This is supposedly one of the great business books of all time, describing the true story of the making of one of the largest leveraged buyout deals of all time. It follows a large cast of characters and firms on Wall Street in the eighties in a complex and fast paced plot, and gives a good picture of the financial landscape of the time.

Though I did enjoy reading this, and had my eyes opened to some of the practices prolific on the street, I found this book fairly hard going. Written from the third person perspective, it gives a neutral perspective on events, which at times was a little dry. The number of characters also makes it slightly hard to really understand some of the decisions that were made, although the authors do go to lengths to give depth to the major players.

Overall, it’s a book I’m glad to have read, and will probably pick up and read again at some point.

Niall Ferguson – The Ascent of Money

R bought me this as a Christmas gift, and she did a good job picking it! As the book points out, with today’s developing major economic events unfurl, it’s easy to forget that there are hundreds of years of economic records and history to look back at. This book looks back at the development of our financial system, just about as far as history goes, and progresses forward to the events around 2008. It does get technical in it’s explanations, and there are facts, stats, and graphs, but these things are offset by Ferguson’s great ability to explain concepts clearly whilst telling a story. And there are photos, what more can you ask for?

Michael Lewis – Liar’s Poker

This book is referenced in Barbarians at the gate, and being a story of Wall Street in the 80′s, shares some characters and a lot of principles. It is written in the first person, describing the career of a bond trader at Salomon Brothers. I’ve only started reading this, but am thoroughly gripped by the writing style and looking forward to reading more.

If you have a pair of powered monitor or reference speakers which you love dearly, it can be hard to accept sound from any sources of lower quality. That includes radios, televisions, and computers. With a pair of great speakers on the shelf, why should I ever listen to a tinny, lifeless sound again?

The answer is of course, because it can be a pain in the ass to get everything talking to each other, and because most reference speakers don’t have a volume control. Scrabbling about with wire is an activity which far too much of my life has been devoted to, to date (between mic’ing up drum kits and an electronics degree), and I’d rather not extend every time I attempt to play a CD or watch the television.

Step up the SM Pro Nano Patch, which has turned out to be the cure for all my ills in this regard. Yes, it is just a variable resistor (the volume knob), a switch (the mute button) and a bunch of connectors, and yes, it does cost forty whole pounds. So why is it good? Balanced inputs and outputs, for a start, allow preservation of high quality input sources through to the output. Before this device, I had to plug everything through my sound card (which is a massive PITA) in order to maintain a good signal chain. Secondly, whilst it has no mixing ability, it has two inputs, which means that it is convenient for plugging into the laptop or iPod to listen to music as required, and can stay plugged in to the television and Playstation full time.

It is a solid piece of kit, that feels nice and provides just enough functionality.

Product website at Digital Village

In 2009 I said: “My ‘New Years Resolution’ is going to be to spend as much time as possible doing the things I really want to do.” Out of context it sounds fucking stupid, but I know what I meant, it’s more of a life motto not to waste my time doing pointless activities like making the bed and waiting for hot drinks to cool down before they are usable. It seems a hell of a long time since I wrote that though. I haven’t written an awful lot this year, my mind has been on other things, like moving cities and jobs.

So blah blah, next year will be better, I’ll ‘just do things’ because priorities are bad thing (!?), I’ll waste less time so I can do more of my favourite things, and also be ready to jump at all the new opportunities that come along.

Nah. I’ll probably get up around 7am every day, go to work, each lunch from a nearby deli at my desk, talk to a limited group of peers about self reinforcing ideas, wait until my boss leaves before thinking about going to the gym, decide against it, curse everyone using a phone on the bus, get home and waste my evening on I don’t even fucking know what. Then I’ll spend the whole weekend recovering from a hangover, making up for the fact that I didn’t eat a hot meal all week, cleaning the mess I left each night because “I don’t have time to sort it now”, and trying to remember what the actual point of any of the last 7 days were.

I sound bitter and twisted, and after a few months in the capital I have absolutely no right to be whatsoever! Actually I’m not- that was my anti-resolution, and I think that maybe this year focusing on things I don’t want to do may be better than writing “stop thinking, start doing” on tiny scraps of paper and sending them to yourself. (http://tinyurl.com/cyvalo5)

Every time I ceased to be able to progress with the project, because a detail needs to be clarified, because some decision needs to be made, or because it is waiting on a sign off, I would click off the chess clock. And relax…

I am a hopeless optimist, and fiercely competitive. This results in one thing when it comes to software development- I cannot predict how long things will take, within even 50%, maybe worse. When I start a project, it’s generally “about a week” from completion for the entire 6 month duration. And as far as I’m concerned that is absolutely fine.

