Craig in feed form

I have finally moved away from my previous website host, Servelocity. For too long I have been putting up with a very old and peculiar setup which has curtailed my fun to a great extent. Servelocity (and many others) seem positively backwards in their insistence on hanging on to legacy stable software.

I’ve been developing another section for my website, but I’ve been using XML processing features not available in PHP 4. Now that I’ve shifted to a more modern host and the holidays have come along I can finish off the section and add it to my website . It is something that I have been developing with help from some researchers at The Open University and hopefully will eventually be published on SourceForge.

During the switch I’ve also taken the chance to change to a much cheaper (and less flexible) hosting package. This unfortunately means that I have had to say goodbye to a lot of content which I was hosting for various people. Although I say ‘unfortunate’ I am actually rather glad to be rid of them, as I no longer have to worry unduly about breaking my website on a whim.

Now that I’m doing real paid work I have less time to even think of things I might like to write in my blog. Here I am anyway though, blogging in my lunch break.

As far as work goes I’m still slogging away on the same project. Battling with conflicting interests and bloody politics… The project would be a doddle if we weren’t all so infuriatingly human about everything, but alas I don’t see any progress being made on that front for a long time. As I fear is the case with all knowledge management work, the project involves simplifying and making understandable and usable the complexity that is society (society in what ever form you happen to be looking at).

The first random thing I’d like to write about is probably another item in a growing catalogue of evidence that I’m obsessed with everything Google. For a while now I’ve been using their mapping tool (cunningly named Google Maps) to find my way about and for all those other occasions one needs to reference a map. Obviously one of the big uses is getting directions from one place to another. One aspect of which annoys me across all mapping tools is the inability to customise your route… when you know what they have suggested is just plain wrong! Well Google have done it again, now you just click on the route and drag it to another road, it will recalculate the route for it.

Along similar lines of “things you’ve always wanted”, I’ve started thinking about how to make my own piece of writing software. You might shout angrily that it is a silly idea because so many already exist… and you’re right. Unfortunately none of them really suit the way I like to write. I want to be able to separate out the ‘content’ I produce from the document and from any kind of presentation. I want a semantic writing tool. I’ll write more about it in time, as my ideas come together.

Well then, I’ve finished my degree. I was awarded a 2:1 for my masters in Aerospace engineering, which I’m pretty pleased with. I’ve now accepted an offer to undertake a PhD at Bath in Information in Engineering Design.

By ‘Information’ I mean pretty much all the data/knowledge bound up within the processes that go into producing a real live piece of engineering. One of the ideas that has been floated in my direction centres on “Information push”. This is trying to provide people with the information they need before they realise that they do.

Related to all of this I’ve been lucky enough to be able to start a project to map the skills within a large engineering company. I’ve been told not to broadcast this, so I won’t mention names here. There is potential that this might lead into a sponsored PhD which might mean the direction following the wishes of the company but (besides the extra money) there would be huge advantages to having a ‘real’ aim for the project and someone with a vested interested in my work.

I came across a Dilbert cartoon strip the other day which struck a rather nice chord given some of the responses I get when I become a little too enthused about my chosen subject:

I changed the look of the website a little while back, as you may have noticed. It is quite a significant departure from the previous style and layout. The two main changes are the new colour scheme and the inclusion of a number of feeds on the index page.

Colour scheme

I was inspired to change to a much darker scheme having read an article on how the colours effect the energy required to display a website. Essentially, bright and light colours require more energy from your monitor.

Feeds

These feeds represent online content which I have created. Although in the case of recommended posts and bookmarks this creation might be considered a bit abstract. This was an idea I had a long while ago, and then not so long ago came across a way of quickly and crudely implementing it.

Up until today the feeds have been read, parse and output each time the page was called. This was causing significant delays in the page loading times. As of today a static file containing the parsed feeds is generated every 12 hours. The index page then calls on the static file when a request is made which means that no time is wasted on parsing the feed and preparing the output.

For those interested I’ve done this quite simply by writing taking a php file that was parsing the feeds and having it write the output to a static file. I then have a cron job run the php file at 9am and 9pm everyday:

0 9,21 * * * /usr/bin/php -q /PATH/generate_static_feeds.php > /dev/null

The last bit of that command “/dev/null” sends the output into the ether. Without it the server will e-mail the output of the script… which for some purposes can be rather useful.

In time I’ll be working on a more complex way of displaying the recommended posts, which will allow me to write a little note to go with each explaining why I have recommended them.

I live surrounded by information I have carefully chosen to be compatible with my own beliefs and understanding – I live in an Information Cocoon and without meaning to be rude, I suspect you do too! It is something that is difficult to avoid, we have limits on our information gathering capacity in both time and money so why shouldn’t we spend our time reading only what interests us and the authors/sources we tend to agree with or trust? The danger (and I don’t use the word lightly) is that we close ourselves off from conflicting opinions and facts presented by other sources. By only consuming mutually affirmative sources we increase the intensity of our beliefs/understanding and further skew the range of issues and topics we’re familiar with.

I have tacitly realised this on several occasions but have usually shrugged my shoulders and accepted it. Today I’ve decided to make steps to rectify the situation. I’m going to add the Financial Times and The Daily Mail to my feeds (I might have to change the latter as I’m not sure I’ll be able to survive reading it for long!). This is a paltry step really… but what else can I do? Perhaps I should try befriending a Tory voter?