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Who am I?

Hi, I’m Graeme and these are my notes, from my messy desk. I started this blog because Google proved to be more useful at finding content than anything else I’ve used.

So I started adding my own content in the hopes that Google would index it and allow me to find things again in the future.

It works.

You can find out more about me here, and you should follow me on Twitter here.

Keeping up

You can automatically receive new content here by subscribing to the “Blog RSS” (link below). This is the easiest way to keep up with what I write here.  See this BBC article for a good introduction on RSS and keeping up with the goings on of the Internet more easily.

Monday
08Mar2010

My Ewgeco

DateMonday, March 8, 2010 at 10:16AM

Ewgeco E200(Disclaimer: I’m biased; Rubaidh built the My Ewgeco web app, and that’s how I got my hands on a test unit in the first place.)

We’ve had a test Ewgeco unit kicking around the office for a while now, and since we’ve moved out the office, it’s been lying in a box with all the other equipment. Over the weekend, I rescued it from storage and hooked it up in the house. And it’s been a huge success.

Ewgeco is an energy monitor that shows a real-time display of your electricity, water and gas usage, also recording the information for later analysis. The idea is to show a very simple bar graph user interface with a traffic light system: green means your consumption is low, red means it’s much higher than your average. The device calibrates itself to your usage over time to make the traffic lights really mean something (though this takes about a week, so we haven’t experienced that yet).

You can retrieve the data from the device and upload it to a web app (which, as I say, we built, so take my gushing praise with that in mind!) where you can spot patterns in usage and feed that information back to actively reduce your energy bills. I haven’t tried out the web app since we installed the unit at home – I’ve only got ~2 days of data now – but I’m really looking forward to giving it a shot from the perspective of the consumer. I’m sure it’ll be awesome. :-)

It’s dead simple to install the device to measure electricity. You simply wrap a “current clamp” around the mains cable feeding your electricity meter. Done. That’s the only one we have installed just now as the gas and water meter installations are a little more involved (though I’m really hoping to at least start measuring gas usage soon). A wizard on the device takes you through connecting to the (wireless) current clamp to retrieve the data, and set your tariffs so you can accurately measure costs.

The real beauty of the Ewgeco device, though, is in the instant feedback. Until now, I’ve received feedback on our energy usage at most once a month and, more usually once a quarter, when we get a meter reading followed by a bill. Now, it’s instant. Switch on the kettle, and you see the electricity graph jump into the red, the number increasing by 3KW. It’s already demonstrated that, for example, that it’s cheaper to make a cup of coffee (with our coffee maker) than it is to make a cup of tea, even just boiling the right amount of water.

The fun bit is going to be walking around the house with the unit (which is wireless, so you can pick it up and wander around quite happily) and seeing what contributes to the “background” electricity usage in our house. When the house was quiet, I was noticing about 0.5KW background usage. I’d like to see how we can change our behaviour patterns to lower that (though I suspect it’s largely down to the fridge, fish tank and a Sun X4100 M2 now sitting in the attic!).

I’ve been working with Ewgeco for well over a year now, but it hasn’t been until I installed the unit in our house that I understood that it’s a complete game changer. Visibility into our energy usage, instant feedback and being able to spot longer term trends is definitely going to lower our energy usage, save us money and have us contribute less adversely to the environment.

AuthorGraeme Mathieson | Comment5 Comments |
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Wednesday
03Mar2010

Aperture 3 on a laptop

DateWednesday, March 3, 2010 at 10:53AM

I was awoken early last week by my laptop’s hard drive making a clicking noise. The fact that I hadn’t reconfigured Time Machine since installing Snow Leopard sent me into a blind panic. A quick trip to Amazon UK later, and I’d ordered a 2nd gen Drobo, along with 3 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green disks. It all turned up the next day, and the data shifting started.

The short version of the story is that I’ve now got at least two copies of everything, one on the Drobo (which should cover against particular types of failures all by itself). And the internal drive in my Macbook Pro hasn’t made any funny noises since. phew

A wee aside before I discuss how I’ve arranged Aperture 3 on my laptop in a satisfactory manner. The Drobo is slow. I mean, really slow. I’m seeing write speeds on the Mac, connected via Firewire 800, of about 25MB/s in tests. To put that in perspective, in order to fill the disk to capacity, you’d need to hang around for about 21 hours. In practice, it’s even worse than that and, in particular, delete operations seem to be spectacularly slow (and, unless the Drobo is filesystem aware, I don’t even know how that’s possible!).

