David Coveney | Page 12 | A personal blog transitioning into an exploration of the intersection of design, technology and ethics

San Cristobal de las Casas to Pelenque

I’m never sure if it’s a great idea to save money on hotels by using overnight buses. It is, however, a very effective use of time. Just so long as you can get some sleep. The bus to San Cristobal was certainly as comfortable as was needed – we could only get seats on the UNO service, a first class service, with lounges (not wildly comfortable, but secure enough that you don’t have to watch your luggage too carefully) and extremely comfortable fully reclining seats. You can, basically, curl up and get a good night’s sleep.

San Cristobal itself is a pretty, colonial town, made up of low rise houses and, in the centre at least, a merciful lack of poorly assembled concrete. It’s one of the prettiest places in Mexico and well worth a visit.

From there we took a horse ride up to the village of Chamula, where a festival was in full swing. This mostly appeared to be made up of lots of men walking around wearing something resembling furry tank tops and wide brimmed cowboy hats. No pictures, sadly, as the locals here believe photographs steal their soul – which means asking and, often, paying a small fee. Yes, you can have a little bit of Mexican soul in your camera for just a pound or so. Bargain. However, not feeling comfortable with the responsibility of soul ownership I decided to not bother too much.

What you can’t photograph, for any amount of money, is the church. It’s not unknown for locals to become quite violent if you try. In a way it’s a shame because visually the interior proved to be one of the most beautiful of the whole trip. You pay twenty pesos (£1) for entry and as you pass through expecting JAC (Just Another Church) you find yourself faced with thousands of candles. On tables, in front of the altar and, most incredibly, all over the floor. Given that the floor is also covered in pine needles it’s probably a good idea to tread carefully, lest you accidentally knock a candle over and start a major inferno. There are no pews either – they’d probably just get in the way of the candles or, perhaps, simply add to the fire risk. Well worth a visit, but like I say – this is a place where tourists are tolerated and grudgingly accepted, as opposed to being seen as a good thing – so be sensitive if you go.

Unfortunately, the 1.5hr horse-ride back started in a fair amount of pain. The ride up had been pleasant, if somewhat exciting thanks to the rocks and steep hills you need to negotiate, but ultimately horse riding involves your backside getting a damn good pummelling. Mine isn’t well padded, and I suffered on the cheap, mostly wooden saddle my horse had. When we returned and climbed off we all staggered around a little, with crooked knees.

At this point it’s worth giving an honourable mention to Gosia – this was her first ever horse-ride. And these weren’t the skinny and slow meta-donkeys you find in many places. They would trot without too much encouragement and could even be encouraged into the odd gallop. She was terrified, and the only instructions she had were from me and along the lines of “pull left to go left, right for right, and both of them to stop.” Not exactly a comprehensive horsey education, but it seems it helped a little.

The next phase of the trip was taking a minibus with another of Fangio’s long lost loquacious relatives. He clearly believed that a tour had to be run as quickly as possible. This wasn’t actually a bad thing, once you dealt with the fear of imminent death – he got us to the breakfast stop and to the main sites before all the tourists arrived. One, however, had to be skipped. It seems that the locals had decided that they were fed up of tourists traipsing around and often spending very little money, so they’d decided to set up a road block and insist on a payment for the visit. The details, unfortunately, evaded us until we’d read their handout and by then the driver had set off in keen pursuit of Palenque.

Before Palenque we stopped at a water falls called Agua Azul which at first looked…well, not as impressive as the book sad. And it wasn’t so much Agua Azul as Agua Brown. Still, once we actually looked around we realised it was an impressive and complex series of waterfalls. And we saw our first hummingbird which is one of those birds that should be shown to depressives – they cheer everyone up. Rather like anybody beating Manchester United cheers up Scousers, I suppose.

