Its name is...

Planet Ubuntu just ran a meme on the subject of computer naming: i.e. how you choose names for your computers.

Mine are named after musical modes, so currently I have:

• aeolian
• dorian
• mixolydian
  

I used to have locrian too, but that machine died and I decided to not reuse the name until I ran out of other modes. I seriously doubt that I'll ever have as many machines as there are modes anyway! There are (basically) seven of them, so I should be fine. :)

My next guitar

I've recently found myself wondering what guitar I'd like to get next. This is a little weird, because I really don't play the guitars I already have anywhere near enough, but lately I've found myself thinking about it more and more, so it might be time to get started again.

My current guitars are:

• A blue Les Paul Studio Lite M-III, which is lovely and has an extremely flexible pickup arrangement that allows it to be played as a strat-style 5-combination single coil guitar, as well as a standard double-humbucker Les Paul.
  
• A Charvel Model 3 (I think. It looks like this in red, but I see so many pictures of Charvels with the same name that look completely different, it's hard to know) , which is unfortunately in need of a bit of love. The bridge's fine-tuners aren't well at all, the locking nut doesn't lock any more and the pickups sound very lifeless (especially the bridge). On the other hand, it has a lovely neck, and also features a self-performed customisation in the form of an additional switch which reverses the connections to the middle pickup, adding an extra two pickup combinations.
• A Washburn D10S12 12-string acoustic, which I actually bought brand new last year.

Now I'm not a guitar collector: I have little interest in spending money on and storing lots of instruments that are minor variations on the same model. So I won't be buying another Les Paul any time soon. When I look for a new guitar I want it to give me something new that the ones I already have doesn't.

Looking at that list, some sort of Fender immediately jumps out as a possibility, but the Les Paul does the three single coil job already, and while it won't really sound like a proper Strat, it's close enough for the time being.

As I was reading Paul Draper's emails about the recording of Six, I was reminded of the Gibson ES335 (as played by Mansun's Dominic Chad), which is a double-humbucker instrument like the Les Paul, but with the distinction of being semi-hollow. This gives it a quite different sound to other solid-body electrics, and so nicely fits the bill of adding something new to what I already have.

Unfortunately, the ES335 is very expensive. Yes, that's $1,999, and that is the cheapest model I could find on that site (the most expensive was $3,849). This is far more than I am willing to pay.

Fortunately, there is an alternative in the form of the Epiphone Dot, which is significantly cheaper at $459 including case ($399 without a case, but I see the case as being essential, and $60 isn't bad anyway).

I have read very positive reviews of this model, and looking around youtube there are a number of videos of people reviewing it and even comparing it to the more expensive Gibson model, with positive results. It's definitely on my list now.

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of Mansun's "Six"

Today I had the very pleasant surprise of two rather long emails in my inbox, from Paul Draper (formerly of Mansun) regarding the recording of the album "Six" (two because there were supposed to have been two "sides" to be album).

I have many memories of this album from the time I first bought it, going to see one of the gigs on the Six tour (at the Leeds Town and Country Club), and enjoying it with friends.

One of the things I always appreciated it was the way in which it pushed boundaries and broke from convention in so many ways, and yet remained a really enjoyable collection of musical moments. The emails Paul wrote about its recording reveals a lot about how all of this came about, the reasons why things were done a certain way and what some things mean. It also shows a number of details that you might not notice: for example, "Special/Blown It" was written as an attempt to create a song based on one giant chord sequence: it in fact ends up being based on a 32-bar sequence repeated five times. This is similar to what Radiohead did with their song "Just", which came about following a competition between Tom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood to get as many chords into a song as possible. Little musical jokes like this that most people simply won't notice are one of the things I love about great music.

Some of Paul's commentary is simply hilarious. Take for example his story on how "Witness to a Murder (Part 2)" was devised with the goal of creating :

...something so off the wall, so fucking wacky that when people listened to it they think: "FOR FUCKS SAKE, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?"

Following a brainstorming session they came up with this plan:

An 18th century baroque harpsichord movement featuring one male and one female opera singer singing how miserable they were in Italian with Dr Who playing a dead Brian Jones in a swimming pool in East Sussex.