I had initially intended to dump my 330GB master Aperture Library on there and have a small one on the laptop while I was on the move. However, after testing, and finding Aperture to be utterly unusable (spinning beach ball for 10 seconds after every adjustment, more spinning beach balls just for scrolling through projects), I had a change of heart.

My current laptop is a 17” Macbook Pro from, I think, sometime in 2007. I replaced the internal drive with a 320GB one at some point. I’ve also got a 500GB Firewire 800 Western Digital Passport (called, imagninatively, “External”) and the Drobo.

That makes the setup pretty straightforward, really:

  • The Aperture library on the internal disk. It’s currently clocking in at 30GB worth of metadata and previews.
  • All the master images are referenced masters, stored on the external disk. Here’s the other 300GB of raw masters.
  • A vault on the Drobo.
  • Time Machine backup on the Drobo.

This gives me a reasonably performant setup (as much as can be expected from a laptop, really, I think), while giving me the data protection I desire.

The Time Machine configuration is perhaps worth noting. As the vault is being backed up separately by Aperture, I’m excluding it from Time Machine. However, since all the master images are referenced masters, they aren’t backed up as part of the vault so I’m explicitly including the external drive in the Time Machine backup.

Another useful tip. Sometimes I’m loading images into Aperture and I’ve left the external drive at home. Not a problem, they get imported as managed files rather than referenced masters. However, when I reconnect the external drive, I do want to tidy things up. I have a smart album which contains all the ‘Managed’ masters:

Managed Masters smart album

To do this, create a new Smart Album (cmd-shift-l), remove the default set of rules and add a “File Status” rule where the status is “Managed”.

All of your managed masters will show up in there. Next time you attach the external disk, visit that album, select all the images and relocate the masters (File -> Relocate Masters…). Dead simple.

Of course, now that I’ve converged all my Aperture libraries (one on a desktop, one on a laptop and one from where I declared photographic bankruptcy a few years back), I’ve got a lot of sorting to di! How do you arrange your entire photographic history in Aperture?

AuthorGraeme Mathieson | CommentPost a Comment |
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Friday
26Feb2010

Using Twitter for business

DateFriday, February 26, 2010 at 9:53AM

I started writing an email, ranting about the dos and don’ts of using Twitter to promote your business. What originally irked me was somebody asking for examples of businesses who have successfully used Twitter to generate sales leads. This is my response, which got off-topic enough that I ditched the email, but I think there’s some element of truth to it at least:

Having been involved in Twitter since the relatively early days (I joined in November 2006, apparently), and having talked to people at conferences about how to successfully use Twitter for business, I’ve got a few opinions about how to do it right. It should not be (directly) a tool for generating sales leads. It’s a tool for engaging with your community (or starting to actually develop a community in the first place, if you’ve never had a two-way channel with your customers before now). If you’re going to give the Twitter account to one department in your company, don’t give it to sales, give it to customer support.

And for goodness sake don’t make it a write-only medium. There are millions of Twitter accounts that consist of nothing more than “New blog post: http://link/to/post” and they’re a waste of time. Then there are the ones that take the time to tweet, but never respond to people that reply to them. A huge opportunity to start a conversation with somebody who’s interested in your company, and it’s wasted!

Another mistake one of my previous clients just wouldn’t listen to my advice on: post … I can’t quite find the right word here, closest I can think is … post organically. Like it’s the water cooler conversations through the day. Don’t open up your twitter client first thing in the morning, dump a bunch of tweets out there and close it again. It’s a variant on treating it as a write-only medium, but it’s even worse because people are probably only going to read a couple of those tweets from the fire hose before they carry on.

Set up searches for your company, product names, and relevant topics. When you see somebody else talking about your company or products, get involved in the conversation. Some of the best karma I’ve seen around companies on Twitter is when an individual makes an offhand complaint about a product on Twitter, and the company responds, eventually resolving the issue. I’ve seen my friends have these sorts of experiences with a wide range of companies from the behemoths (BT) to smaller web-based startups (GitHub).