I’ll blog separately about Palenque, and try to actually do some research first so it makes sense – it’s a historic and stunning site. One pic is included the following gallery:

Planes, Trains and Taxis to Mexico

It felt like we’d been travelling for 36hrs… and we had. Tired, dehydrated and crabby, reaching Oaxaca and actually getting a proper meal and a comfy bed was actually something of a highlight…

That was… looong. I mean, I know we’re technically travelling and so the journeys are part of the fun, but since leaving we’ve done Manchester>Atlanta>Mexico City>Puebla>Oaxaca. That’s 18hrs of travelling.

However, we only felt like we’d reached a comfy stop some 32hrs after leaving. We had a brief three hour stop in Atlanta, where we guzzled free gin and tonic and nibbles in the rather excellent lounge. That was the only bit of luxury for us, however. But those moments make membership of a suitable priviledge or frequently flyer scheme worthwhile. They give a nice break where you’re taking multiple flights. And Atlanta airport is surprisingly pleasant. On the inside at least. I’m sure that an architect would be dismayed at the lack of enormous concrete swoops and dramatic exterior, but the inside was well decorate with lots of artworks and almost no advertising.

The flight to Mexico City was as unremarkable as all flights should be. But we were late, and we wanted to leave immediately for Oaxaca where friends were waiting.

Give money or he'll continue to look mournful — Give money or he’ll continue to look mournful

However, with the next Oaxaca bus from the city being at 7am, we decided to try, instead, to take a bus to Puebla where we were assured there’d be a reasonable onward connection.

They were, of course, lying. Still, it meant a chance to stay in Puebla for the night, albeit during a holiday season where every single hotel was fully booked. Oops. Consequently we managed to find a hotel that was both grotty and expensive.

And now here we are in Oaxaca – a relatively touristic city. It’s popular with both Mexican and foreign tourists so food and accommodation can be a little expensive by Mexican standards, and quality doesn’t seem to be amazing. We’re now setting ourselves up to go and visit some old ruins. Mayan, I believe, but I’ll admit I’ve not being paying attention. I was simply happy to arrive somewhere and get thoroughly fed and watered, along with a comfy bed for the night.

In terms of hotels, we can heartily recommend the Posada Don Matias in Oaxaca. Clean, tastefully decorated and friendly. And free Wi-Fi if you have the kit with you. You can guess how I’m managing to blog this :-)

Tim Ferriss and why I don’t like his emotional blackmail

I appreciate, right away, that by writing about Tim Ferriss I’m going to give him the oxygen of publicity. And what follows may just be a small-minded rant. I don’t know – feel free to tell me if I’m wrong by commenting….

Four minute workweek would be too much for some... (picture of Vicky Pollard from Little Britain courtesy of the BBC)

If this is actually just a small-minded rant, feel free to tell me in the comments. I need to know if I’m just an idiot who hates somebody doing well and raising money for charity….

I appreciate, right away, that by writing about Tim Ferriss I’m going to give him the oxygen of publicity. That in discussing him we all encourage him to continue to use attention seeking devices to increase his influence and marketability.

And boy, does he know how to market.

Here’s a guy who’s written a book with an interesting concept. It’s titled The 4-Hour Workweek. Very interesting it may be. But I haven’t read it. Nor will I.

Because to read it would mean giving money to someone I find incredibly irritating. I mean, the guy gets everywhere. But he’s a fascinating study in popularity. Just like the most popular kids at your school probably weren’t the most capable or interesting, neither is he. Let’s go through some things:

1. Use of emotional blackmail to increase influence

Basically, the more people who follow your tweets on twitter, and the more people who follow your blog, the more influence you carry. Tell 100,000 people what you think about something, and you’ll influence them. Some will blindly take on-board your opinions, while others will be a little more cautious. But 100,000 people who treat you almost like a God? That’s power, that is.

Anyway, his latest way to build followers is to use a not-so-subtle form of emotional blackmail. He will raise for charity $3 for everyone who follows him on Twitter with a limit of 50,000. Now, you’d have to be pretty mean-spirited not to click that Follow button. That’s all you have to do to raise $3 dollars to help educate some US children. I mean, if you hear about this initiative and don’t click then you must be a truly horrible person. For five seconds work you can raise $3 dollars. That’s, like making $2160 an hour for charity! Wow!

