system FogBugz for many years. I use it at work (where it sits in the centre of our development process, we all revolve around it) but more importantly (ahem) for my own projects such as John’s Background Switcher it’s indispensable – without it I’d be lost. It handles all my support emails, defect and feature tracking, it’s my documentation repository, I use it to create release notes and when I’m doing beta testing of JBS I use its discussion forum functionality. There’s nothing better on the market and it takes away all the pain associated with managing and developing software so I can concentrate on what I’m actually building.

I’ve also used SourceGear Vault for version control for a few years and it has the handy ability to hook into FogBugz such that when checking in some code I can associate it with a case in FogBugz. This means I can look at all the code changes for a given case and see what it was that made me break some vital piece of functionality, although there’s no automatic way to see cases related to a checkin.

My good friend John Topley has been telling me how great distributed version control systems (DVCS) are for ages now (regular readers will know that John is forever telling me how great something is and then 6-12 months later I realise that he’s always right and follow up – like buying a Mac, an iPhone and many other things). When I attended the Scotland on Rails conference last year with John I saw a demonstration of working with Git (one of the DVCS out there) and I was impressed.

Very briefly, instead of having a central repository that you get the latest copy of the source from, make changes then commit them, you clone the entire repository (with all of its history) onto your machine. You can make changes, commit them (locally) and then when you’re ready push all those changes up to your central repository. You can also choose when to pull changes from the central repository locally – the cool thing being that you don’t actually have to update your local source with those changes until you’re ready. This means super fast checkins (since you’re not going over the network) and you can work in isolation while being able to unwind changes without affecting other people. When you’re ready you push those changes out so that everybody else can pull them to their local repositories. Suddenly things like branching, merging, multiple development paths and a host of things that can be painful to do in systems like SVN are much easier. If you really want to know about distributed version control systems then read Joel Spolsky’s tutorial here – hginit.com. What, you’ve read it already? Let’s carry on.

So a while ago I heard that FogCreek were working on a version control system – called Kiln – that integrated seamlessly with FogBugz but I was a bit busy at the time so added it to my “to get back to” list. A couple of weeks ago I finally remembered to have a look at it and bought myself a license (knowing that I had nothing to lose with their no hassle money back guarantee). After installing I started importing the source from my projects into Kiln. The first problem I had was that Vault seems to have no easy way to export the source history but since I’ve still got Vault running I can always go back and find older versions if I need to (which I most likely won’t).

The import was easy and it then became a case of getting used to using Mercurial (which is the DVCS system upon which Kiln is built) and how it does things. Having read Joel’s tutorial again (and paying attention this time) I was quickly up and running. Even though I’m the only person who works on my own projects (by choice), being able to have multiple cloned local repositories means I can try radical things out, take advantage of source control while I do that and choose to push the changes into Kiln or just delete the lot. And I don’t need to mess around creating branches only to later delete them or go through the pain of merging them in. Ultimately it means the time between checking in can be a lot shorter knowing that only when I’m finished with a piece of work do I need to push it to Kiln. In a team environment this rocks – you don’t have to worry about colleagues picking up your half-finished work and them complaining when things have broken.

When you’re developing on Windows you can install the “Kiln Client Tools” which puts TortoiseHg and some addons onto your system and makes authenticating and cloning repositories from Kiln dead easy. If you’re on a Mac you can install Mercurial tools yourself and it all works nice and smoothly. Since there are plugins for most development environments (like Visual Studio and Eclipse) you can use Kiln (Mercurial) seamlessly as though you were using SVN with the added security of it being a DVCS. Welcome to 21st century software development. Sweet.

The FogBugz integration with Kiln gives what I like to call “360 degree traceability” (something my friend Ian and I love about Team Foundation Server). If I commit a change with something like “Case 123: Fixed the divide by zero error” as the checkin note and push that to Kiln, then automatically case 123 will show that commit on its case page so I can see the changeset details and likewise when looking at the history in Kiln there’ll be a link from that changeset to case 123 in FogBugz. When trying to find out why changes have broken other parts of a system this sort of visibility can be incredibly useful, particularly where a team of multiple developers work on the same code base.

