In winter, walks in daylight seemed impossible, what with it getting dark mid-afternoon. But that’s ridiculous, I realised. The vast majority of the time I work from home, so it should be no problem to get out in daylight. On the other hand, the only real downside of working from home is that even though you tend to start earlier and finish later than the office-folk, they still tend to assume you’re sitting there all that time. Even putting the computer aside for lunch can mean a stream of irate messages when you return.

I think you probably make these expectations yourself though. I rarely do actually put the computer aside for lunch, preferring to drop crumbs in the keyboard instead, so I suppose it’s reasonable to be surprised when someone who’s pretty much always there is not there. However, with that in mind I’m going to make a new expectation which is that I’ll be taking a long walk, along with my trusty hound dog, in the middle of the day from now on. (Albeit with telephone, email and instant messaging in my pocket).

Of course, it’s easy to say you’re going to do something every day – harder to actually keep doing it. One really busy day leads into a really busy week and before you know it you’ve forgotten about the whole thing. So I decided to keep track of the walks on here, like this: today and yesterday. Will that help, or is it just an excuse to play with technology? Only time will tell.

The following video, also courtesy of Brenda Wallace, shows the output generated from the StatusNet (formerly Laconica) git repository:

I think this is really impressive stuff, and not just because I’m in it. There’s a better quality version on YouTube.

Yep, as of this morning, I consider Java as malware. Having put up with the JRE updater being used as an advertising platform for some time now, the final nail in the coffin came this morning with JRE 6 Update 5. This attempts to install a stinking “Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox/Mozilla”, and while there’s a checkbox to turn it off, it’s enabled by default.

As far as I’m concerned, this is totally unacceptable and Java and Sun just went down an awful long way in my estimation.

My laptop started playing up on Monday night, randomly freezing up and overheating, so on Tuesday morning I gritted my teeth and picked up the phone to Dell, ready for the usual rigamarole. Instead, I got the most excellent telephone support, the like of which I have never received from an offshore call centre. That was followed up the very next morning by the arrival of a skilled engineer who replaced the motherboard in what must have been record time, and now everything seems to be shipshape again.

All I need now is a Microsoft engineer to come and replace Visual Studio’s “motherboard” with a non-faulty component and I’ll be laughing.

What comes in gets dealt with immediately, one way or another, and once that’s done it is either deleted or moved to the single Archive folder which has replaced the ridiculous arrangement of folders that previously existed. They’ve all been deleted as well, and the contents dumped into that same Archive folder. There’s no loss of information there at all, because I can search it. What happened in the past anyway, when I needed to find an old email, was that I’d look in the appropriate folder, and then have to do a global search in case I’d put it in the wrong place.

Another side effect is that my email apps are now CLOSED unless I’m actually processing emails. That means if you’re one of those people that make the ridiculous “have you read the email I’ve just sent you?” phone calls, I will no longer be lying when I say no. You don’t even need to make the call, because you’ll know when I’ve read it – you’ll have a reply. In the meantime, I’ll be working with one less distraction.

This time around, the move was inspired by a Google Tech Talk by someone I’m convinced is Chandler off of Friends*, but is now calling himself Merlin Mann. Whether or not he is a thinly disguised TV star, he talks a lot of sense. If you are in any way inefficient in dealing with email, take my advice and take his advice – the video is here.

Although excellent, this was actually the least interesting Google Tech Talk I’ve seen recently. I’m not a big fan of Google to be honest, but I can’t thank them enough for making this stuff available. Here are a couple of other gems I’ve enjoyed over the past couple of months:

• Lenhart Ohman on Erlang
• Majorie Shapiro on the Large Hadron Collider

*”He doesn’t look anything like him”, you are no doubt protesting. I don’t care, I get that from my long-suffering wife all the time in these situations. I say he does, and that’s that.

This covers the entire 12GB of pictures, and shows that the majority of the data is contained within the last year. The cause is obviously higher resolution images, more memory on the camera and an increasing inclusion of video as well as still images. This means I can expect to be adding to this data at a rate of at least 11GB per year from now on, even if I only continue at the current rate. I seem to be doing ok with not losing it for the first decade, but I need to get a bulletproof backup system in place for this before it gets out of control.

I’m not suggesting that there aren’t people for whom this is a serious problem, but “Millions ‘hit by toilet phobia’” is just ridiculous.

What defines Toilet Phobia exactly? Well, from the article, it can “simply be manifest as a mild distaste for public loos.” Erm, hello? Is there anybody, other than George Michael and friends, who doesn’t have at least a mild distaste for them? I don’t like public toilets one little bit. If there’s something wrong with this, then somebody please let me know and I’ll go and receive the necessary therapy and counselling. Otherwise, I’ll happily persist in my belief that public toilets are unpleasant places, for a number of reasons.

The sensational story has a more down-to-earth sister story, which tells of the plight of a chap who struggles with “obsessive compulsive disorder and constantly worries about dirt, germs and contamination issues.” Despite the title of the story, “Toilet phobia makes life hard”, he evidently doesn’t have Toilet Phobia. He has far higher standards of hygiene than the rest of us, to the point where it impacts his life in a mostly negative way. I say mostly because I bet he doesn’t suffer from colds and other infectious diseases, or food poisoning, to the same extent as everybody else.

