Present Perfect

Some principles and observations come back in many aspects of life.

One drive I have in everything I do, whether professional or personal, is to remove friction. Removing friction helps to stay in a flow and focus on the important things. (One of the bad sides is that I'm prone to yak shaving because of this, although I think it pays off). I like removing friction today for my flow of tomorrow.

A recurring observation I have is how, in any company of a reasonable size, certain small things just don't happen automatically anymore, because a sense of shared ownership gets diluted when there are more people involved. Typical example is 'the shared fridge tends no lose the entropy battle'.

And another observation is how, in many cases, an overengineered system ends up being extremely unusable.

Today, those three met when I was in a meeting and I wanted to put on the lights, but I turned on the way-too-loud AC instead.

What was the problem ? Pretty simple. The remotes for lights and AC all have 6 buttons. Left ones are On, right ones are Off. But there are no labels. So these programmable remotes can control whatever you want. It's just that usually all you want is to control lights and control AC.

So, someone had labeled the remote using a Dymo (I love Dymos), but apparently got them switched around. Then someone else put scotch tape on the labels, and put a very small almost invisible double arrow on there to indicate 'hey, the labels are the other way around'.

But no one takes the time to just put the labels on correctly. No one feels annoyed enough to fix it for the next person. Amazing how people leave this easily fixed piece of friction around. (Guess what I did during that meeting)

The story of our AC and lighting is another one entirely, but it's overengineered to the max. Here are the things that suck:

• like I said, remotes are programmable. Sounds like a great idea, but sucks in practice if you really always only control lights and AC. The third row of buttons is never used. I'm sure the engineers went 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we made it programmable so that if we ever think of something else than lights or AC, we can just reuse the same remotes ?' I can hear them discussing it right now!
• hence, the remotes are unlabeled. Nuff said.
• the remotes have no light that indicate whether they work at all. Batteries go flat - the bare minimum is a light that flickers when you push a button.
• You need to sort of aim the remote at a receiver in the ceiling. But they're pretty hard to spot, and the range is not very big.
• Hence, wouldn't it be nice if you actually got a feedback light on your remote that indicates 'the receiver noticed the command ?'
• If the receiver manages to receive the button press, apparently the signal goes to some central location where the whole machinery is housed. I imagine an ENIAC computer filling the whole basement somehow. It takes ages to get from 'pressed a button' to 'lights go on' or 'AC goes on'. I mean, easily, 10 seconds.
• All of these huge usability mistakes combine to make turning on or off lights or AC into a giant button mashfest not seen since the days of playing Summer Olympics joystick waggling and button twiddling at the arcade was in fashion.

All of this, of course, is in addition to all of the usual problems with AC - the controls for temperature are also unlabeled (and in a company with new people arriving constantly, there will be at least one person thinking that left is complete minimum and another person thinking that right is, and they will fight over this passive-agressively), it never provides the amount of cold people want, some people smoke in the building anyway so it gets shared for all of us, and filters never get changed as often as promised. Oh, and a few times a year, water drips from the ceilling (and it's not that much fun to find your laptop turned on and wet in the morning).

And the kicker is, the whole system can be programmed on a time basis to get turned off at certain intervals. I still don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that, around 22:00, the lights turn off, and that tells you to either go find the remote or to go home because it's long past time to do so.

Some principles and observations come back in many aspects of life. One drive I have in everything I do, whether professional or personal, is to remove friction. Removing friction helps...

When we moved into the new apartment, one of the things I definitely wanted to maintain the nerd quotient in the place was a scrolling LED marquee in the kitchen pointing to the living room:

I got the idea when we bought a marquee such as this one as the perfect gift for Peter's 30th birthday some time ago. I remember racking my brain trying to come up with a good gift for us to give him, and at some point it hit me that one of these things would be awesome for him.

We didn't just give it to him either - he had a birthday party at the Charlatan, a bar in Gent, and we installed the marquee there as part of the DJ booth, putting up increasingly weird messages until he finally realized that it was a present for him. Good times!