I believe this guy is using the tricks religions use to gain followers. The upside of following their instructions may not be massive, but the downside could be huge. And he uses this approach All The Time. It’s horrible to see. See, in religion you can say things like “follow the guidelines in this book in order to receive eternal salvation” and “if you don’t follow us you could be cast into eternal damnation.” It’s like Pascal’s wager – if the religion is correct, then a small amount of investment of time and effort leads to a massive pay off (ie. eternity in heaven) but if you’re wrong and death is just death… well, you haven’t lost much, have you? Ratio of cost to potential gain is ridiculous.

2. Four hour workweeks don’t appeal to me

I mean, I enjoy my work. Simple as that.

3. But perhaps one of the things that turns me off is the overbearing air of smugness

Look at the guy’s header pictures. You can tell he isn’t English. You couldn’t go into an English pub and face your mates if you had a picture of yourself striking a sort of zen-style karate pose on your website’s header (carefully revealing your muscles, of course) unless perhaps all your friends were just like you.

4. In the end though, it’s the emotional trickery

The promises are high. The headlines beguiling. And you know, to someone working a dreary job or with difficult people what he discusses sound attractive. But a lot of it reminds me of me when I’d discovered I could make lots of money as a PeopleSoft developer. I really had it all – I could work moderately hard for short periods, taking plenty of breaks between contracts, travelling, fast cars, and sleeping with beautiful models. Ok, forget the bit about models, but really, life looked good.

And boy was I happy to let people know this. But when I thought about it, I got into corporate systems because at 18 I wanted to get a job coding and the only suitable job I could find around here was at a corporate. I trained up and, one day, took my skills out onto the open market. But the truth is, I was just lucky. How was I to know, in 1987, that ERP developers would be highly sought after in highly paid roles that the universities were failing to train for? I’d much rather have been a games developer – but truth be told, I wasn’t that good… Good for my wallet and lifestyle, because game coders typically earn less than ERP coders, but this was all pure chance.

In summary, Tim Ferriss is probably little further ahead of the curve than a lottery winner releasing a book called “How To Choose Lottery Numbers and Become Super-Rich Like Me.” That would be patent nonsense, but no more or less manipulative than his own lifestyle guruness.

So when this rich young man tries to pressure me into trying to find more people who can learn about him and adore him by tweeting about his new scheme, I find myself feeling ever so slightly sick. The idea sounds, initially, excellent. But why doesn’t he just give the money directly to charity? Why does he make it into conditional love? Why does he make it feel like a psycho girlfriend or boyfriend who says “if you loved me you’d do it.”

Maybe I’m Wrong

In a way I’d like to be. But I always want to look at the motives behind people. Maybe I’m just an idealist. But if I’m right, it might just dissuade people from posting some of the self-promoting junk that clutters up Twitter, forums and blogs. Not just his junk, but other people’s. There’s a growing tide of the stuff. It’s annoying.

Anyway, just a final call to action – you can follow me on twitter too if you like. I just won’t pay anybody anything. I also promise to try not to sell you anything, or retweet marketing gumph, competition announcements and so on. I may however, complain vehemently about whatever random irritation that cropped into my head that day.

Edited to add a link above to the Tim Ferriss’s blog post on the matter. And tags.

PHP Serialization Fix for WordPress Migrations (& other applications like Expression Engine)

Serialization of data loaded into an SQL table is a dreadful thing and makes WordPress migrations harder than they should be, but it happens and so we must deal with it. I’ve knocked up a rough and ready bit of code which does its best to resolve the problem.

When you move a WordPress blog from one folder to another, or from one site to another, you normally use the export/import functionality.

This is fine for normal blogs, but say you’ve developed a new website and set it up on your local machine – the URL for the site may be something like http://localhost/devsite and the live URL will be something like https://davidcoveney.com – you won’t want to set up all the theme options, site options, plugin options and so on all over again.

A different kind of migration - public domain from Wikipedia Commons — A different kind of migration – public domain from Wikipedia Commons

Instead, a theoretically simple approach is to do a database dump, a search and replace for all references to server paths and URLs, and then reimport that data in the new location.

