Anywhere but here

Every day on this project is the same. I want to work on a feature, but the complete hash a few archaeological layers of developers have made to a Microsoft MVC website bite you, and if they don't get you then the disastrous Entity Framework repository implementation will probably take you down, and if that doesn't, then it might be the home-spun data attributes / view-model objects / AutoMapper combination that finally shits in your eye. Or the weird cache. Don't forget the weird cache.

But every time I do work with Conclave, a weight is lifted from me.

Lacing an ailing, legacy application with another technology isn't a choice to make lightly; At worst, you've just added another degree of dependency, complexity and a migraine for the next developer to pick up the mess. At best, you can distil what the application is doing and capture that in a way that will make it easier to re-write the whole thing from scratch, with, in this case, new Conclave models, stores and behaviours.

Christ, I can't wait. I'm so tired of wading through the muck.


Reading: "Glow" by Ned Beauman

Lady Invisible

She has vanished, alas!

Invisible - with a swish of her cloak, she turns to glass; stealth technology of the highest order that US Generals, fearing rival borders, to own would surely sell loyalties both homeland and extramuros.

A hazy, busy camouflage is all I see, but I recall dark and gold spun curls alongside me; before invisibility.

While communication, fading nightly, causes motes to tumble crazily, describing arcs in air and drowning brightly where she has passed.

Is this Winter? Will this last?

And, I wonder still and ask the air aloud of she - Lady Invisible, will you soon appear to me?

(By me, circa 2012.)

My letter to Angie Bray MP concerning the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

Dear Ms Bray,

The Government announcement about this legislation is immensely concerning on many levels. Firstly, that this is being rushed through with very little time for MPs such as yourself to read and scrutinise the law before voting upon it. Secondly, that the content it concerns - the blanket retention of data - was found to be unlawful and an infringement of the right to privacy by the Court of Justice of the EU, and this Bill appears, on the surface, to simply be an attempt at not allowing the UK Government or ISPs to be sued for such infringement. And thirdly, that under the surface, the Bill paves the way for further regulation on data retention to happen without due legal process.

This is bad legislation and an extremely underhanded way of extending already over-reaching powers of mass-surveillance in a fashion that stops democratic process from occurring.

Unless you and other MPs act, the British public will have to rely upon the House of Lords to correct this colossal mistake that has far-reaching implications for personal privacy. I have no doubt that you, as a duly elected representative should be very, very concerned as to how this legislation is being rail-roaded through Parliament, with "cross-party" support being gained before the Bill was even published. This is a gross abuse of the political process and should be viewed as an embarrassment to the UK as a whole.

Please help turn this around, to offer fair scrutiny of this legislation, and to respect the higher Court of Human Justice of the EU.

Yours faithfully,

Adam Christie.

The Stream

The flow of people from the station I see every day is unknowable and chaotic; I call it the stream. It ebbs and flows and pulses with time, and at some point in its strength you can only attack the problem with statistics. The mathematics can represent the total of the crowd, the vector of its travel and intent, but that becomes zero-sum as the stream moves on, disseminating into Westminster, and later - back. Unless, of course,  you see something that you recognise; maybe the cut of a coat, a specific pair of boots or a primary display of hair. Then, the eye is caught and greater analysis can be performed.

The stream changes morning to morning, day to day before reversing later in the day like the tidal Thames, and I think about how it could be used to tell a fortune. Fluomancy; seeing the future in the whorls, eddies and tides of moving water as the particles flow out from the station and into the city, passing around obstacles both structural and human, with those that fight the stream doomed to drown unless they are the strongest of swimmers.

The motion is framed by contra-flows and whirlpools like the jet streams of Jupiter, and this is where the commerce occurs, giving freedom for those trying to beat the flow and direction. And that commerce is life and choice and exchange and freedom.

Let the maths yield the shape of the future, as the fluid flows. Trust the numbers. Trust in the stream.

Bookmarks for 20140313

Thursday is an exciting day. I'll tell you all why soon. Work is busy, things are progressing and I saw a cracking gig last night - Hollie McNish supported by Sabrina Mahfouz - awesome awesome awesome spoken-word poetry at Bush Hall. After the gig I popped in for a quick beer at my neighbouring bar and ended up on a call to technical support for half an hour to try and fix their card machine, which didn't get fixed but at least I got a free beer out of it. I then woke up with a headache this morning and I'm blaming the card machine.

Good article on thinking about appropriate data structures in Redis.

https://matt.sh/thinking-in-redis-part-one

StreamTools by the New York Times R&D Lab.
https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing-streamtools/

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! A Fighting Fantasy RPG brought to Android and iOS. However, I'm biased so here's just the Android link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorcery1

I've been on a massive reading binge recently, here's a couple of highlights:

Red Phone Box: A Darkly Magical Story Cycle, by Salomé Jones, Warren Ellis, et al. This was quite a ride through London... Every London.

Gun Machine, by Warren Ellis. This is the detective novel I've been waiting for. Also some of my favourite writing I've come across for a while. An unsettling case that spreads across 20 years and all of Manhattan.

Bar cycle 1 of x

And there's a girl on a Mac Air, wearing some kind of jacket that seems to mostly consist of feathers, and she's studying pictures of men with immaculately clipped beards who are drinking beer and playing croquet.

She drinks tea in the middle of the bar and restaurant.  Tea, because she can't concentrate on the beards or the croquet with a head full of beer or wine. Or maybe she is so loaded on heroin and etsy-as-a-positive-career-move that anything else doesn't have that zing apart from the morning ritual of the triple espresso assfuck. Rich kids aren't what they used to be.

What led her to this, I wonder? In what channel of the screaming great Pantheon of choices in life do you wind up eschewing alcohol and looking at hipsters being ultra-gentrified; instead of a baseball bat they are hefting a mallet. You poor, sick, lost schmuck.

Bookmarks for 20140226

The careful arrangement of strings, bells, lenses and mirrors I employ to wake me at the appointed time definitely did not work this morning. However, it's a sunny day so here's some bookmarks.

Data modelling with MongoDB (general topic as I've been busy with re-writing bits of Xizi just recently):

http://mongolab.org/topic/?data

Warren Ellis has a new, epic looking graphic novel out (shortly), TREES:

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=15103

Some Kickstarters of note that I've backed recently:

TimeWatch - Gumshoe and Time Travel RPG thingummy that did ridiculously well:

"You've got a time machine, high-powered weapons and a whole lot of history to save. Welcome to TimeWatch!"

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kevinkulp/timewatch-gumshoe-investigative-time-travel-rpg

Project: Dark - A stealth-based tabletop RPG that sounds amazing and that also smashed its funding goal:

"Play fantastic thieves in a fantastical city in this new stealth-adventure tabletop roleplaying game."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wordstudio/project-dark

Hello Ruby - A delightful, almost perfect children's book that teaches kids the basics of programming. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

"Hello Ruby is a children’s book that teaches programming fundamentals through stories and kid-friendly activities."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lindaliukas/hello-ruby

Coffee, Cake and Kisses - Fundraising for the new iteration of the Coffee, Cake and Kink space. Not totally sure about the new name but I understand why they've had to do it; their heart is in the right place and I hope they make it:

"A relationships-focused social design space. Tease your taste buds & stimulate your senses in the place that makes you go mmm."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coffeecakeandkisses/coffee-cake-and-kisses

Also: I've been listening to The Black Keys entire discography for about 5 days now. It helps.

END OF LINE.