Anyway, having that thing at home for a few days and playing with it convinced me I should get one for myself for the new apartment and use it for news updates. We installed the thing in the ceiling spanner and, apart from some tedious remote control entering of texts for some occasions, I haven't used it much since. I tried once in a while to control it from the computer but I never really got it to work.

Until last week I had some spare time and decided to figure out what the problem is with the computer control. After a lot of twiddling, I realized that the serial-to-jack cable had a 6P6C jack, instead of the usual 6P4C for RJ-11 use. I hadn't actually ever seen a cable like that, someone suggested it might have been used for ISDN connections, but I have no idea. Hooking it up directly to a computer made the software work under VMWare and Wine to control the device. After that, controlling it directly from Linux was easy.

Of course, I want to use the marquee in its place in the kitchen, not by my computer. After all, that's why I invested in the Abitana network I installed. I went to my favourite electronics store in Barcelona, where they had to custom-make the cable because apparently it's hard to get stock cable like this.

Took it back home, tried it, still didn't work. After inspecting the cable more closely it seems the guy had put one end on the wrong way. Luckily, one end is supposed to go in the 8P8C RJ-45 wall socket, so I crimped a standard connector on that end, and bingo! Finally have the LED marquee in place and controlled from Linux from my computer!

Next step, to write some Twisted-using software to implement the protocol, and write some code to get RSS feeds and display some news! I considered using LCDProc (which I've used on my Dave/Dina box), but it looks like that's mostly geared towards small LCD displays with multiple lines and characters, and some control buttons.

I need to figure out how I am going to prioritize incoming information (RSS feeds, buildbot status, nagios alerts, incoming mail, ...) and create a message queue out of those spread across the 26 pages the marquee offers. If you know any software doing this sort of thing, feel free to comment!

When we moved into the new apartment, one of the things I definitely wanted to maintain the nerd quotient in the place was a scrolling LED marquee in the kitchen...

Was forced to pick up a new skill today - driving through pouring rain with non-functional wipers. I had to drive for 2 hours like that. I got out of the car all cross-eyed and with a hint of headache.

The trick is to focus on the tail lights of other cars and the white lines, and keep your distance. And, possibly counterintuitively, driving faster or getting take over by big trucks splashing water all around actually helps in this situation.

Was forced to pick up a new skill today - driving through pouring rain with non-functional wipers. I had to drive for 2 hours like that. I got out of...

What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?
There isn't one.
Oh. I thought maybe there was.
No. There isn't

The good thing about discovering a comic 20+ years after it was first written is that you can gorge on the back catalogue.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman at times reads like poetry.

What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long...

There's a guy in Barcelona who runs an antique store. Well, maybe it's not an antique store, because it doesn't like like stuff my mom would actually buy. And I'm not even sure if he's selling.

But he cooks for anyone who comes in, whatever is available, and turns it into honest and magical meals. He's probably Barcelona's best kept secret - he's not in any guide (which is a good thing), and I doubt he even has a license to do what he does.

He gives you whatever he has, and what he has is always excellent quality. He probably goes by the farmers and vineyards himself to select his products. No is not a word he accepts, and there's no way you can eat everything he gives you.

I'm always a bit worried when I bring people there because it takes some time to get there, it's always difficult to organize it, and you just never know how people will react, or how Angel will react if he happens to be in a less sociable mood and gets asked to cook something non-meaty for example. But I've just never been disappointed, so I don't know why I worry.

Today we went there to kick off our developer meeting now that everyone's back from holidays and Julien, a new guy, just started. We got chorizo, manchego cheese, beans, a huge tortilla, a special Cabrales cheese which was very strong but good, bread, and duck pate. And those were just the starters, I had to explain to my surprised collagues. After that, we got blood sausage, cutlets, and hake. All of this with some wine, and desert and coffee at the end.

And when you get up and leave, you ask him for the price, and he makes one up on the spot for the whole group. Rumour has it it's cheaper if you're a girl and can part with some pecks on the cheek.

If you ever get to Barcelona, drop me a line for the address. And let me know if you write for a tour guide or travel magazine, so I can give you the wrong information. I don't ever want to see it get ruined.

There's a guy in Barcelona who runs an antique store. Well, maybe it's not an antique store, because it doesn't like like stuff my mom would actually buy. And I'm...