And that is exactly what they recorded. Brilliant.

Then there's an extremely long section about how the "Muttley" laugh in Shotgun was recorded that is, shall we say, perhaps exaggerating a touch? Wacky.

I was really sad when Mansun broke up. This was a band that was creating genuinely good music that was clever, had depth and rewarded repeated listens. They weren't just about creating hit after hit, and there aren't many bands like them.

The whole thing reminded me of how much I enjoyed making music years ago, with my friend Mark and friends from university, and how I would like to get back into doing it again. it's just a question of time and equipment really.

Maybe someday...

(I've held this post back for a few days in the hope that I could link to Paul's writings about Six, but it appears that it is currently for mailing list subscribers only. I'll add a link once it is published somewhere public.)

In search of a new gaming mouse

bout three years ago (I think), I treated myself to a really good gaming mouse: the Logitech G7. It had a frikkin' lazer, adjustable DPI (which I actually never used and just ended up reprogramming the buttons for other purposes), and most importantly was cordless with a very clever battery charge and change system.

It was great. But a couple of weeks ago my son managed to break the radio receiver of my brother in law's G7, and so I was left with the burden of having to replace it. I decided that the best thing to do would be to let him have mine, and get myself a new one.

Now, I figure it would be foolish of me to simply go out and buy another G7, since it has been three years since I bought that mouse, and things could have come a long way in the meantime.

So I have been looking around, and to be honest really haven't seen anything of interest at all.

Logitech have the new G9 which looks interesting with its interchangable grips, but it has a cord. I really don't like a cord when I'm playing games as they always tend to snag on things at the most inopportune time.

Razer are a well-known gaming mouse brand, but they don't seem to have any cordless options at all. Microsoft are a company I'd rather avoid, but in any case they don't have a cordless gaming option either.

It is starting to look like the G7 really is still the mouse for me, but just in case there is something out there I have missed, I thought I'd see if anybody out there has any recommendations?

How not to give helpful criticism

One of the things that people often struggle with it taking criticism.

Professional criticism though is part of the job. In software development we have code reviews, and the person doing it the reviewing is supposed to point out things that are either wrong, or could be improved upon. It is then up to the author of the code being reviewed to take this information as it should be: as constructive criticism where constructive is the operative word.

It has been pointed out before that programmers are insecure folk who don't like their work to be criticised, but the fact is that programming is a complicated task; one that is practically impossible for anyone to get right all the time every time with no mistakes.

This is what reviews are for, after all.

It is true though that people struggle with this: I have performed many reviews myself, and it is interesting to see the differing reactions from person to person. Some just get on with fixing what I point out, while others get very defensive about it. Of course, the reviewer isn't always right either, and sometimes you'll get a bit of debate between the reviewer and author on a particular point. This is all healthy, and the end result is better code, which is better for everyone.

Now, when I do code reviews I try very hard to be respectful of the person I am reviewing and of his work. I don't like to be offensive, or make the author feel like an idiot: as I say, people will always make mistakes, and may not know as much as I do about the particular item in question that I am pointing out. Again, this is to be expected: nobody knows everything.

But what if the criticism, while perfectly valid, is presented in an offensive way? How should one respond to that?

Recently I took over maintainership of a small bazaar plugin called diffstat. It is written in python, a language which I like but have little experience in. I figured this would be an excellent opportunity for me to learn more about python, and get involved in the open source community in some way in one go.

Today I was notified of a new bug against the plugin which I have to say got my back up a bit.

The report was not really a bug since the functionality was not broken. Rather it was pointing out how one part of the code could be improved. The diff is attached to the bug report, but in essence it replaces nine lines of code with two that work exactly the same.

It is a perfectly valid and good improvement that makes use of a feature of the python libraries that I was not previously aware of.

The subject: "Silly code for popping kwargs".
The message: "The code in "cmd_diff.run()" for popping the "stat" and "stat_diff" parameters is convoluted and silly. The optional default parameter to "dict.pop()" is a better solution."

Erm, what was that? Silly???

I immediately felt offended and even unsulted, hit the reply button and, hands poised over the keyboard, thought for a moment.

