Now you can find me at the brand spanking new domain of www.flat3d.org!!!  I am fully hosted and domained up…  So there you go!  Be sure to update your feeds, your favourites and your links… 

As the site has actually moved, this won’t be updated any longer, after a little while I’ll put up a holding redirect page, and then eventually it’ll probably just die out…
The flat3d.co.nr links will point to the flat3d.org, but if you are reading this post then someone, somewhere is linking directly to the f2s url…

Nothing else much has changed I’m afraid!  It’s still the same old nonsense and gibberish!  Just with a shorter, more permenant address.  Marvellous!

So get on over to www.flat3d.org and get yourself all sorted out!

At the moment it is on the free hosting that comes with my brother’s broadband connection (a throwback to being in Antrim!). I had hoped I could move it to Biglobe’s space but it doesn’t support php or DBs unfortunately.
I can buy a package from F2S for £25/year and flat3d.net for £12/year (or flat3d.co.uk for £7.50/year, but that doesn’t seem to be right when I am in Japan!)

The space is pretty minimal (200mb w/10mb database) but it is the same as I am working with now…
Can anyone suggest a decent host (not too pricey and supporting php/providing db)?

answers on a postcard… or just comment below…

Sapporo Snow Festival 2009

You can see some pretty awesome snow sculptures at the festival!  I got to go twice, once during the daytime on Saturday, then again on Tuesday evening with Alex, but a mix up in meeting and communications meant I didn’t meet Alex in the end, but still got to see a few of the sculptures all lit up…  The ice ones look much better by night!

Last Wednesday, a Public Holiday here in Japan, a Singaporean student at the language centre (Wan Jee) arranged for us to go to a Singaporean buffet-banquet at a hotel in Otaru.  It was delicious and we all ate far too much!  I had to leave slightly earlier than the others to prepare to give a speech on Friday morning.  The others went to the Otaru candle light festival in the evening.  My speech went well on Friday, it was all about electrocuting myself when I was little.  We have to do speeches each time we finish a section of the course in front of all of the students and teachers at the centre!

Then just the other day my internet began working!  The NTT (Japanese equivalent of BT) came and put in the line a couple of weeks ago, but it took Biglobe (my provider) a little longer to get it up and running.  The line is an optic fibre link to the exchange which promises a maximum ability of 100Mbps, but in reality it is giving 12-15Mbps downstream and almost as much upstream at the moment…  Which isn’t the 100Mbps, but still isn’t bad for a consistent connection speed.

The final bit of news is I am on Twitter!  If you are on twitter you can follow me at flat3d, I’d love to follow you too…  I’m building up my links (it’s all about the links…)
For those who aren’t or don’t know what it is, it is a bit like facebook’s status updates, but made viable.  In reality it seems to be a bit more like one huge chatroom, with a whole lot of conversations going on at once, the nice thing is it sort of tunes in your friends and tunes out everyone else, so you can follow conversations.  It’s also possible to use it to simply let people know what you are upto, which might sound pretty dull or dim, but I like the idea that I can communicate daily life to folk and friends at home.

The big surprise for me is that it is actually pretty big in Japan.  It seems to be filling (bridging?) a gap between the all out geekiness of IRC (internet chat) and the more mainstream social users of Mixi (sort of Japan’s answer to myspace or facebook…)  At the moment I am much to illiterate to make much use of it in Japanese, but as I learn more hopefully it will be a valuable resource in learning about the tech world/culture in Japan and even help me with studying the language!

I will sometime link it into the site here, a twitter updates jobby or something, but I am not sure the best way to do it yet, or even if it is actually worthwhile…  Some more thought required I guess…

It usually begins with something that seems fairly straightforward or simple, something that shouldn’t be a problem at all!  Things go smoothly at first, but after a short while something appears that was unexpected, soemthing isn’t formatted quite correctly and to get any further you will need to spend hours reformatting it, maybe the data isn’t as complete as you thought and you will need to spend a while typing in or copying and pasting the rest into the file, or there might be a step in the process that you didn’t foresee and seemingly no easy way to overcome it…  But you have come this far!  Surely to go back and do all this by hand would be much more labour than to overcome the obstacle and get it done right?  So you plough on, and as time wears on and the text on your ctrl key is worn back to unreadable from all the copying and pasting it begins to look like the manual option might have been quicker, but surely there isn’t long to go now?!

This is the kind of thing that crops up all the time in IT work, particularly in software work that is heavy in data processing.  In my last job we often took feeds from various places and attempted to automate them to make life easier (well in this case actually just to make the project possible!).  Of course if you have the right tools and so on, you can overcome the obstacles and, to quote someone else, “anything is possible!”

But the issue is made even more frustrating as you realise why it occurs and what it means.  If (suitable) data is already in a digital format, it is sheer lunacy to have to do manual work in order for it to be acceptable in another location.  The whole point of digitising data is to increase its accessibility, portability and usefulness and this too often is forgotten as people make an application that produces data or transfers it.  Perhaps the developers didn’t use standard formats designed for transferring data such as XML, CSV etc for textual data, common image formats or whatever is suitable for the data in question.  This is less of a problem now thanks to the web and forced portability of data.  The real killer comes in lack of consistency, when data is being transferred in a common format, or even a well specified uncommon format, but all of a sudden something changes and data is coming across in a slightly different format.  Of course this results in lost data, mistransmission, etc, but it also makes attempting to process the data automatically a real headache, and it is inevitably down to poor design and implementation of the original system.