What I don’t need is plenty of time to get things done, what I *want* is a ticking clock that I can see all day measuring my performance. The thing is I don’t want to be judged based on, is other people’s priority lists. Just because Bill in accounts is too busy to sign my project off, well, I don’t care.

If developers are to be treated as delivery agents or micro project managers- by looking at the absolute time to project completion, then you are losing all their efficiency. They stop worrying about how lambda functions can help and best practices they could be learning and that git command you only ever use once in your life, and start worrying about why Mike is chatting to Kat rather than emailing them back. Give them that clock, and ‘click’, they can switch to some other project safe in the knowledge that they are not being measured.

According to modern software management opinions, putting developers under pressure does not make them more efficient, and I agree with this. In my experience the negative pressure which is experienced is usually due to events outside the control of the developer- eternal delays, changed specs, pointless meetings, rather than because I screwed up and took too long doing something. If that is the case, my pride as an engineer trying to create a quality product will mean I work twice as hard to finish on time. As a manager I think you need a way to get your developers to feel competitive about their own performance, let them put their effort into creating quality, and let you worry about these other events and pressures. That to me is the role of a manager, and the chess timer fits this perfectly- you are giving the developer the chance to be responsible solely for the things within their control.

The other thing the timer provides, is an accurate way of tracking how long you spend blocked on projects. I don’t think it matters too much how long developers take to write a quality piece software (within reason), because you are getting some increased quality or feature for every hour they work (provided of course that what they are working on is well managed!). However for time projects are blocked, you get nothing at all.

One could argue that if you don’t care about time to completion, and developers can effectively switch between projects then there is no problem here, since your efficiency is still optimal. However we all know that business *does* care about time to completion- it’s just the developers who shouldn’t and/or don’t. The point here isn’t to minimize blocked time, although that is obviously a goal, but that it is properly tracked by the chess timer, so we can see exactly what proportion of a task or project’s total duration it took up. This isn’t something I have seen in my (limited) experience, but am interested to know if other companies do track.

Surely it should just be “few cases were affected by delays due to technical errors”. OK, I concede that there is a modicum of additional information about the distribution of technological delay across cases in the original sentence, but that really wasn’t the point.

When I’m reading text quickly, I’m not neccessarily going to read every single word (which is what I imagine most people do with a book on software management, otherwise God help them), so why make it unneccesarily difficult to decipher with the stupid hyperbole?! (The answer is, I suppose, because the author wants us to buy into their theory)

On thursday I gave a 30 minute presentation to the London Python Dojo about Airplay SDK, and some work some colleagues and I did on porting python and creating some bindings. The project is hosted at https://github.com/guy127917/python-airplay. It’s kind of raw at the moment, but we have some basic stuff running, and the slow down doesn’t seem too bad for 3d stuff, so it looks promising. Some of the bindings require changes to the SDK which aren’t available to the public right now, but let me know if that is an issue and I’ll see what we can do.

The presentation went quite well I think, I guess it was more of a talk than a presentation since I didn’t take any slides. I didn’t really get through everything that I wanted to- 30 minutes absolutely flew by! So moral of the story is, though you may be able to wing it, it’s better to have some structure. The main reason I didn’t do more preparation is because I spent all my time getting a tech demo running, which only accounted for about 15 seconds of the talk. An iPad is a lot less impressive than a projector in front of a crowd!

I really appreciate having the opportunity to present though, so thanks to the Dojo and Mr Tollervey for giving me the chance. I really enjoyed it and hopefully can do something similar in the future. I actually wrote about wanting to do some talks not very long ago, so it’s nice to see a bit of progress there.

In fact, that post has reminded me why I like writing things down from time to time- it makes the whole “I was such an idiot 2 years ago, now I’m MUCH wiser” mentality more transparent and you can see it and isolate it if it is causing issues. So hopefully I will write more regularly in the future (famous last blog words).

