Last year, when I last posted, things were going from bad to worse on the job front. My telecoms job had gone from suffering an impatient and somewhat disorganised customer to sitting on my hands awaiting said customer to sort out their internal difficulties and come up with some more exciting things for us to work on. And so I continued, waiting, while new people were hired for product work and we were left to keep our seats warm. Eventually, after some three months of this, I regretfully left. And I anticipated better times – after all, i my interviews I had emphasised why reasons for leaving and my desperation to be kept busy. Thus I was more than a little surprised when my new employer left me in a similar situation – filler tasks while waiting for more work.

This did not go down well, and, as Polly will gladly tell anyone interested, did not make me pleasant to live with. Given this was my third job in two years I felt somewhat trapped, and given their constant assurances I felt it necessary to offer them a chance to fulfil them. Nevertheless, my probation came to an end without any work materialising and I once again resigned, this time without a positioned lined up.

Normally, the thought of being without a job in the middle of one of the world’s more expensive locations would strike far into my somewhat anal heart. It may therefore serve as an illustration of my state of mind that I spent the following week doing anything except thinking about work. I made some good progress in Warcraft, I read a lot and I spent a lot of time fielding calls from agents, who quickly started to cluster like flies to a carcass. And I was justly rewarded for my carelessness when I started job hunting and had a contract signed within two days.

So, after a bit of time wondering in the wilderness I’m once again gainfully employed and a lot happier. This time I’m working for a small company – I’ve given big companies another chance and received my just desserts, and shall be working to avoid such entanglements again. Now I work in a relaxed and passionate environment with 7 or 8 other developers where the mention of words such as ‘synergy’ is justly greeted with sniggering. We have a Wii, lots of beer, and the only thing that irks me is that my workplace is out in the depths of Hammersmith. Still, one cannot complain too much, even if I do have to trek into the West End and out again each day.

This all leaves my life a little more stable, Polly a little less stressed and provides no excuse for the lack of posts here. So stay tuned and, if my flight is boring enough, who knows what could appear here?

The best thing Labour ever did was giving the Bank of England independence. This should, in theory, allow the BoE to manage the economy, rather than pandering to the vote grabbing tendencies of our political establishment. Nevertheless, as soon as there’s a crisis the government starts turning the screws for the BoE to start bailing people out. And this time they’ve folded.

For those in areas with less tea consumption per capita, a large lender, Northern Rock, recently got itself in the shite. This was it’s own fault, and that of the banking industry – they made silly loans to try and make more money, and now no one knows who is credit worthy and so they won’t lend to each other. Indeed, the interbank rate is now above the BoE’s punitive lending rate, which is not a normal thing, and not particularly good for the markets.

The ECB folded very quickly, pumping money into the market to bring this down. The Federal Reserve dropped rates significantly recently to try and do the same. The BoE, despite political pressure, kept on course with the very sensible objection that if the banks, especially Northern Rock, were bailed then this would serve as encouragement for a repeat. After all, if you take risks you deserve the gains – and the losses, should it go wrong. And at least one of the upper management earned over £1.4 million last year – so there’s little call for them to complain that they missed the gains.

However, after Northern Rock applied for (and received) emergency funding, consumers panicked and started withdrawing money. The banking industry blamed the BoE for the ‘humiliation of their industry’ and politicians accused the BoE of mismanagement. How hypocritical can you get?

So now the BoE is taking the heat, and inprudent consumers and bankers are getting a reprieve at the taxpayer’s expense. In a free market economy risk is often rewarded with gain – but without the chance of failure the market will collapse, and the taxpayer will be the one who loses. In a time of widening income inequality, and with financial sector bonuses at obscene levels, how can it possibly be the taxpayer’s responsibility to bail out those who (with full knowledge) placed high bets? So much for liberal economics.

A good example is the news feed from your friends¹ – it’s a perfect candidate for RSS. But no, you’re stuck with visiting their site. And their messaging service is just as bad: while I have a perfectly good IMAP inbox they insist I use the parallel one on their site. It doesn’t help that their e-mail notifications of new items are rubbish.

Likewise, you can’t replace things – Twitter and Flickr sit alongside their photo and status apps – there’s no way to use something more open.

Now they’ve a critical mass they probably don’t really care. It’s all very trendy, people are going to use it anyway. And other more reluctant people will get dragged along by the tide. The downside is that once something new comes along people have no choice but to jump – rather than making access to data open and allowing users to pull an environment together they leave users with a simple choice: buy-in, or don’t. Great when you’re on top but as MySpace have found it won’t save you from the competition.

¹ Is anyone else driven mad by people you’ve never encountered before wanting confirmation as friends? Or is this a cultural thing?

• The implosion of my last job through a lack of work.
• The discovery and joining of a new place of work.
• World of Warcraft.

Mostly the latter.

Unfortunately my work at JR dried up, thanks to a customer who ran in to some problems with other vendors and sent their plans up a certain creek minus rowing implements. After three months of driving Polly mad (and playing too much WoW) I regretfully found a new job. So I’m now working for Inspired Gaming Group, working on the platform that runs the distributed gaming machines and generally corrupting the nation’s youth (or rather pub-goers and old ladies playing electronic Bingo).

WoW has also proved a terrible temptation – I tried the Burning Crusade trial and got hocked by the much improved Draenai and Blood Elf content. I’ve now got a level 63 blood elf mage who is rather talented in the freezing-things-to-death department. Very different play style from my old paladin – a lot more fragile but much more interesting to play. The major downside is Blizzard haven’t bothered with the mid-level content, so levels 20-60 are spent drifting through a ghost world as fast as possible. A shame, really.