Should work, but it often falls apart.

What happens is that in WordPress, its themes and its plugins, a lot of data is stored using a method known as serialization. Now, in my opinion this breaks all known good practice around data – it’s language specific, it’s not relational even though it often could be, and it’s hard to edit by hand.

One particular problem is that if you change the length of the data in a serialised string you have to change the length declared in the generated string.

That’s very painful when you have hundreds of the fields.

So, because I’d found this painful I decided to knock together a quick application to at least reduce the amount of editing I had to do. You just do your search and replace, forget about the serialized string lengths, upload your data to the new database, and run this script.

Warning: I haven’t got it to work for widgets and cForms II yet, but the latter has some export functionality anyway, which takes that particular pain away if you plan ahead. In the meantime, feel free to play with the attached file. You use it at your own risk, of course.

To use it, download the file linked in this post, extract it, open the file, edit the connection settings, tell it the table you want to scan through, the column, and the unique key field. If you somehow manage to have more than one unique key to deal with (you shouldn’t, but then it surprises me what people manage to code up), then you’ll have to modify the code accordingly. Once done, make sure you have a backup of that table, and execute the php – either at the command line or through the browser. License is WTFPL, and if you’d like to improve the code, please do and I’ll host the new version.

download file

Serialization-fixer.zip download

BIG WARNING: I take no responsibility for what this code does to your data. Use it at your own risk. Test it. Be careful. OK? Here in the North we might describe the code as being as “Rough as a badger’s arse.” Never felt a badger’s arse, but I’ll take their word for it.

Wordcamp UK 2009 to be in Cardiff

If you’re following the various WordCamp lists, you’ll already know about this event. But many won’t.

If you use WordPress professionally, or with a great deal of enthusiasm, WordCamps are a great way to meet with other users, developers and designers who really understand the system. There are useful presentations, social events and activities based around the event.

I was there last year at the Birmingham WordCamp, with James, and our company Interconnect IT was one of the sponsors. This year we’re waiting to see how finances work out before throwing in sponsorship money, but I’ll definitely be there again and I’m likely to be presenting on the issues surrounding bringing WordPress to the enterprise space. Because corporates love WordPress too…

This year’s event will take place on the 18th to the 19th of July at the Future Inn Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales.

For more information, you can visit the official WordCamp UK Site.

Cerrie Burnell – and unthinking parents

Cerrie Burnell – a pretty children’s TV presenter who, it seems, has managed to upset some parents by only having one arm. Er… what?!

I keep thinking that I should cancel my Campaign for Actually Thinking*.

After all, nobody really cares what I say. I’m just some guy, running a small web business. I code a little (a very little these days) and I talk to people. I carry little influence. So it’s hard to motivate myself in the face of rampant stupidity, but this one really got me:

The sad story of parents objecting to a disabled TV presenter.

Cerrie Burnell accused of scaring children by bigoted parents.

Cerribe Burnell. Look, she's lovely, OK? — Cerrie Burnell. Look, she’s lovely, OK? (pic lifted from a BBC site, hope they don’t mind…)

I’ve no idea if Ms Burnell is a great kids presenter or not, but chances are she can’t be bad if she’s got the job with CBeebies. But that’s not the point. And so what if her dodgy arm scares some kids – I’ve had one kid in tears at me because I had dark hair. Little children can be scared of practically anything. I used to be scared of the space under my bed. Terrifying, it was. To be honest, far less scary than an attractive blonde girl could ever be.

So, to the parents, bigots and dolts who complained about her… please, do us all a favour and go away and keep your opinions to your fellow BNP members. Either that or try thinking for a change, but I suspect that’s not likely.

*name changes according to my mood.

Wordcamp UK 2009 to Liverpool?

pdf

Well, we’re going to try! WordCamp is a small, informal conference all about WordPress and its people.

