David Carrington

At work I’ve got a pretty nice dual-screen setup. Recently I have become more aware of the personalities that each screen has developed. Personalities? Sure. They don’t talk back to me, but what they show me and how I use them differs greatly:

Screen 1: Mr Left

Mr Left is a creator and a developer. He loves code, databases, and image manipulation. This is where all the real work gets carried out. If I’m being productive, I’m working with Mr Left. Left is currently showing me a SQL query. We’ve also been working together in Visual Studio on some reports. He has the windows start menu, so he’s the one that dishes out work to everyone.

Screen 2: Mr Right

Mr Right is about results. He loves websites, files, task management, and emails. As soon as Mr Left has done his thing, he passes the work over to Mr Right to test. Mr Right gets the final say on whether something is right or wrong. If the final result on the Right isn’t good enough, it gets given back to Left to deal with.

But Mr Right has a secret: he’s all about fun and media. He runs Mozilla Firefox and browses the web. He listens to music on Winamp through the day and occasionally watches videos for lunch. He loves to keep in touch with people, through Outlook E-mails, internal IM using Office Communicator, and keeps an eye on the web in general using Google Reader.

Thank you, Mr Left and Right, for making me more productive.

Scouts night hike

Our Scouts came joint 7th out of 17 groups from around the district on the night hike on Friday. This is pretty surprising, since we had to rush back by skipping 2 bases with a shortcut. It turns out that very few teams went to all 10 bases, with one team only managing 6. My legs have recovered now, but my sleeping pattern is still a bit off.

Prawns in tikka masala sauce with pilau rice

In an attempt to expand my cooking abilities, I bought a bunch of spices and checked out a recipe for pilau rice. I’m very slowly working on becoming a better cook. Perhaps the next part is making the sauce by myself too - as I’m pretty unlikely to go catch my own prawns.

GSM stumbler failed

My attempts at making my GSM stumbler application run while my phone is sleeping has not gone well. The latest version doesn’t seem to pick up any changes of cell tower at all while the phone is off, and takes a pretty long time to discover that I’ve moved. I’ll have to look into this again.

After looking through various KML samples on the web during lunch today, I spent a little time experimenting with converting my existing location data into something that Google Earth could read - allowing people to track my location in real time.

Manual labour

About 6 times per day, I press a button on my phone and it sends a text message to my website with my current cell tower ID. My website then takes over and does all the smart stuff by itself. If I’ve traveled somewhere new, it automatically looks up the cell ID in a large UK database using their API to find the latitude and longitude of the cell tower I’m currently connected to. But big decimal numbers showing my current latitude and longitude aren’t all that interesting on their own.

Sidebar widget

The next step in my process was to add the widget on the side of my website to show everyone my current location. It’s not particularly fascinating - either I’m in my home town, at work, or traveling somewhere in between. But I’ve just added something a little more interesting.

Google Earth

Whereas before the link on my current location just took you to the coordinates where I’m currently sat, it will now load up a KML file showing a nice picture of a man standing on my current location, and hopefully a number of little cell towers which will show where I’ve been over the last 7 days.

The historic data isn’t all that interesting in Google Maps, but if you open up My KML file in Google Earth then you’re exposed to seeing the timeline control and you can choose to see where I was at different times and even animate my location over time.

What’s next?

I’ve got a habit of always wanting to do more.  I’ve cleaned up my location database so I could add in other locations (i.e. not just cell towers) and try plotting even more data. I’d like to try the following:

• Load up GPS data for any hikes I go on
• Add a few key locations onto the map such as the Scout hut, my brother’s place in Canada, anything relevant to me
• Add some kind of refresh so that it updates automatically when I’m on the move
• Create some kind of JavScript timeline interface for Google Maps

I don’t pay the extra £1.50 for itemised billing, but I can still get a full itemised 18-page bill online in PDF format. Here’s a few key things that I noticed on my first phone bill from Orange:

• SMS delivery reports: 1p - Bad
• SMS to Jaiku: 20p (International) - Bad
• SMS to Twitter: Free - Excellent
• MMS to Flickr: 25p - Good
• 10% Love Your Number discount - Nice
• Unexpected 10% staff discount - Awesome!

So I’m only paying £28 for a £35 contract (Dolphin 35). What the guys at the store also forgot to mention was that the Love Your Number discount slowly increases by 5% each year up to 25%.

Orange seem to have endless ways to make me happy!

Update: Here’s a couple of quotes regarding the Orange employee discount which I noticed while scanning their terms & conditions:

• The “pay monthly offer” is 10% discount on line rental for the life of the contract.
• Offer is limited to a maximum of 5 phones per employee.

I’ve read a few articles about spoken languages across the globe fading to non-existance because no one speaks them any more and they get forgotten.

“More than half of the word’s 7000 languages are endangered, because they consist of an unsustainably small – and declining – speaker base.” - New Scientist

On a much less epic scale, I’m concerned about my own knowledge of programming languages fading to nothing from lack of use. The best example for me is Perl.

Perl is the first server-side programming language I tried to learn to improve my websites. I made very basic guestbook scripts and that was about it, but I did (for a short time) know the syntax and some basic principles in the language. I’ve not used Perl for 5 years!

I started looking into PHP, and never looked back. So what do I remember of Perl now? Hardly anything at all.

With a few years of self-taught PHP under my belt, I’m now pushing slowly into ASP.NET. This time, I’m going to keep my PHP very much alive.