So I’ve warbled on and no one is going to be reading now, even if they were the last time I checked!  But the next time you find yourself thinking “technology makes things so much more complicated” ask yourself if it is the technology that makes it difficult or the design of the system.

(This post was inspired by my attempts to get my supporters addresses from the automated email sent to me and into my pc’s address book.  Surely someone might have thought about the format that the addresses are provided in and thought that commas alone might not be the most useful separator…)

In preemptive preparation I have been doing a bit of organising etc.  Today I got Office 2007 (Can’t find the discs for the student edition of 2003 I bought, so I’m taking the excuse!).  I got the “home and student” edition simply because it is ridiculously cheaper than the other versions, and was glad to find it has powerpoint (the home version didn’t have power point when my brother got it, or when my dad got it…hmmm) but also found it didn’t include outlook.  Now this is no big loss.  I had used Outlook for my calendar with it syncing to my phone and, recently, my iPod Touch but thought it would be a simple matter of telling things to sync to Windows Calendar or something.  No such luck!  For all their ease of use and anti-Microsoft following, Apple have decided that the iPod and iPhone can only sync with Outlook (2003 SP1 and above).  So I started to dig!

While digging I realised that I should get all my contacts together and store them safely (having experienced the misery and difficulty that missionaries experience when their harddisk or similar crashes and contacts are lost or even just temporarily unavailable for a week or two).  I reckoned that a cloud solution may be what I’m looking for.  I already use GMail and Google Reader, and am quite fond of the intrusive, privacy neglecting, big G so seeing as they already know everything about my email and browsing habits, I may as well give them my contacts (most are already in GMail) and calendar too!

While scouring the net for potential, I happened upon this nifty site which can be used to set up an in-the-cloud Exchange service that is able to provide Exchange style access to (among others) Google’s online services, designed specifically to give people mobile access to these services through Windows mobile and Apple handheld devices.  It’s in beta at the moment and can allow pushing of calendar and contacts, with plans to introduce email making use of GMail’s IMAP service.  Once set up I can access my google calendar and contacts direct from my iPhone syncing via Wifi and no need for Outlook or other expensive stuff!

Following that success I decided to look into laptop access.  So that I can still get at my calendar on my PC, make appointments, get contact info etc when I’m not in range of a usable hotspot.  So I tried a few things, mostly unsuccessful, until coming around to something I should have thought of at the start.  Mozilla Thunderbird.  Well truthfully I downloaded Mozilla Sunbird and set it up for my google calendar (with the relevant addons) then downloaded Thunderbird to do contacts (and IMAP gmail… maybe…) and realised I should just use the Lightning extension with Thunderbird.  So I did that.  And it works!

So now my calendar and complete contacts have joined my email in the Cloud!  But I still have a synchronising copy of each on my laptop!  Marvellous…

Yesterday (Friday) I finished my time at GCD,  I originally was going to go on til the end of September, but with my dissertation and other things to be done before the OMF deadline of 25th September it became clear that I needed more September to get things done and so, reluctantly, I handed in end of August notice.  My reluctance wasn’t because I want to make more money, or because I like getting up at 7 so I can make it for 8:30 (ish!)…  I genuinely enjoyed working with the guys at GCD.  I’m only 26 so I haven’t had too many jobs, but I haven’t experienced a workin environment or job like it; the work itself was interesting, fun, often challenging and only sometimes annoying, the lunchtime Halo matches and great attitude of all the guys (and later girls too) at GCD made for fantastic team dynamics and working relationships and of course the leadership team of the two Andrews made my two years (just under, but I’m rounding) without question the best job I have had so far!
Now every job has its down sides, but to be honest I’m struggling to think of them, even the annoying bits lead to great office banter and fun times.

So now I am full time dissertation for two weeks with smatterings of OMF thrown in.  I have to complete my introduction (the last bit believe it or not), then collate my references, proof read and redraft however many times, get it printed and bound and handed in before 1pm on the 15th September!

So what’s that title about an iPod Touch?  Well yesterday, as it was my last day, we all went out for lunch at Gowdy’s (local regular of GCD celebratory lunchtimes), then after a great lunch (as always – only downside was a sleepy afternoon!) Andrew G pulled out a box and a card, so I thought, “Great! sweets!” or something along those lines, but when I had fought through the sellotape I opened the box to find an iPod Touch 32GB box!  Of course I thought it was a joke, I mean an iPod Touch?!  But no, on opening the (smaller) box I found not only a sleek, shiny piece of 1 Infinite Loop’s finest hardware, but it had been engraved:

To John
All the best
from everyone at
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx*

So now I have an iPod Touch and it is very nice, I’ve used iTunes a bit before for the store, but it is nice to now have everything in one place, at least for a while, and I am looking forward to a host of funky apps!  There were a few initial hiccups (mostly file formats, I had an MTP Creative Zen then a Sony Walkman, so I had windows media and atrac files all over the place) but the only crappy bit are the earphones!  Now this is my first foray into Apple technology (at least first piece I have owned) and no question it is a very shiny gadget…  I hope I don’t get sucked in to Jobs’ pie-chartless, spreadsheetless world of photobooks and floppy hair! ;-)

Thanks GCD, for the experience and fun of the past two years and for the ideal geek toy as a parting gift!

*the xs represent the GCD local network’s external IP…  Funny if you’re a geek like me!