David Coveney » Asides

Bye Bye Skoda

David Coveney — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:01:33 +0000

It’s always sad when you decide to get rid of a car that you’ve enjoyed owning. Not because it’s no good, but because your needs have changed. And the biggest problem was that we’re now parents to one growing toddler and another relatively new baby.

Which nearly did my back in. Both the Skoda and the Audi are relatively low cars, and as I have a weak back as it is, this proved too much and I recently found myself barely able to move for a weekend. Not good. I decided it was time to find a taller car.

So, with a heavy heart, I’m selling my 77,000 mile late 2004 Skoda Octavia vRS. As you might expect from me, it’s been well looked after, has a full service history and no expense has been spared in its maintenance. It’s a cracking car with great performance, handling and pretty good refinement.

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. If you’re interested, drop me a line in the comments below. I’ll be adding a contact number on here shortly once the Telesafe number’s come through.

Price? Just £3100 – a lot of car for little money. I’ll be sad to see it go.

2011′s Nearly Over

David Coveney — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:29:16 +0000

So I thought I’d do a Wordle to see what figured highly on this blog.

It’s probably no surprise that the two dominant words here are Conrad and Kolya! No bad thing – they’re my two amazing, wonderful kids. It’s been quite a tough year in terms of time and effort. Business continues as it should, and it’s almost certainly been the company’s best calendar year so far, with 2012 looking even more promising. But there’s not doubt that right now I’m feeling pretty tired – the holiday season couldn’t have come any sooner for me, and in-laws will find themselves well used!

Whilst fiddling with Wordle above, my colleague Rob came up and mentioned We Feel Fine. So I asked it for feelings in the UK of people aged 40-49 this month. I was a bit surprised by the existential emptiness of the result. Stark dude, stark.

Do You Need an SLR?

David Coveney — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:50:11 +0000

OK, I’ve always said that you don’t need a fancy camera to take good pictures. All that a good camera does is add flexibility and choice, but so long as there’s a decent amount of light (and even then, not necessarily that much) a compact or a smartphone camera could well be adequate.

This lunchtime I went for a walk but was dismayed to find my trusty Lumix LX3 wasn’t in my backpack. I decided I should still try and take pictures, however. The light was flat, the weather uninspiring, but let’s try with the smartphone camera and see what comes up.

I’m going to have a go at doing this as a regular feature. Just to challenge my abilities with composition and creativity.

I will admit to one thing, however – I’ve post-processed. I usually post pictures up as they came out of the camera, but sometimes you need to tweak at least a little – and smartphone cameras are pretty limited in their controls for contrast and colour.

Las Palmas – Drunken Toddler

David Coveney — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 20:01:02 +0000

Ever thought that toddlers act like drunk small people?

The way the embed works is a bit rubbish, sorry, but the film’s worth it :-)

Into the Sea!

David Coveney — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:20:58 +0000

Last month we enjoyed a number of visitors. One family to come were Adrian and Ania, Igor and Mikolaj – this is great for Conrad as he loves other children, with Igor being four years and Mikoaj nine months old.

In fact, it’s hard to describe the delight from Conrad when he’s got a four year old to play with. At times he’s clinging onto the legs of other children and not letting them move anywhere, which may come across as a bit needy. I hope he grows out of it before he’s 18.

We all went together to the Blue Planet aquarium. This was Conrad’s first time in such a place, and it was great to discover that young children go free. And he loved the colours. I suspect he was a bit bemused by a lot of it, however, but he did appear to have a great time.

The beach we went to was Crosby beach where Anthony Gormley’s Another Place is installed. This is one hundred statues in the image of the artist. It is, in essence, a statement on the massive ego of some artists but, as the tide corrodes the iron statues, probably reflects on its fragility too. That’s my arty bollocks approach to it anyway.

Pics, then…

Blog “Reboot”

David Coveney — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 20:10:32 +0000

Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients

But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme. I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.

Why?

Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters. The typography is pretty good. The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.

But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme. Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years. It’s just not our business. So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme. And, well, why would we want to do that?

