My last week at Epic

Ever since handing my notice in nearly 4 weeks ago, coming into work has been a frankly odd experience. People think twice before assigning me a task, I don't get invited to meetings, I'm "out of the loop" on any customer issues. Some clients have been informed of my impending departure, others won't be informed for a couple of months, to avoid any contractual concerns. I've found myself with plenty of free time, which I hate. I come to work to be busy, at home I've got 101 things to do every evening, so I loathe the prospect of twiddling my thumbs during the few hours of daylight that we get.

I have next week off, between jobs, and the time shouldn't hang heavy on my hands. My to-do list reads something like:

- Move into my flat
- Get the boiler working
- Repaint the woodwork outside and mow the lawn
- Buy a sofa, dining table, TV, and chairs
- Buy the other odds and ends that I'll need
- Get the phone and broadband set up
- Build my new PC from the bits that arrived last week (and I still haven't unwrapped)
- Play the "Orange Box" Half-life set
- Play 5 games of bowls
- Have a day in London
- Brush up on CSS and Mach II
- Have lunch with various people in Brighton
- Relax (?)

If I get half of those things done, I'll be happy!

Hammering it in, old-skool style

I've signed up to a "basics of DIY" course, in an attempt to learn some new skills that might be of use in the immediate future. Having spent a few thousand pounds renovating my flat this year, I've wondered how much I could have saved if I'd been able to do some of the work myself. I'm no slouch with a paint brush, but I'm out of my depth with the more practical aspects - such as plastering, coving, making wooden box housings, building kitchen units, etc. The nice part of DIY is being able to stand back and admire your work, assuming that you've done the job well. The bad part is spending time and money on a botched job, that you have to pay a professional to re-do.

With these things in mind, I attended the first class last night, held at my old secondary school. Our tutor, James Hatter, clearly knows his stuff, and is keen to get on and impart his knowledge to us. With only six of us in the group it would be nice to have some introductions - maybe a brief chat about why we're there, and what we're hoping to achieve - but no, it was straight in, listening to him for 2 hours. I took copious notes, and learned a lot. He went through all the tools that you're likely to need when doing DIY tasks (hammers, drills, saws, etc.), and handed round samples of each, explained how to use them properly, what to buy, where to buy them, what safety precautions to take, etc.
I was amazed at how much I didn't know: a hand-saw, for example, cuts down-wards, assuming that it's not a "pull saw", which cuts when pulling back on the handle. Fifteen "teeth per inch" (TPI) is considered to give a fairly fine cut. For cutting "with the grain" on large pieces of wood, a "rip saw" is recommended. The width of the cutting blade (anything up to 3mm) is known as the "kerf". The choice of saw will be governed by the hardness of the wood: pine is soft, and will require a fine cutting edge, whereas oak or ash is hard, and will need something more resilient.

It's nice to be learning from an expert - I just hope that my first DIY creation (which will probably be a set of shelves) lives up to his (and my) expectations.

It's Halloween tomorrow... where did I put my spirit level...?

The Joys of CF_ACCELERATE

I just stumbled upon a fantastic little tag by Brandon Purcell, called cf_accelerate. Basically, it's a memory-based custom tag, which is reckoned to be 50x faster than CFCACHE. I just tried it out on the development version our statistics-heavy TQi website, and the difference in load speeds is quite dramatic, down in most cases from around 10 seconds to less than 2 seconds. We were using CFCACHE, but cf_accelerate just blows it out of the water. With RAM prices so cheap, this is a hugely cost-effective way of speeding up your sites. If only we'd found this earlier! The TQi site is shortly being replaced with a new all-singing, all-dancing Unistats site. Ho hum...

Read all about the tag here:
http://www.bpurcell.org/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=963

To install it, just copy it to your ColdFusion custom tags directory. If you're on JRun, this will be buried somewhere in your jrun/servers/cfusion.ear/cfusion.war/web-inf/cfusion/ node. Have a look in the ColdFusion administrator, under the "custom tags" section, and it will tell you the default path. Once you've done that, just wrap your code in a <cf_accelerate> tag, and hey presto! The only caveat I've found so far is that any CFFLUSH tags won't work, as they're now wrapped within a call to a custom tag, so just comment these out.

Windows Search ripped my flesh!

