Book Crossing Is Cool

Towards the end of 2016 I was at a course and 1 of the attendees mentioned "Book Crossing" and explained it as leaving and retrieving books people have placed in all kinds of places.

Finally I got around to actually researching what I had heard around September 2017. Since then I have have placed 46 books out there and am hopeful that eventually people will begin to enter reviews, or at least little comments of some kind on my bookshelf (http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/agilecoachrob).

http://www.bookcrossing.com/about does a pretty good job of explaining what this is all about really. I think one of the most fascinating things that will emerge from this social experiment running since 2001, is the way the membership (http://www.bookcrossing.com/findmembers) will change, and some kinds of insight that will emerge of where and when books are released, and then where, when and how will those books travel to their next release point. Maybe even luckier some kind of "pure" trend about which books are more popular really / unbiased by reviewers, publishers, book sellers, prizes or any other kind of "public persuasion".

Who knows - but I am still hoping that people will pickup one of those 46 and update the locations, leave their own reviews, etc and continue this fantastic social experiment! Thankyou for supporting!

Update on SEM

For those that are interested:
- Through May traffic (New AND Returning Visitors) to this blogsite tripled
- Through June traffic (New AND Returning Visitors) to this blogsite doubled
- Google impressions through June (when I started tracking those as well) have more than doubled
- Early days in July, but already looking on track to double again :-)

Thank you all readers and supporters!!

At the same time, my research with Twitter has come to an end for now - the Twitter disconnect from LinkedIn announcement on Friday seems like an opportune time to deactivate. In reality this site attracts far more new+real visitors (hang around and read for 4-6 minutes) via Google. :-)

Best View of London

On 27 March 2009, after living in London for 2 years, I got the best view of London I have had yet!

I was fortunate enough on this day to be flying back to London Heathrow, and arrived over the UK as the sun was beginning to set. I had been napping on the flight until then, and awoke to the plane circling south of the O2 Arena.

Round and round we went ... the green scenery below getting darker and darker. The sun dipped lower, and the City's lights started coming on. Spectacular! The City itself...the tall buildings etc - all I could think was "google maps, with perspectives, eat your heart out!"

And then finally, we were allowed to proceed to Heathrow ... over Picadily Circus, over Hyde Park, South Kensington ... following the Thames River back ... over Kew Gardens ... and then we were landing.

I am now hoping that my next return flight on 17 April will come back at sunset again, which is possible because the clocks went back 1 hour :)

The Inventor of the Wind-Up Radio

It is quite a good read from the inventor of the Wind-Up Radio - Trevor Baylis.

It covers great ground about inventing, inventors and a couple of other relevant topics: Trevor Baylis OBE.

Don't Shout At Your Computer!

An engineer shows what happens to harddrive performance if the harddrive is subjected to vibration, in this case, loud noises emanating from his shouting near them. ARGHHHHHHHH!.

Another wiki going places...

While doing some research for a last minute Sri Lanka holiday, I found this wiki that I was previously unfamiliar with. Content is good, growing fast, recent and accurate (for Sri Lanka at this time). If you want to avoid using a tour operator for your trip, you could do worse...wikitravel.

WikiLeaks - Oops!

Wikileaks is a very interesting little web site that came to my attention because of some sensitive documents that were leaked in/by South African affairs recently. Some very interesting cartoons, names and documents, from some the most ?unlikely? people and countries I would not have guessed at.

Disk Defragmentation Tool

Thank you Jaksa (my colleague) for this invaluable tip for a great Disk Defragmentation Tool! I've been a believer in defragmenting my hard disk drive on an annual or bi-annual basis (or major file system upheaval event) for many years.

The problem I started experiencing over the past 5 odd years, is that as my hard drives became bigger, "defragging" took longer and longer. Worse, the tool provided with Windows only works properly when 30% of the hard drive is available! Now 30% of 120MB is only 36MB and is not such a bad temporary sacrifice. 30% of 100GB is a huge sacrifice that I just cannot afford! Not on my development workstation, nor on my personal home machine(s)!!

Jaksa pointed in in the direction of independent evaluations listed on Donn Edwards' web site. Or you can simply download the winning defragmentation tool (JkDefrag) here.

Brain Rules

Brain Rules is quite a fun little web site that gives one possibly plausible explanation for how the human brain evolved over time and how it works for humans today. A collection of short entertaining videos and some writings.

Getting around in a "locked down" environment

I probably should not really be blogging this little entry, but I just can't help myself! Please continue reading or using these little details at your own peril.

Recently I discovered myself in a "locked down" environment, yet I still had a tonne of software to install, and I desperately needed it installed "today" rather than after 1 month. (the contract in this case was for this primary purpose - installations, configurations and support) (something completely different to what I've been doing for many years now, but not so different from what I was doing 10 odd years ago, so I had the skills)

My first step in any new site is to meet as many people as I can, and then to make friends with those that I desperately need, in the order that I need them. It is a hard cold fact, and they know it, and I know it. I am ... for want of a better word ... using them. By doing this though, I suddenly start avoiding official processes, official documents filled out in triplicate, and actually get things done rather quickly. Which makes me look good, compared to the rule followers.

So with enough friends on my side, around day 2, I learned 1 useful tidbit about the so-called "locked down environment".... it is not so locked down as made out to be. Thanks to XP's security model, the thing that really enforces lockdown policies is done via LDAP ... when you login or logout of the domain.

And again, with enough friends on my side, I managed to secure just a slightly better than completely useless level of workstation usage. And here comes the fun bit. Many of the GUI widgets for changing a workstation are stripped out of your view, and some that could not be stripped throw you an error message if you try to access them.

So ... you find the command line equivalent and use that instead. No security to stop you. Thank goodness for XP! I have no idea what I'll do if I find myself in a Vista or better security modelled domain with the same deadlines - probably make even more friends instead, and take them to the pub every other lunch!

Here are the 4 that I am using frequently:

regedit - reg.exe
Data Sources (ODBC) - odbcad32.exe
RemoteDesktop - mstsc.exe
Add/Remove programs - MSIexec

I am sure there are others, but fortunately I have not needed more than these so far!

Light Motivational Relief

Despair.com for wonderful miscellaneous motivational posters and sayings....all twisted into a very cynical viewpoint. It is a really good laugh!

Ethical Office Politics

I have been meaning to read this article for about a month now, and finally got the time this morning! Adrian, the author of the article, covers quite a few topics throughout the piece and I found it an insightful and well thought out argument.
Ethical Office Politics

I think he does a good job of most of the issues I have studied, heard about, thought about and/or experienced.

Wabi-sabi

I stumbled onto "wabi-sabi" and thought "Yes!" that's a new saying for me, that would fit in nicely with this blog! It has apparently even been used in Agile and Wiki discussions! (no guessing where I found it!)

According to our great source of free intelligent information wikipedia on the matter, it has Japanese origin. According to the entry, a 'Richard R. Powell' summarized its meaning by saying "[wabi-sabi] nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."'

Furthermore, the deeper meaning is also expressed by 'Andrew Juniper' as "if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi."

I like it!

Thankyou for supporting!

Cool way of visualising Eclipse's history

Here is a little video visualising the various Eclipse players over the years checking source files, documents and images into the repository. It makes for a few minutes interesting viewing! Eclipse Code Swarm (short version)