Anyway, needless to say, behind all this there is a book and DVD waiting to be purchased.

Here’s a great way to put old mobile phones to good use. This morning I dug seven of the blighters out of the loft, and a charity called Sri Lanka Child Care is sending some prepaid envelopes – all I have to do is stick the phones in, and they get recycled, with the proceeds going to the obvious good cause. What could be easier than that?

If you have any old phones, get in touch with me for contact details.

I’ve dabbled very briefly with various speed reading techniques in the past. It’s always been a very brief dabble on the grounds that they’ve all involved a significant investment of time, effort and sometimes money to achieve an improvement in speed that’s unknown at the outset. Given that I read extremely quickly anyway, I’ve never seen the point. This time around, first impressions were that little effort was involved, and the technique was so simple and obvious there was no way I would be needing to get my wallet out, so I decided to investigate further. (Interesting that of the three invesments mentioned, time, which is surely everybody’s most valuable asset, appears to be the one I value least – proven not only by that decision making process, but by the fact that I’m writing this.)

A quick internet search revealed various vendors who had other ideas about the wallet part, but there was no way I was paying anything for some RSVP software, when I could easily knock up a workable implementation in 10 minutes. As luck would have it, before getting the compiler out, I came across a neat looking open-source application called Dictator, and spent the the 10 minutes downloading and installing that instead.

To try it out, I grabbed a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray from Project Gutenberg, a couple of my lengthier posts from this journal, and a 32 page design document I reviewed/edited last week. These were deliberately all “works” I was familiar with, since my first goal was to see if the thing was any use at all, rather than worry too much about issues of comprehension. With these texts at hand, I set up Dictator so it filled the screen with one giant word, and set about ‘reading’.

I figured that coming to this cold, I would need to train myself somewhat, so I set the speed to a measly 200 words per minute, and hit the spacebar to start the action. The low speed was my first mistake. One of the points of RSVP is that the rapid speed inhibits the natural tendency to sub-vocalise when reading, yet at my chosen 200WPM I realised almost straight away that not only was I sub-vocalising (which I don’t do much when reading normally anyway) but I also seemed to have plenty of time to think about what I was doing in between the words. On realising this was a total waste of time, I ditched the training idea and went back to the start with the speed cranked up to 600.

At the higher speed, things were starting to get interesting. Now there was no way I could possibly sub-vocalise, nor was I fully aware of the process of reading, but I was definitely doing it. Something odd was happening though – it seemed all the texts had been re-written in the style of a poor non-native English speaker, who had left out pronouns and such willy-nilly. Knowing this couldn’t be the case, I thought perhaps the software was deliberately dropping these words (of course I didn’t RTFM – in fact, I don’t think there is one, hurrah) and set about examining the various menu options, where I found the answer.

Dictator has two modes, Constant and Dynamic. The former is what my 10 minute implementation would have done – at 600WPM, a new word is displayed every 10th of a second. Dynamic mode, the default, is more refined, and modifies the timing on a word-by-word basis according to various factors including word length, appearance of a comma or full stop, and whether the word is a “connecting word”. By default, the connecting words were given a shorter time, which meant I wasn’t registering them at all. I tried switching to Constant mode, which wasn’t too bad, except that beyond a certain word length I couldn’t recognise the word fast enough, so the occasional long word imposed an unnecessary limit on reading speed for the rest of the passage. Also, Wilde’s ridiculously lengthy and convoluted sentence structure, while not totally incomprehensible, did not make for a pleasant reading experience. Here’s an example from near the start of chapter 1:

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

I mean Crikey O’Reilly. Is that really a sentence? I thought I was bad. Actually, a 10-stretch for armed robbery is a sentence, and possibly a less tedious one. I’ve often wondered if in that era, they actually thought it was big and clever, or were perhaps involved in some kind of competition, to try their utmost to write in such a way that you need to make notes mid-sentence to remind you what the hell has happened by the time you reach the next full-stop, assuming you haven’t fallen asleep or slashed your wrists with boredom before you even make it to that point. Also, I can’t help but picture Wotton in a haze of smoke with his mouth stuffed full of fags. (Important note for US-English speakers – the word has a very different meaning in the UK – apologies for the image. Also a full-stop is a period. I’m not doing this US/UK translation thing any more, you’re on your own from now on.)

Anyway, before I got distracted, I was having two problems with Constant mode  – long words, and long compound sentences. I switched back to Dynamic mode, and made a few adjustments to the settings – specifically, you can adjust the weighting given to the various factors, so I made both word length and commas have a greater effect, and bingo, everything was going much better.

I can’t say I have comprehension approaching the 100% mark at this early stage, but I think the potential might be there. I need to look at that and the maximum speed side of things now, but this epic post is only first impressions after all. If anyone’s actually read this far, I suggest you look into RSVP for yourself before coming back for part 2, unless you have plenty of time on your hands.