Lots of reasons, actually. I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do. But the problem with that is that there’s not much need. My blog is not an important one. It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.

I run a business. Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit. Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good. A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.

Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?” And decided to go shopping for something.

So What’s It Like?

It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme. I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.

Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.

No really, they don’t. One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible. This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.

Migrating WP content really sucks.

There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import. If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links. And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost. Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.

So what do you do? Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue. I have my tools. But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images. Every post with an image in it. That’ll take a while.

If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time. Way too much time. This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.

Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud

The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud. Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on. Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up. But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.

Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on. And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins. The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it. I felt it was getting sluggish.

So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better. Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.

Is it a lot to ask? Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!

Thinking Digital University (2011)

David Coveney — Tue, 24 May 2011 22:54:54 +0000

3D Processing

So, here I am again at Thinking Digital. Only this time I’m no longer driving the seemingly doomed Golf TDI I had last year that did one of it’s self destruction tricks en-route. Consequently I’m not missing out on the workshops here.

In fact, I’m doing better than that – an additional workshop was added for the Monday by Jer Thorp of Wired fame. A workshop on Processing. That, I must say, was a wonderful find. Processing, in case you’ve never heard of it, is a data visualisation tool or sketchbook. It’s a bit old-school, but this is a good thing, generally, because this has the advantage of being relatively accessible. In fact it reminded me of the fun early days of BASIC on small computers.

Simply put, you can easily draw things, and you can analyse data with it. Some was stuff I could do on a Dragon 32 nearly thirty years ago, but with many thousands of times the power – and that means you can do cool stuff in real time. I recommend you look up some of the online Processing materials. You can even try it out without installing anything by using my colleague Robert O’Rourke‘s website, hascanvas.com

During Nancy Duarte's Workshop

That Resonates With Me!

Then on day two it was a half day ‘off’ which, for me, meant a series of telephone calls with clients while I ensure that work continues as it should. The afternoon, however, brought along Nancy Duarte‘s “That Resonates With Me!” workshop.

Funnily enough, her resonate analogy was the one bit that didn’t work for me. She used the peculiar patterns of salt as it’s vibrated on a plate as a way of showing how different people can resonate with your message in different ways. It’s interesting, but I feel that people don’t work that way. People can, however, be like salt – you know, small, hard, square and bad for your health. So perhaps she had a point.

BUT – I’m picking. Because truth be told it was a fascinating workshop that helped me to see through the clutter of my presentations and to find ways to understand my audience and find ways to connect with them. The simple exercise she gave will help me improve my presentations – of that I’m sure. I just have to make sure I put them into practice.

The Rest

The rest of the conference is more classically organised, with the usual talks, networking and information overload. In the evenings there’ll be the usual entertainment. Already I’ve been better at avoiding alcohol than last year – I’m remarkably sober tonight. This is a Good Thing.

Highlights, I suspect, will be Jer’s talk (always visually amazing – check out his Vimeo feed) but the rest I’ll have to report on later.

Homage to Beatrice Warde or a bad idea?

David Coveney — Tue, 17 May 2011 10:22:56 +0000

I recently saw in the book “Just My Type” by Simon Garfield a poster by Beatrice Warde, the famous American born typographer who spent much of her career in the UK*. There seem to be many variations of typesetting for the poster, so I’ve no idea if she designed one herself or if it was simply something that printers liked to produce.

But I quite liked the idea of a strong message to visitors of a print shop that what went on there was important. So why not the same for an office of web developers and designers? What we do carries great potential, it is world changing, and we facilitate amazing things. Why shouldn’t we as an industry have something similar to help trumpet our cause? And where better to start than a classic set of words by an eminent typographer?

I’ve set this in Gill Sans Std rather than Albertus of the original I saw, but perhaps there’s a better typeface?

I’m not happy with this quick draft just yet, but wanted to put the idea out to see if it would fly. Comments please!

With a hat-tip to Beatrice Warde

* Enough, in fact, that I believed she was British until the helpful comment below informed me otherwise.