Wordcamp UK 2008 was held in Birmingham last year. The current list of nominated venues are in Liverpool, Cardiff and London. Read the pdf attached below, and see what you think. Feedback would be great, but if you really want the WordCamp to take place in Liverpool on the 18th and 19th of July you’ll need to pipe up on the official mailing lists. More info at Tony Scott’s blog.

St. George's Hall, Liverpool - not the likely venue. Pic by Me.

Microsoft OneNote

At the risk of sounding like an MS Fanboi, I thought I’d bring up Microsoft Office OneNote. I’ve been using this package for general note-taking for some time now, and I’m finding it to be an incredibly useful piece of software.

Thing is – it’s quite hard to explain. It’s a freeform note taking application, but with a number of tricks up its sleeve. It allows for very easy video and sound recording, pen use if you have a tablet PC or a graphics tablet handy, and a neat screen capture tool. Throw in handwriting and image text recognition and you have a pretty potent utility.

And… AND… You can even post notes direct to your blog. In fact, here’s a screenshot of what I’m doing right now – and I’m going to try posting this to my blog to see what happens:

Screen clipping taken: 26/01/2009, 20:26

I can see this as being especially handy for certain collaborative tasks.

Total cost? Well it depends, it comes bundled with a lot of versions of Office, but if you don’t have it you can get it from Amazon and the likes. I’ve seen it on offer for £6 for certain academic licences but for most people it’s going to cost between £36 and £72, give or take a bit.

I feel strangely apologetic for bigging up some Microsoft Software – funny how that’s happened, they clearly have some failings to address with regards to how people feel about them. I do feel they’re improving on this now, and I have to remember that if it wasn’t for MS I doubt I’d have got into coding as it was their excellent yet affordable BASIC that got me started in 1982. And yes, I am that old!

It’s worth noting that in posting this it does do some things slightly strangely – I’m not sure why it adds a one point margin to the left of each<p> tag, for example, but otherwise all seems well. I’m guessing the margin could break some themes – not ours though ;o)

10 Things That Will Make No Difference Whatsoever To Your Blog’s Success

Blah blah blah fascinating introduction blah blah read this blah blah simple list, should only take a few minutes blah blah oh come ON you swines… just click on the link, OK?!

Success is getting something like this - courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I’m getting tired of lists that make out that ten simple things will make your blog/company/online business/facebook profile a massive success.

What I’m going to post is no doubt contradictory, possibly inflammatory, and may well annoy some people who follow me. But let’s give it a whirl – with the tip, followed by why it won’t make a difference:

1. Blog Daily

Why? After all, if your ramblings are tedious, doing it five times as often won’t necessarily bring you five times the traffic. 90% of the daily traffic on this blog goes to just three posts and two are nearly two years old. And one of Interconnect IT’s clients has a blog that gets, typically, 20x-30x my daily traffic yet he updates his site just once a month. The site? Sniff Petrol, if you were wondering.

2. Create quality content.

Nope, didn’t work for Ebaum. All he did was find stuff other people had created and make it easy to find. Oh, and he slapped his logo over everything to make sure he got brand awareness. He’s not a top ten site, but he doesn’t care… he’s rich.

3. Run affiliate adverts.

Just makes your site look cheap. Doesn’t stop me trying it out every now and again, but I’m a hypocrite.

4. Blog about breaking news.

Pfft – if it’s big and important most of the world are going to BBC News or similar. They’ll only go to your site if you were there, took some amazing photos or video, or added some amazing commentary. And even then, the clickthroughs on adverts will probably add up to about $20 of revenue.

5. Keep your blog specialised.

I don’t. I blog about whatever hits my mind at the time, and I’m doing just fi… oh hang on no, my traffic sucks. Maybe you should do that one.

6. Use social networking.

It makes relatively little difference to the majority of the world – really, it’s a fraction of internet users who use StumbleUpon or Twitter or Digg. The best you can do is seed. People get pretty tired of seeing linkbait on social networks and it’ll lose you friends in the long run.

7. Create something of value.

Some content can be incredibly valuable. It can give superb advice and be incredibly informative. However, it won’t bring anybody to your site if they don’t know about it.