Well, maybe not literally. When I booted up this morning, my first thought was "eugh - where did that come from?!", as I spotted the little Windows Search box embedded in the taskbar. It wasn't there yesterday... maybe it came through with the Adobe Reader update last night? No... must have been some random fascist in the I.T. department?

Sadly not - a quick visit to The Register shows that thousands of users across the land have had this "upgrade" thrust upon them, and are now suffering massive slow-down. Irate sys admins are running around trying to uninstall said update, which from a quick look, doesn't do anything too useful.

To get rid of this fine example of bloatware, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on your Taskbar. Select Toolbars --> click once on "Windows Search Deskbar".
2. Open Control Panel --> Administrative tools - Services
3. Scroll down to Windows Search, double-click it.
   
4. Set the startup type to Manual, then stop the service.
5. Close the Control Panel.
   
6. Breathe a sigh of relief.

Oddly, the main complaint from users is that it makes their computers slow down. Having spent the princely sum of £380 on new PC components last night, I'm wondering why anyone should have a slow computer in this day and age. That small sum of money has bought me a top-of-the-range Intel Core Duo processor, with a 4mb (yes - 4mb!!!) level 2 cache, a whopping 2 Gigabytes of RAM, a rock-solid motherboard, 250GB of fast SATA hard disk space, and a pretty nifty graphics card. Plus a few other odds and ends.

I might leave my Desktop Searchbar enabled as a mark of smugness... :)

Form is temporary, class is permanent...

I was involved in a highly frustrating game of bowls last night. Nothing too important, just an evening league with some friends. However, for some reason, my form totally deserted me. I had no rapport with the green, and each shot looked impossible as I stood on the mat. In my mind I knew what line and length to take... but for some reason, the bowls weren't obeying orders! Why should this be? Just five days ago, I played against two up-and-coming England bowlers, in the Denny Cup, the flagship indoor bowls tournament in the UK. I played well - the pressure was on - and I responded, after 4 hours of play my team lost narrowly, but it was a highly respectable result against such quality opposition. So why this sudden slump in form?

My working theory is that as you play a sport at higher and higher standards, it becomes very hard to get enthusiastic about bog-standard games of no import - games where you can lose, and nobody minds. If I'm put under pressure, in front of an audience, I know I can compete with the best, because the adrenaline is pumping, my mind is focussed 100% on the game, and everything else is irrelevant. A circus of performing monkeys could set up next to my rink, and I wouldn't notice, because the game is all that matters.

I've read several stories about really good bowlers (Tony Allcock is one), who now refuse to play in any non-competitive games, because they know that they only perform under pressure. What's worse, is that they are likely to get beaten by less talented players, who can then parade around, boasting that "I beat Tony Allcock". Clearly, this is undesirable. How, then, can players of this level practice between matches? From my observations, players of this standard tend to form gaggles, or cliques, with other like-minded, and similarly talented players. They will then practice together, go drinking together, travel to games together, and hopefully, play together as part of the same team. Almost every club has such people - an elite group - almost a "club within a club". They may get frowned on by the average player, who isn't interested in winning silverware, and they will almost certainly be grumbled about by people from other clubs, who come off worse in an on-green encounter. However, I firmly believe that without these groups of top players, the game as a whole would collapse. The top level of competitive play would cease to exist, and all we'd be left with would be a hearing-aid beige montage of sub-standard bowlers, playing amongst themselves to pass the time. The talented cabals, for all their pitfalls, are a pointer to a higher standard, and a magnet for competitive players. They are something to aspire to.

Which brings me back to last night's game. I'm not a particularly outstanding player, and am currently not part of a clique of top players (much as I would like to be). Last night was a reminder that bowls is an incredibly random game, which twists and turns at unexpected moments, so much so that betting on a bowls match is almost unheard of. It was also a reminder that getting annoyed at a bad shot will never, ever help you, or your team. It's these facts, and more, that makes the game so appealing, and keeps us coming back for more.

New job, new blog

I'll be leaving Epic on November 2nd, and apart from saying goodbye to a fantastic bunch of people, I'll also be leaving my internal blog behind. It seems a shame to stop blogging... so I've set up this public-facing blog, as a place to leave some thoughts, impressions, and know-how (if I encounter it), for others to share.

I expect my postings to fall into one of three categories:

• Work-related posts on ColdFusion, databases and web servers
  
• General technology posts on new and interesting topics which I think are important
• Personal comments on life in general

I start my new job at Greenhouse on November 12th, so as the saying goes, "watch this space".

Pete.