David Coveney

Archives

All the posts below have been tagged with Asides.

28 December, 2023

The productivity paradox

I came across this chart recently and it gave me pause for thought as someone whose life work is designed to improve productivity. It shows that from 2008, although we know technologies have been growing in power, productivity growth suddenly dropped away from the trendline following the global financial crisis. Why? This is where I […]

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16 November, 2023

Off-Cloud Backup for Heroku apps – a possible answer

The Heroku platform is an absolutely fantastic way to have to not bother with devops within a small development company. We’ve been using it at interconnect for years now, and whilst it’s not entirely perfect, it takes away one set of headaches and does so at a reasonable cost. All the services offer backups, and […]

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15 February, 2022

Interesting times in the world of software

About a decade ago, I was at a conference and talking to a fellow developer (I still call myself one, even though I don’t code so much these days) when he giddily told me about the funding he’d got for building a new piece of software he was hoping would make it big. It was […]

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11 March, 2014

Bono’s office, some time in 2014

Hi guys, I suspect you know why I’ve called you in here for this meeting. Adam, Larry, uhm… hat guy… you know that costs have been rising and, what with piracy and everything we just don’t get the receipts we used to. Obviously that means we have to find some savings and, after looking through […]

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5 June, 2013

Liverpool Central Library

So, Liverpool Central Library has had a revamp. The reading room was always ace, but had been closed for ages and I’d not been able to show it to friends. It’s now all been lovingly restored, and the ‘modern’ bit done in a much more interesting manner with wonderful natural light. It’s great to see […]

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2 April, 2013

Twitter is about to die. Here’s why.

Something odd has started to happen on Twitter for me, and it’s cutting my usage of it down quite dramatically. Why? It’s because it seems the spammers are winning… @majorie6474 @davecoveney haha you bite so easy Toye :P Actually my mac is arriving tomorrow :P — Nick Hanson (@nrhansonp) April 2, 2013 @prestonrupemo @davecoveney haha […]

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5 October, 2012

What It’s Like to Dine Out When You’re Veggie

Imagine, you arrive at the restaurant. It’s slick, it’s luscious. Wonderful smells assault your nose. You’re hungry. Very hungry. This is going to be great! So, you sit down, the waiter comes over.  Oddly, he doesn’t hand you a menu.  Instead, he decides to tell you what you can eat. “Tonight, for starters, you can […]

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18 July, 2012

It’s OK, Coming Second Isn’t So Bad

One of the lessons I’ve learned, from motorsport and life in general, is that coming second is actually OK. You’re brought up in school to believe that winning is important. Anything else is being a loser. Well, they’re wrong. The minute you learn to accept that you win by being the best that you can […]

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3 February, 2012

Bye Bye Skoda

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 […]

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3 November, 2011

Do You Need an SLR?

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 […]

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10 July, 2011

Blog “Reboot”

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, […]

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24 May, 2011

Thinking Digital University (2011)

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 […]

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17 May, 2011

Homage to Beatrice Warde or a bad idea?

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 […]

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12 March, 2011

Freedom of Information is Abused

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 […]

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22 September, 2010

New Spectacu.la Discussion Updates

My colleague James has been extending the threaded comments plugin that I use(d)* 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 […]

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21 September, 2010

Headshots

The new company website will be launched shortly, and today we were taking new headshots of most of the team (James won’t play, meh) for the site. I think I like this one best:

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7 January, 2010

Rainy Days in Liverpool

A wee picture from Liverpool.

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18 December, 2009

Liverpool Skyline

This is the view from our new office in Liverpool, right now.  Well, a few minutes ago. I consider myself very lucky to have this just behind my desk and it has to rate as the best view of any office I’ve worked in.  You’d think the office would be very expensive, but it’s not, […]

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31 August, 2009

Argh! Spiders!

To my great shame, I’ve allowed the cobwebs to build up somewhat during renovation work. That’s going to have to stop, because today I just saw something scary.  An entire spider family, with big mummy spider sitting in the middle.  O_0

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14 August, 2009

Old Reel to Reel Tapes

Found these in the garage and have popped them on eBay. Love the old style designs – so simple by today’s standards. Easy to reproduce too. Also realised just how many bands from this era were called “The” something or other. How things change…

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29 July, 2009

Photoblog is No More!

Sometimes… you just have to tidy up, and finally I got around to dumping the old photoblog section of the site and integrating it in here.

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20 July, 2009

What it’s Like to Present and Attend at WordCamp UK

Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.

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