8. Use lists.

Lists always suggest an easy-to-read article that can be easily read during a tea-break or while the boss goes to the toilet… but although they bring easy traffic, they very rarely turn visitors into repeat visitors. Most will turn up, read the list, and leave. They won’t be back. Their value is almost inevitably zero.

9. Keep them wanting more.

Actually, this one will make a difference. Peep Show’s next series is being eagerly awaited by everyone because the six episodes they do each season just aren’t enough. In the online world that’d generate a lot of flack… but they don’t hear that, because the recipe is correct. So to that purpose, there’s no number 10 in this list.

Look, blog to make money, to entertain yourself, show off, get better jobs or to entertain your friends. It doesn’t really matter so long as it makes you happy. Traffic doesn’t matter either, and it certainly won’t make you happy when you discover that 1,000,000 have visited and not spent a penny on your Adsense links.

Ultimately, that one visitor a year who decides to pay for you to come advise his company for £1m is way more interesting than a million visitors who’ll pay you nothing. Sniff Petrol has won its owner plenty of business without a single affiliate link or piece of Adsense. The only important thing is that your blog is good for the people to whom it would be important and who are also important to you. If my blog was a huge hit with Uzbekistanese nose-flute players then it’d not make any difference to me in any way because if it does exist, then I probably hate their music.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that some big changes are being lined up for me, Interconnect IT and Spectacu.la – watch this space!

New Year’s Resolutions for Greater Productivity

I don’t talk much about business on this blog, but I’ve decided to share what I’m doing to increase my productivity at work. So far these changes are making a great deal of difference.

I don’t talk much about business on this blog, but I’ve decided to share what I’m doing to increase my productivity at work. So far these changes are making a great deal of difference.

Dump timewasters like the StumbleUpon or Digg toolbars from Firefox for any work related PC. I love it, but it’s there for entertainment. This is my work PC and I can’t afford the easy distraction.
Use Twitter more. I know it sounds like a potential distraction, but by being selective about who I follow I find it adds to my community connection – and that can make me more productive, rather than less. Don’t be offended if I don’t follow you back – it’s just that what you’re twittering about isn’t connected to what I do, even if it’s very interesting.
Declutter my online life. That means unsubscribing from mail-lists that I’m not really that interested in, and filtering the rest for reading when I’m not busy.
Declutter business. All companies have to deal with them – the small clients that constantly ask you lots of niggling questions which never actually lead to a sale or any real income. Work out a way of politely dumping them. You could consider referring them on to someone who’s just starting up and who needs the small clients.
Implement proper time-tracking. Use a simple grid sheet where you can quickly mark units of time against clients and jobs. That way you can establish where you’re wasting time and money.
Turn off IM except for a short period each day – especially if you have chatty friends.
Use larger monitors. I now use a 24″ screen at the office and a smaller 22″ at the home office. Both are dramatically more productive than smaller screens. And they’re not even especially expensive these days.
Use your laptop like a desktop computer. By that, I mean get to your desk and connect it a full size monitor (see point 7!), keyboard and mouse. Use the laptop screen as a secondary screen if you like, but that’s all. I don’t care what anybody says, but a laptop alone is always less productive unless you’re single-tasking most of the time – and in today’s connected world that’s rare.
Learn to use Outlook. There’s a lot of great productivity features in there. Outlook 2007 is especially neat and brings the game on. Office for the Home or for Small Businesses is pretty cheap these days and well worth it.
Actually, learn to use MS Office properly. It’s got some amazing tricks available to you. Excel can gather data from websites and keep it refreshed, so you can use it in your spreadsheets. Access can make up the basics of a decent CRM system in no time at all. And if you get a decent MS Word template your documents can be clearly structured and indexed in no time at all. In fact, if you join at Spectacu.la their WordPress User Guide has all the styles in it that you could ever need for a comprehensive document.

That’s enough for now, but needless to say that a little investment can reap incredible benefits to your work life. Yes, you’ll need to devote a little time and/or money, but if you gain more of both within a short while then everyone’s happy, no?