Rules of the game

I wonder if I'll ever understand commuters' mentality. The insular disposition that people adopt on a tube train is reflected in their complete disregard for what anyone else is doing. I am — admittedly — a demanding person. But why do people fart-arse around so much when they catch the tube? Are they being deliberately obstroperous or does their idiotic selfishness come naturally?
Example: today at King's Cross only one ticket barrier was open on a particular exit; consequence, twenty-odd people in the queue. When it comes to my turn to go through someone barges me out of the way, only to find that he doesn't know how to insert his ticket properly and holds the entire queue up. Was he a wanker or just a plain knob?
Escalators carry a sign saying "stand on the right". It does not add "and take up as much room as possible making sure to elbow or handbag whoever passes you". Nor does it say "stand on the right and dawdle on the left". If you're trotting along really slowly, why force others to go around you? Do you drive at 50 mph in the middle lane on a motorway? Probably. And when you get to the end of the escalator, do you then decide to stand around blocking off anyone else trying to get off it?
On reaching the platform everyone seems to think that the least crowded carriage is the one that's closest to the platform entrance. No need to move along. Unless of course you see a particularly fascinating poster advertising online gambling, which causes you to hover in the centre of the platform forcing anyone who's got past the platform entrance brigade to tightrope walk along the platform edge.
Then try to board the train. Standing by the door is clearly the most comfortable place to be. Don't these dickheads realise that at every stop people will have to clamber over them? Are they just stood there for the cheap thrills, a crafty brush against a frazzled fellow passenger? Or must they stand by the door so that at all costs they're onto the platform first at their stop, to amble up the centre of the corridors and turn the left-hand side of the escalator to treacle once more?
It's all I can do sometimes to hold in all the abuse I want to hurl at these miserable idiots. At least this blog entry was cathartic.

Happy Geek, Sad Geek

Today's links demonstrate what makes geeks happy and what makes them look sad.
Happy Geeks.
Sad Geeks.

Europe Minor

As we watch Austrian politicians promote a case for Turkey joining the EU as second-class citizens in much the same way as some two million Turks currently live in Germany, knowing that Turkey will refuse, the question of what Europe is for raises its head again.
The UK, currently holding EU presidency, has always been in favour of European expansion for two reasons. Firstly because it extends the common market and consequently improves the potential for economic growth and secondly, because expansion is viewed as a means of dilution; it is harder to implement closer political and legal integration when more countries are involved.
Austria conversely has a more nostalgic view of the situation than the Brits. Turkey's entry is not a hindrance to future progress in convergence of the European ideal, but an affront to history: since when did Turkey form part of Europe? It was after all, Asia Minor.
To which I respond, since when did Austria care about such historic details? Should we base today's political decisions on disputes between Greeks and Trojans that elicit a sense of Euro-Asian conflict? If they hadn't kidnapped Helen would we let the Turks into the EU? If the Austrians are so concerned about what constituted Europe historically, then how come the Baltic states and Scandinavians are involved? Were these part of any Roman Empire that defined Europe for a number of centuries? No, but Turkey was... Or are we looking to a later Christian idea of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire? Britain and Ireland weren't in that one either...
You have to question why any of the member states joined Europe. The most recent additions, Rumsfeld's New Europe, were far more keen on ties to the dollar than to the Euro. If the Turks don't join the EU, they may form an economic bloc to the north east instead of north west: Russia and its satellites await. So maybe Europe isn't that important after all, which would be naive of the Europeans given the geographical signifance of a country that borders Iraq and Russia.
The reason for not admitting Turkey to the European club is clearly based on religion. What message does that send to Muslims, or for that matter Jews who have dealt with central European prejudice for so long?
I'm not advocating expansionism for its own sake, but xenophobia can't be the basis for deciding Europe.

Faith and flag

It's always useful to know what the other side thinks; and I mean that in its loosest possible sense. The Tories are engaging in two months of bickering and soul-searching to select the person who will lose to Gordon Brown at the next general election. The full débâcle of who is dropping out before the campaign starts in earnest is recorded in detail by the Conservative Home blog together with comments on how handsome the candidates all are. There's also a whole load of links; you'd never realise that there was so much Toryism out there, but that's the subversive nature of the internet for you.
And subversiveness is just what the Tories are out to crush, albeit in a way that enshrines freedom of capital. Not sure how you can square free marketerring with an opposition to rampant liberalism. I use the term advisedly, although that advise has come from the Cornerstone Group, headed up by Dubya-lovin' Edward Leigh.
Leigh and his ilk want to see a return to traditional values, to private enterprise and to tax cuts. They want to promote Christianity but cut back state education and the NHS. They'll cut taxes for the wealthy and give further tax relief if you can afford not to use the school and health systems that the wealthy will no longer be paying for. So you're a hell of a lot better off it you're, say, a barrister and member of the Inner Temple and the son of a knight... which Mr Leigh is.
There are sixteen MPs who advocate social irresponsibility under the pretence of taking the moral high ground. If one of them's yours, make sure you vote them out next time: Brian Binley, Peter Bone, Julian Brazier, Douglas Carswell, Bill Cash, Christopher Chope, Robert Goodwill, John Hayes, Edward Leigh, Ian Liddell-Grainger, Owen Paterson, Andrew Rosindell, Lee Scott, Andrew Selous, Desmond Swayne, and Angela Watkinson. Some notably intolerant names in there.