A Kiln Changeset

Another cool feature of Kiln which is absolutely no use to me on my own projects is a powerful code review tool. I’ve never really done code reviews in any place I’ve worked – it’s seemed like there’s never enough time to do it. However looking at how easy it is to create and manage code reviews in Kiln makes me think that were I using Kiln at work in my team then we’d definitely start using them. You’d pathalogically avoid branching and merging in Visual SourceSafe because it’s horribly hard to do (since SourceSafe sucks) but using a system like Mercurial makes that so easy you don’t even think twice about it. And so it is with code reviews, they’re so easy to do in Kiln that there’s no excuse not to do them.

In summary I’m very impressed with FogCreek Kiln. FogBugz has set a very high bar in terms of quality and ease of use and Kiln sits as though it was there from the start. Next time I build a development team and choose the tools I’ll be going down the FogBugz / Kiln route for sure, I’d be an idiot not to!

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The Benefits Of Physio

February 3, 2010

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I’d always heard how the older you get the faster time goes. That youth is wasted on the young. That football is a young man’s game. That time waits for no man. And that there’s nothing in this game for two in a bed (Bullseye circa 1986). And so as the years have passed I began to notice that my body didn’t recover as quickly as it used to. That training and playing regular football meant I spent more time with aches and pains than without. I started to get used to rising in the morning and grimacing as I got out of bed before my legs started working. I accepted that playing football meant having niggling injuries in my ankles, groin, thighs, hamstrings and a host of other body parts. I kept saying “one more year and I’ll hang up my boots”. Time was marching on.

My Idea Of Massage My good lady hurt her knee and went to a local physio to get it sorted out. It turned out I have medical cover with work so she got her sessions paid for. Sick of hearing me moan about being stiff and sore she suggested I get a sports massage to loosen off these tired legs and booked me in. I’d been warned that if they found anything wrong they wouldn’t be able to help themselves trying to sort it out. I sort of imagined a relaxing, sensual massage where I’d walk out feeling loose and on top of the world. Instead what began was a series of fabulously painful sessions where I discovered just how much physical pain one woman (my physio) can cause. Remind me never to fall out with a physio.

Much to my surprise everything was wrong! Pretty much all the muscles in my body were as stiff as a board. My flexibility was non-existent. My posture was terrible for many reasons including the muscles on the left side of my body were even tighter than the right. Joints barely moved and I was only going to get worse the older I got. Things had to change.

So each week my physio would work on a particular area of my body then give me a list of stretching exercises to try in an effort to loosen things off and increase my flexibility. Gradually, week by week I noticed things starting to improve. I could move in ways I couldn’t before (and hadn’t even noticed that I couldn’t). I wasn’t feeling stiff and sore after playing football any longer. I was waking up without any pain at all. Suddenly I started to feel years younger and realise that old age wasn’t getting to me just yet!

And since I’m relentlessly (or tediously) disciplined I’ve continued doing about 20-25 minutes of stretching every night and continue to get more flexible. I feel years younger and realise if I keep up the regimen (which I will) I should be able to extend my sporting days many years further than I thought I would. So if you’re in your mid-30s wondering how long you can keep on being active – get yourself down to your nearest sports physio. You won’t regret it!

Next on my list is finding a way to get rid of all these wrinkles… 😉

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Hogmanay at The Clachaig, Glencoe, Scotland

January 6, 2010

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My good lady, a couple of friends, their dog and I spend 4 days over New Year staying at the famous Clachaig Inn up in the wilds of Scotland and were treated to great food and drink, beautiful scenery, cold but crisp weather and a good bit of walking. Anybody who’s ever been climbing or hiking in the area will know what a gem the Clachaig is and we were not disappointed!