Rob Hague's Blog

So, November is over. And, fifty-thousand and some words later, I’ve managed to do it again. In the middle of Sunday afternoon, I wrote the last words of Homeopath, a somewhat odd tale of intrigue, rage, and maybe murder. But maybe not. In any case, it’s definitely written, and it’s definitely more than 50,000 words, and so I’ve won NaNoWriMo 2009. Go me.

This year, I’m not going to post the entire thing immediately. Instead, I’m going to have a break from it for a while, then revisit and edit it in a month or two. So, no novel in this post, I’m afraid. I can, however, tell you some thing’s I’ve learnt over the last month:

• Planning helps; I didn’t plan in any detail, and ended up wandering around for 25,000 words setting the scene before I got on with the plot.
• Writing in the first person gives me the urge to constantly point out that I don’t necessarily share the opinions of my protagonist. Make of that what you will.
• Emacs and MarkDown make for a pretty nice editing environment for prose. Isolator is also handy.

The main thing I’m intent on taking away from the experience, though, is getting back into the habit of actually doing something substantial - writing something, programming something, practising something - when I get home from work in the evening, as oppose to just collapsing in front of the TV. NaNoWriMo imposed a structure where this wasn’t an option. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep it up now that it’s finished.

Finally, two graphs (because graphs are traditional). This first graph shows my progress over the course of the month; basically, things went a bit pear-shaped early on, but I managed to make the time up over the subsequent weeks.

The second graph shows my daily writing rate; the red line marks 1,666 words per day, which is the average rate (more or less) than you need to keep up to make it to 50,000 within the month.

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree.

In 2002, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, an insane Internet pseudo-contest to write a novel in a month. I managed it, and you can see the results here (be gentle - it was written in a month, and I haven’t revisited it with an editor’s pen). For a few years, I paid it no mind, but this year I seem to be surrounded by people who’re taking up the challenge, so I’ve succumb to peer pressure and signed up again. Wish me luck.

P.S. - For anyone who has an nascent novelistic idea (or even a title), and have, say, mentioned it in the pub, then it’s not too late to sign up. You know who you are.

P.P.S. - Regarding the previous entry, the bad news is that I’ll not have a chance to work on SilverService for at least a month. The good news is that I’ve already solved the new entry problem, which was the most serious issue with the current version. If you have the OS X developer tools, you can grab the latest version from GitHub to get the fix.

Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X, was billed as “no new features”, but actually comes with a whole raft of minor improvements. One of these is improved handling of Services, a vastly under-rated feature inherited from NeXT. If you’re not up to speed on Services, or the improvements in Snow Leopard, this website has a good overview.

This is of particular interest to me, because it has ramifications for a piece of software I wrote a little while ago: SilverService. Specifically, I wondered if the ability to easily creates services in Automator renders SilverService obsolete. One of the areas in which I was thinking of extending the tool was the ability to create longer scripts, something which is definitely catered for well in Automator. However, the Automator approach is somewhat heavyweight, so I think there’s still value in a more focussed tool for one-liners.

With that in mind, I’ve dusted off the (now pretty ancient) source code, and got it compiling under the latest XCode. It basically works, but has at least one major interface bug (newly created services do not appear in the table until you restart the application), and one more minor problem that has been present since the start (the services only work when the application is running). I plan to look into these over the next few weeks, with the aim of producing an updated version with bug fixes but no new features. I’ve also created a SilverService repository on GitHub, if you want to have a hack yourself.

As ever, if you have any comments or suggestions about SilverService, I’d love to hear them, either via the comments below, e-mail or Twitter.

On Friday, I decided had a go at fixing the occasional dropped connections I’ve been seeing between Windows machines and my LinkSys WRT54GS (v5,1) router. As part of the process, I upgraded the firmware to what I assumed was the latest version. That was a mistake. After the upgrade, the router’s DHCP server would no longer dole out an IP address to Mac OS X or Linux clients, either wired or wirelessly (Windows XP clients seem unaffected).

It turns out that the solution is to get the latest latest firmware. The Cisco/LinkSys page offers version 1.50.9 of the firmware as the most recent version for most models; this version exhibits the problem. Instead, try version 1.52.2 available here:

LinkSys WRT54GS Firmware version 1.52.2

The solution is simple, but took me a while to find. Hopefully, this entry will save time for anyone experiencing similar problems.