Of course, I’m talking from the perspective of a consumer on Twitter. I don’t have a great deal of experience from the business end (though I have won business through conversations I’ve had on Twitter and new acquaintances I’ve “met” there). So, what do you think? And what are some of the best examples you’ve seen of companies successfully using Twitter?

PS, if you don’t already, you should follow me on Twitter. :-)

AuthorGraeme Mathieson | Comment2 Comments |
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Wednesday
04Nov2009

PragProWriMo

DateWednesday, November 4, 2009 at 1:59PM

I’ve committed to getting involved in PragProWriMo, which is piggybacking on top of NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The concept is simple: write 4 pages of prose every day for the month of November. By 1st December, you should have about 50,000 words towards a book. Or you won’t, and you’ll have a better idea of how much effort is involved in writing the book you’ve always promised to write.

I’ve always wanted to write a book (actually, what I want  is to have a book published and available for sale in the local Borders, but the writing is a necessary prerequisite). I’ve even approached the Pragmatic Programmers in the past with a couple of ideas. (Their response has always been, “sounds interesting, write a proposal”, which has been enough to weed me out so far.)

I’ll keep you up to date with progress throughout the month, but for now I wanted to share the background to the book I’m planning to write.

The Pitch

The concept behind the book is “The Internet: How it works”. I’m aiming it squarely at software developers; in particular web developers, because that’s who I’ve been working with most often lately, but I’m sure most other species of developer will get something out of it too. The book should be direct and to the point, and it should help developers have a better understanding of how the technologies they use actually work. A broad understanding of all the parts of the tools you’re using will make you a better developer. Chances are you’re using/building on top of the Internet a hell of lot. :-)

Some of the topics I’d like to cover include:

  • How the Domain Name System works, including what happens when you look up a DNS record. From here, you’ll understand practical things like when to use a CNAME or an A record, and why propagation delays occur.
  • An overview of the full network stack, from your web browser, down through the TCP/IP stack, to the physical Ethernet layer and back up.
  • TCP/IP itself. As web developers in particular, we rely on the underlying TCP/IP protocol to provide us with a (relatively) resilient, stable, bi-directional, in-order stream of bytes from a source IP to a destination. The details are a little more complicated. From here, you’ll have an understanding of TCP vs. UDP, how TCP gives you a (relatively) reliable connection and what happens when Good Streams Go Bad.
  • Internet routing. The Internet’s a funny place. Your TCP/IP packets go out of your network card, off to your broadband router, through this fluffy cloud (the Internet is always represented as a cloud in network diagrams, sometimes bearing the phrase “here be dragons”) and magically arrives at its destination. It’s not that simple. Routing decisions are made for technical, commercial and political reasons. Here you’ll learn more about what happens to the traffic in the cloud, an overview of routing protocols and some background to the routing decisions made.
  • Email. How email works. The roles of mail transfer and mail delivery agents. How SMTP, POP and IMAP fit into the world. What Mail Exchangers are all about. Spam and spam fighting mechanisms.

That’s all I’ve got so far. Chances are it’s enough to keep me busy for the month. :-)  But I’d like to know, what are you, the software developer (my target audience) would like to learn? I’m looking to help you develop better software by better understanding the stuff you’re using under the hood. What are the concepts, protocols and tools that you use every day, but you don’t know the details of how they work?

 

AuthorGraeme Mathieson | Comment4 Comments |
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Wednesday
04Nov2009

Switching to Squarespace?

DateWednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:24AM

If you’re reading this, I think I’ve successfully moved my Wordpress blog across to Squarespace after it was recommended by a few folks on Twitter.  If you’re not reading this, please let me know. :-) I’ll switch the RSS feed across shortly, too, so apologies if you see a bunch of (really old) repeated articles in your feed reader.

If Squarespace doesn’t work out, there’s no harm, I’ll be back to Wordpress again without any loss. But it’s worth a try. The main lossage right now seems to be that I’ll want to recode all the code examples that are kicking around and, unless I want to manually syntax highlight with HTML, I’ll have to find an external service to do it. GitHub’s gists are probably the way forward if I need an external service, right?

Meantime, if you could all kick the tyres, leave some comments and let me know the new place is working out OK for you, that would be awesome. :-)

AuthorGraeme Mathieson | Comment4 Comments |
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