I’ve also had utilities going silly – T-Mobile decided I owed them money I didn’t and screwed up everything it was possible to screw up. Wankers. So, if you’re in the UK: avoid T-Mobile. The others may be rubbish, but T-Mobile is more clueless, more useless and have a rubbish UTMS network. And the ROM on the MDA Vario II is buggy as hell, and no updates have been forthcoming (which is a shame, as the hardware is rather good).

I also decided to jump to Be and ADSL-2+. It’s all good – when it works. Connection was buggered up between them and BT, leaving me with no ADSL for a weekend. Their help-desk is only slightly better than Demon’s, but at least they had the good grace to refund me for the unused time. And now it’s working it is running at a rather nice 16Mb (about 1Km from the exchange). The major downside is that my WAG200G (which is an excellent modem) won’t go above 7Mb on Be’s connection, so I’m stuck using the extremely rubbish Alcatel that Be supply.

But life is once again good (well, presumably) so hopefully I can stop neglecting this quite so much…

 Then someone goes and demonstrates there are people who actually believe such things.

 There are mad people everywhere, but some are madder than others…

This is a much nicer approach than the old world, with its disconnected computers and systems, each man being but an island. However, I can’t but notice a nasty slide back to this world, only this time we’ll be stranded on different platforms.

The much-hyped ‘Web 2.0′ is the worst offender. Google Reader for instance – fantastic application, but your data ends up in a silo. Newsgator have a better idea here with the ability to synchronise data, but lack a Linux client and have but a rather basic web client. And the social networking sites take this to extremes – I have a presence on the web. Here. Why, should I want to join MySpace (heaven forfend) or Facebook (which seems suddenly very trendy), do I need to create another one?

Would a true networking site not allow me to draw my disparate services together: mix in my homepage feeds with my LinkedIn profile, my IMAP e-mail and my Flickr photos? Let me manage my contacts via iSync and track down my friends via this data source? Let me read my news via the best tool, whether I’m on the web, my computer or my phone?

There is some movement: Facebook have their new API but it is still rooted on their platform – you draw data in to them, not out. Flickr are fairly open, to their credit. Google, surprisingly, aren’t – POP mail in GMail looses you your valuable filing metadata, and you are completely buggered with respect to Google Reader.

I guess in a way in all comes back to the Semantic Web – if you can exchange data freely then all sort of interesting things will pop up. While you silo it a huge amount of energy is wasted on duplication. And that’s bad for all involved.

(We apologise for the sloppy writing in this post. It’s that sort of day…)

Given the Swedish had already won a place in my heart for a chocolate bar that shares the name of my better half, I’m really feeling quite benevolent towards them.

Not to be outdone, James T has already suggested Rødgrød med fløde.

The last two days have been spent on one problem. A web service deployed on Axis 2 as an AAR module worked fine with Weblogic. It broke horribly on JBoss.

The solution turned out to be sticking the JAXB2, Activation and JMS libraries in the JBoss endorsed library directory. This is really, really bad. It’s not (probably) too much of a problem for our application, as we’re the only thing running on the server, but suddenly our modules are getting horribly polluted by rubbish up the tree. And since some of our older modules use JAXB1, this fast becomes painful.

Worse, before JBoss 4.0.2 there was a flat classloader. Honestly, you wouldn’t even think of making this stuff up…

So at last I’ve found a reason to love Weblogic – the error messages are useless, but at least it gives you reasonable control over class loading.

I’m playing World of Warcraft again. I thought I had broken this rather nasty habit, until they released a ten day trial for the Burning Crusade, and I found that the two new starting areas are leagues ahead of the original ones. Also, with the high-level migration to the Outland my old server, Nordrassil, is near empty is some of the early zones, which makes it nice for soloing. So while my main awaits to see if Polly wants to quest once more, I’m levelling up a Blood Elf mage with floppy ears and bad taste in outfits.

This also means my Wii isn’t getting used much at present. Which is nice in a way, as it tides me over until Resident Evil 4 and the Wii Mario games get a European release.

We also spend an unusual weekend recently without internet, after BT bollocksed up my voice on Friday, my DSL on Saturday and then refused to fix anything until Monday. This makes them only slightly better than T-Mobile, who are trying to charge me for phones that were never sent, but I digress. It did mean that at long last, some five years post-release, I finished Warcraft III. This leaves me with a year to sort out The Frozen Throne before Starcraft II.

All in all, not a profitable few weeks…

Gears offers two things that previously you’d have been looking at something like Apollo or Silverlight to provide – threading (rather than a single JS thread) and offline data storage. Hence appropriately enabled application, like the new version of Google Reader, can be toggled into an offline mode and used in the absence of connectivity. Also, Gears is really cross-platform and cross-browser, with IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera support promised, and it works very nicely on my Linux box at work (unlike Silverlight).

It also fires a salvo in the direction of Microsoft, clearly stating Google’s desire to provide an application platform that threatens their core business. Further, once Google Docs is enabled it suddenly becomes rather a greater threat. Interesting times.

Now if they’d only release a synchronisation API for Reader I’d be chuffed silly. While Reader is a superb, quite possibly the best, web feed reader, it doesn’t yet match up to NetNewsWire. Unfortunately that leaves me stuck using NewsGator as a synchronisation server, which has a rubbish web interface and no client whatsoever for Linux.