The criticism was valid: the existing code was, while not 'silly', definitely convoluted in light of the better way of doing it that the reporter provided. Furthermore, despite the poor way in which this was communicated in the bug report, this was a good improvement to the code that the reporter was providing in his own time. The bug report was in effect a code review, and I should deal with it as such.

So I thought about toning down my response a bit: while the review was valid, the approach was not, so perhaps making it civil while writing "silly" in quotes to make the point passively would do.

Another moment of thought put rest to that. It was childish, and furthermore anything I write will become part of the project's permanent record in the form of the commit log and bug comments for all to see for ever more.

So in the end I sucked it up, thanked the reporter for pointing out the improvement, and made the change to the code he suggested. I did throw in there that I was quite new to python, to attemt to explain away why the code was like that, but that's as far as it went.

I have no interest in making myself look like an ass online. The things is though, others might have no problem with it. Those people would have reacted differently to how I did in the end, resulting in the bug reporter taking his attention elsewhere to the detriment of the project. Of course, this could all be avoided by people giving their criticism in a better way in the first place...

Before reacting to anything on the Internet it is worth thinking for a minute about the consequences of doing so. The bug reporter reacted to the code he saw by calling it silly. I chose to react to his reaction by thanking him.

Some people are just rude, some don't speak your native language and might not mean to be rude. Others will go out of their way to be polite. Whatever, if they are trying to help, let them.

Don't let pride be a barrier to collaboration.

Health insurance: it's all clear now

I'm not going to go over the whole health insurance debate that is going on in the US at the moment: it will make me angry.

Instead I'm going to write about something I just realised about how it all "works".

We've had to have our own insurance lately because my company doesn't provide it (though hopefully they will be shortly). When we got our insurance (itself a debacle of a process), our agent warned us that in six months time the price will go up significantly and we'll have to go through it all again.

Well, sure enough, we've just been informed the our premiums are going up significantly. By 26% in fact. So surely this is justified? Surely we've put such a great burden on them that they can only afford to keep us if they bump their rates to account for the massive losses we are causing?

Well, no actually. We've hardly used them. I haven't worked it out, but they've clearly made off like bandits with us, taking in hundreds of dollars more than we have used.

As I said, our agent said this is common practice, and it was because we were put into a group and certain people in the group got ill and that pushed up the premiums of everyone in the group. But it doesn't seem to make sense, because all it does it push everyone to cancel their insurance and take their business elsewhere.

But today I think I've got it figured out. They want us to leave. They've successfully made a profit out of us. "Thanks for the money, now go and take your risk elsewhere. We'll have no problem finding other people to milk for six months instead". The less time they keep us for, the less chance of us getting sick while they're covering us. And if we do get sick, well, they'll try their hardest to deny the claims, and if that fails they'll pay as little as they can, after which they will cancel you as soon as you can, with a pre-existing condition so you'll never be insured again.

You're out of the system.

T-Mobile massively increase text messaging rates

Today I happened to notice a notice on the my.t-mobile.com about text messaging rate increases. I was astounded to see that they are going up from an already too high 0.15 each to 0.20. That's a third, 33.33333% increase for a service that must surely cost them practically nothing to provide on an ongoing basis. Each message probably doesn't even occupy 1k.

It's worse though. Here in the US you get charged to receive them, as well as send them. So anybody could cost you money simply by sending you a joke text message they think you'll appreciate. Then there's the spam that we're not supposed to get but do anyway.

I suppose this is designed to push me into what they want me to do all along: buy a messaging bundle. My cheapest option is 400 a month for 4.99. If you use them all up, this works out at 0.012 per message, which is obviously a lot more like it. At the other end of the scale, I have to send or receive at least 25 a month in order to avoid end up paying more than 0.20 per message.

Given that my normal usage pattern generally puts me at about that mark, I'm basically screwed. I either stick with what I have and hope I don't go over 25 messages in a month, or just buy the bundle and feel compelled to send more messages than I would otherwise want to.

Last month my messaging usage came to 4.80, or 32 messages. At the new rate that would be $6.40. Definitely worth it. The month before though I only sent 13.

Sigh.

Alright, T-Mobile, you win. I've added the messaging bundle to my service.