Many, many people will charge you money to shill your product on Twitter and Facebook. Many people have written many things on why this doesn’t really work, and I won’t rehash those points here. A little while ago, I came across this post describing an example of how social media can help with product marketing - basically, if your product is good, and you don’t actively prevent people sharing information about it, your customers will market it for you. (It occurs to me that you could make the same argument about The Pirate Bay, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)

In any case, yesterday I encountered another way that social media and product marketing can be mixed effectively. The sequence of events went like this:

1) I see a link on Daring Fireball to a Capo, a Mac application for playing songs in various ways (slowly, looped, and so on) so that you learn them on the guitar.

2) I tweet that it looks interesting, but I don’t really have the musical ear to take advantage of it.

3) A little while later, the developer (SuperMegaUltraGroovy) replies, encouraging me to try and learn, and pointing me at a video that might help.

There are two important points here. Firstly, it wasn’t a generic mass-mailed press release, but rather a specific reply to my post. That differentiates it from spam. Secondly, it was clearly from SuperMegaUltraGroovy - they weren’t pretending to be a neutral observer or satisfied customer. That differentiates it from shilling.

The end result is that, from relatively little effort on the part of SuperMegaUltraGroovy, I’ve come away with a very positive impression of the company, and am seriously considering buying a $39 application that I previously only had a passing interest in.

So, it seems there are ways to use Twitter and Facebook to promote your company or products without pissing people off. It also seems like a way that indie developers can differentiate themselves from bigger companies - I can’t see the latter pulling this off without it seeming contrived. We’ll see if this becomes the accepted way of doing things, or if more irritating methods prevail. Given that nobody seems to have figured out a way to make the irritating methods work yet, there’s hope.

I’ve finally watched the first episode of The Wire, and I get the impression that might be every bit as good as everyone says it is. One thing that is beyond doubt, though, is that it doesn’t take prisoners in terms of depth or complexity. I don’t think that this is due to the accents or slang - I’ve read in various places that this is a barrier, but I didn’t have a problem - but rather that a very rich and intricate world is thrust upon you in one go. In introducing both a large number of characters and an unfamiliar setting with little preamble or explanation, it does ask a lot of the viewer. For me, at least, this infinitely preferable to being spoon-fed.

Given the BBC’s insane 5-episodes-a-week schedule, combined with the fact that Tori isn’t keen, I’m unlikely to be able to keep up with it for very long, but I’m going to give it a try.

The other day, I was reading a web page, and something strange happened. Without warning, a woman in a red uniform appeared, and started pushing things about. “This is it,” I thought, “I’ve cracked. The walls of reality are coming tumbling down.” However, it turned out that I wasn’t, in fact, going mad, but was instead experiencing something I’d been deprived of for quite a few years now; animated banner advertising.

The reason for this brief psychodrama was that I was trying out Google Chrome. My general impressions of it are almost universally positive, but I switched back to Firefox because of something I didn’t expect: lock-in, where the way a piece of software works makes it difficult or impossible to move to an alternative. Usually, lock-in is something associated with proprietary software and formats, MS Word being a typical example. Firefox and Chrome are both open source, and deal in the open standards that make up the web, so what’s going on?

This is a Mac SE that I acquired at a Computer Preservation Society give-away a few years back. The 20MB (yes, 20 Megabyte) hard drive is a bit temperamental, but after leaving it next to a radiator for a while I managed to get it to boot on the fifth or sixth attempt. The application shown is, of course, HyperCard.

In 2008, the Invisible Hand was caught in the Invisible Till, and markets around the globe crashed in one of those freak, once-in-a-million-centuries events that happens every four or five years. As such, it seemed like a good time to improve my woefully limited knowledge of finance, if only to learn what used to be in that big, smoking crater. To this end, I borrowed a couple of books written by prominent nay-sayers in the field.

When I first published the previous entry, I’d mistyped the quote in the title as “You Killed Anne L. Retentive With A Type?” I corrected this, but then an alternative script for the comic in question popped into my head. “Hang on,”, I thought, “hasn’t Dilbert just grown all sorts of groovy, funky Web 2.0 shenanigans that allow you do do those ‘mash up’ things the kids are talking about these days?” (Free tip: if you want to read Dilbert without all of the extraneous bells and whistles, try http://dilbert.com/fast/.)

It turns out that you can produce modified versions of comics, but only in fairly limited ways. However, I do still have the GIMP:

(Original strip at Dilbert.com)