It’s nice to have objects like these in your life. Just little pieces of quality innocuously reminding you the value of doing things properly. People seem to find this in many ways- watches, cars, motorbikes, Apple *cough* products, and also less techy things- designer clothes, hand made jewellery, specialty coffee and many many more places. Having either pointless or pointlessly specified objects around is a very common thing in western civilization, and why not!

R and I have been trying to find some items to decorate the walls of our flat since we moved in, and so far we’ve come up a bit blank. We kind of agree about a few different pieces, but haven’t committed to buying anything. Personally I like the idea of having some sort of inspiring imagery on the walls, something thought provoking, or even something which just looks nice, as long as it is consistent and not a novelty. But I can’t get excited about choosing something, and I’m not sure exactly why.

I think my first reaction to buying some piece of ‘art’ to put on the wall is to think of all of the other million people who have that particular print. I guess there is very little ‘quality’ which I would like to surround myself with in a digital print.

My second reaction is that whatever you have on your wall is making a statement, and I just look at things an think, ‘well it looks nice and all, but do I really want people to look at this and just think “he likes dogs”.’ It’s like people who walk around with t-shirts which say “DRAG RACER ’78″ on. I just don’t understand why people want people to associate themselves with shit like that. Not that there is anything wrong with drag racing, but I’m pretty sure there is a stupid t-shirt to drag racer ratio in the world right now.

I like the idea of buying something from an unknown or young artist, maybe getting something at least a little bit unique. I wouldn’t mind paying a bit for the privilige either, I guess I just need to get out and see some exhibitions or something. Also, R and I have to agree on stuff too, so it’s not like I can just go out and buy a 10 ft canvas of a melting skeleton or something (on balance, probably a positive thing…)

I probably sound super pretentious here, but actually I’m not. As with most walks of life I think everyone should surround themselves with whatever they want. Just because I walk into a room and think “if I had to wake up everyday and see that I’d probably rip my face off”, it doesn’t mean I think any less of the proprietor, except maybe in the “me-and-you-art-compatability” column, which let’s face it, isn’t that important.

“None of things I am about to say have any relation to my opinions. They are just words and sentences- the meaning of them is completely arbitrary.

“You are fat. You are a liar. You smell.”

I don’t know why you would do this, maybe you think that the sound of those syllables are particularly pleasant, maybe you never get the chance to say those things to someone in a meaningful way but you were interested to find out what it would feel like to speak the words out loud anyway, maybe you are reciting the lyrics to a song. But why shouldn’t you be free to do this? The point is, the words convey a meaning on their own, regardless of the intention of the speaker (pre-disclosed or not). It would take a very strong character to ignore completely those derisions, even with the preceding sentences- a character who could ignore the nagging doubt that they were the true feelings of the speaker.

So what if you want to explore the rhythm, rhyme and role of language? What if you want to see how other people react to the simple words, meaningful to your or their life or not? For example if you want to write a book about a promiscuous man, without your girlfriend questioning your faithfulness or desires, how would you separate to her your real and fictional psyche? It is certainly not unacceptable to want to explore the world through one’s imagination, and sharing this should be encouraged, but yet you will be judged based on the fictional characters and plots you create as if they were your own desires.

In many ways the situation is entirely expected. If I wrote a book about killing in a particularly brutal way, I would expect for people to look at me a little different, presumably thinking “is he looking at that knife and salivating?”. This isn’t a good thing though, in fact I think it is a terrible thing. Just because you are thinking about and considering the idea of cheating or stealing or paedophilia, it doesn’t mean you are considering cheating or stealing or wanking off over naked children. We are capable of meta thought!

In my opinion the mind should be totally protected. No man should be judged for his thoughts, good, evil and indifferent thoughts included. Only when actions manifesting these thoughts could negatively affect other people should judgement take place. In my opinion writing, art, and music are all physical manifestations of thought, not actions, and thus should come under the same protection. I am thus opposed to censorship, though I do support content rating, and publishing channels should be free to support whatever they want.

I think there is a gap between the ideal freedom of thought, and the natural human ability to separate the meaning of words or thought from intent- “genuine” or “real” thought. That is not to say however that with consideration every one of us cannot come to fair conclusions on these matters, but I think this is one place that it is important to use this consideration rather than resort to instinctual feelings. I think that as a society we should avoid knee-jerk reactions to every day things, like what people say, and bigger things, like the Wikileaks cablegate scandal. I think we should be very careful about protecting freedom of thought and communication.

The next post is something I wrote a while ago.