Freedom of Information is Abused

David Coveney — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 23:00:39 +0000

In 2000 in the UK, the Freedom of Information Act gave us all the ‘right to know’ what our public bodies were up to. We can ask for information about a huge range of items, and it’s a great idea. Information should, in my view, be as open and transparent as possible.

But there’s a problem.

It’s become easier and easier to make FOI requests, for example using sites like the excellent http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

I like this. I like efficiency. I like speedy, easy to use systems.

But what I don’t particularly like are some people.

Let me explain. People, in general, tend to be quite nice, harmless, and socially aware. But a significant proportion, perhaps 20%, are best described as spoiled, selfish, mean… you know what I mean. And that’s an awful lot of people. In our population of 60 million or so that means there are 12 million not especially nice folk around. A smaller proportion, perhaps a million, will be genuinely unpleasant*.

So, what happens when a large number of people can easily make requests to the FOI that are, to all intents and purposes, selfish?

This is what happens, each set from just one user:

838 Requests about diesel misfuelling: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/nick_panchaud_2
1168 Requests about empty commercial properties: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/natalie_davis
586 Requests about procurement of contractors: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/keith_griffiths

In each case the requests pertained to commercial information. The diesel misfuelling question is by Nick Panchaud, who a quick bit of googling for the term “Nick Panchaud diesel” reveals him to be commenting around the place promoting the Diesel Key, a device to prevent petrol hoses being inserted into diesel vehicles.

Natalie Davis and Keith Griffiths are harder to track down conclusively due to their more common names, but the requests they make would only really be of interest to commercial organisations, so I’m rolling with it.

What’s happening is that at least some people are making multiple FOI requests for commercial gain. Yet there’s a massive cost behind all this. I decided to do a little bit of FOI requesting myself. My question? How much did Nick Panchaud’s requests cost you to service?

I only asked three public bodies (let’s not build up the costs here!) and two responded ( http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/david_coveney ) giving costs of £87.63 and £50. Not much of a sample size, but let’s roll with it – it may be representative. Given that, you can see that to fulfil Mr Panchaud’s research it has cost public bodies as much as £41,900. Money that has come out of tax payer’s pockets.

If we assume similar costs for those other requests I’ve listed above (it may be quite a bit more: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2010/11/12143737) , we’re looking at potentially another £87,700. So three people with commercial interests have sucked over £100k from our economy.

A Possible Solution

FOI requests are costing the country millions. People like our Nick Panchaud above are not using the FOI system in the spirit in which it was meant to be used. Consequently they are costing us a fortune and we need to find a way, in these difficult times, to slash those costs.

I propose a change to the FOI system that makes all requesters pay a small fee. It doesn’t have to be a lot – perhaps £10 each. That would stop the scurrilous and wasteful requests, whilst still keeping the system open for those with a real purpose for the information they seek. Even commercial researchers. Obviously it should be reviewed in time – it may need to go up, or down, but usually people are economically quite selfish and they’ll consider more carefully the requirement.

I know this post is likely to disappear in the noise and won’t get much traction, but this has been bugging me for a while now and I had to say something!

* On the upside, there’s 600,000+ geniuses (depending how you measure it) floating around, so maybe they balance out. Then again, perhaps 20% of those geniuses are evil geniuses. In which case that’s 120,000 evil geniuses in the country. That’s a lot.

New Spectacu.la Discussion Updates

David Coveney — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:01:01 +0000

My colleague James has been extending the threaded comments plugin that I use on this site. It’s available from http://svn.wp-plugins.org/spectacula-threaded-comments/trunk for those of you with SVN clients, and for download and easy installation from WordPress.org and Spectacu.la within a few days.

If you wish to test it out, feel free to comment here…

It adds a quote button for content (try selecting some text here and see what happens!), an extending comment box, so if you like people to write long comments they’ll find it easier, and a quote button for comments. These features all enhance the WordPress commenting engine and make it easier for your community to engage with you.

A proper release after final testing and updates is due in a few days.