Blogs, liberty and happiness

As Walter Wolfgang has discovered, events on 7th July will be used to justify anti-terror action against anyone who might disagree with the government line. This legislation has already been applied to... people protesting against the legislation, of course. In the States meanwhile, the Federal Election Commission has taken a lead from China, Myanmar and Saudia Arabia among others in considering ways to restrict the political content of Blogs.
It's hard to comment about the loss of freedom of speech, but allow me a moment to say that the people who came up with these ideas are a bunch of ignorant mother-fuckers.

Please release me

I'm still staggeringly busy, trying to do my own job a few months into a new role, covering for a colleague who was beaten up and supporting colleagues who took over my erstwhile duties. This workload and other events beyond it have left little time to comment with any value on subjects I would otherwise have addressed.
But here I am blogging at a desk designed for someone six inches shorter than me at the Queen Elizabeth conference centre in Westminster, attending a software quality and systems conference. This event is no where as boring as it might appear; I'm scrawling in an interval not during a keynote. I've heard a number of interesting propositions and we're promised a giant Scalectrix set later...
But I digress.
Microsoft sent someone here direct from HQ, a team leader on the Visual Studio release whose presentation was well received by most, though by no means all. Should Hackneyed be rephrased Redmond?
This particular team leader revealed that Microsoft has one defect for every ten lines of code, but that 5% of known bugs remain before release. Given that just the test suite of Visual Studio will require a bare minimum of 10,000 lines of code, this means it will be sold with at least fifty bugs; imagine then how many there will be in Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP, or how many were released in the Microsoft Office suite.
The speaker's justification for this state of affairs was the pressure of time to market and that if you have millions of users they will always find a bug. This, I felt, was a complete cop out. I appreciate that they're a lot less complex, but I develop web sites. These too have millions of users, are developed in a scale of months rather than years, but no one charges hundreds of pounds to use them to get a message asking you if you want to report a problem. They just don't return to the site.
Microsoft runs a roughly equivalent number of testers to developers on each project – if only we could charge services at those rates – but there appears to be an assumption that everyone will want to contribute to the company's success. People beat down Redmond's door to work for or partner with one of the world's largest companies, but that doesn't mean they want to pay for a tool that does only part of what it should and will break down once people hack its flaws.
The customer defines quality. If this generic customer ever evolves its expectations then, as with Firefox, Microsoft will inevitably lose its market share, particularly to other products that have similar defects but are free and constantly updated. Why pay to inherit someone else's problem and test it for them? There's hope for open source yet.

More on professional services...

I've been somewhat remiss in my blog, not through lack of things to say but through lack of time. Consequently I will let someone else's image speak for me:

The art of consultancy

Confidence — I believe it's Epicurus who tells us — is the mean between rashness and cowardice. Consequently it is a prerequisite for those of us who work in the service industries, particularly consultancy.
You should be rash enough to think that even in your short visit to an organisation you can identify endemic issues in the way they work that no one there will have spotted, while wary of stating the bleedin' obvious. You should don your mettle and cast yourself headlong into office politics, careful of treadng on toes. You should be brazen about your subject knowledge, but timorous that any conception you have of best practice could be an appropriate solution.
Above all, be afraid that your client might discover you're a bullshitter and be brave when they do.

One out, all out

Apparently I wasn't at work on Monday. The nation's press has confirmed that the entire population was attached to a pub television set through some kind of metaphorical viscous process that kept us away from our desks to send house prices tumbling and fuel prices rocketing; or possibly the other way around.
The England team will soon be rewarded for their contribution to national counterproductivity. In addition to knighthoods and canonization they will be numismaticised: commemorated in currency for their sterling efforts. Michael Vaughan will appear on £50 notes, Andrew Flintoff on £20, Kevin Pietersen on tenners and so forth. Unfortunately there are only ten levels of demonination but Ian Bell has been promised that he'll be selected once we have the Euro.

Not drowning, but waving

I have been submerged recently in a torrid, sweltering overflow of work. I knew that my defensive lines had the potential to be breached, given that I had founded my job description not on rock but on marshland. Yet despite the perilous forecasts I fail to anticipate the predicatment that this sudden maelstrom of activity could plunge me into.
So I ended up stranded in Bloomsbury with no means to escape. I should have left before, when I had the chance. But now I watch the tide of work wash up all around me as I wait for someone to draw off all my other duties amid the chaos.
I must admit, however, that I don't want to be rescued from this. Amid the chaos that exists here, it has nevertheless become my home. I don't want to be pulled out at this stage to be dumped in I don't know what sort of environment just because someone else assumes the atmosphere here may be contagious. I stuck out the initial turmoil and I'm determined to see through the rest, despite the rankness and boredom punctuated by militant youths trying to take me for everything I've got.
Those of us working in this area have become used to the occasional storm of activity. They're pretty much seasonal we should be able to cover for them. This one was quite a bit bigger than I could have imagined, but I'm here in my ramshackle dwelling and I'm sure the work will drain away before too long.