I’ve been using Movable Type as the power (with a capital ‘P’) behind this site for the last few years and I’ve been pretty happy on the whole. One thing that was missing was a decent WYSIWYG editor (so that when I write a post I can see how it’ll look when it gets published) - but I sorted that one out by using TinyMCE. Another was comment spam but I fixed that with CAPTCHA. Everything was great, it was working happily and despite the fact that I really liked the look of Wordpress (more about that later), I was happy to stay put.

Then recently Movable Type 4 was released. I installed a beta version to have a play around and I really liked it. It’s organised similarly to Wordpress (which is much nicer to work with than Movable Type 3) and it seemed very slick. That is, until I tried editing a post. Six Apart have implemented their own WYSIWYG editor and, to be frank, it’s nowhere near good enough. I never find myself switching to the plain HTML view to fix something TinyMCE has messed up and it was only when testing MT4’s rich editor that I realised just how good TinyMCE is. MT4 produces some real garbage HTML underneath, doesn’t let you edit the properties of images you’ve placed such as the CSS class or style you’d like to apply to it (unless you switch to HTML view), doesn’t support tables (except with HTML view) and when creating a new post it doesn’t even surround the text with paragraph markers (unless you switch to HTML view) and you end up having lots of line breaks entered instead of paragraphs. These things may seem minor (and there are many more) but they’re annoying enough for me to not upgrade my installation. It’s the 21st century, I shouldn’t have to be hand-coding HTML to produce a basic, standard blog post about my hair or new football boots.

I have attempted to write a plug-in to get TinyMCE working with MT4 but haven’t managed it thus far - the entry editing page is quite different to the MT3 one and is proving rather tricky! Plus I’ve not really sat down and dedicated a lot of time to figuring it out.

I will say though that there are plenty of other slick features I like such as being able to create pages (a la Wordpress), manage uploaded files (such as pictures) more easily, some more powerful template tags, finer-grained user permissions, better look-and-feel and just basically a more logically organised front-end. But until I manage to use a better WYSIWYG editor, I won’t be upgrading.

Which brings me onto Wordpress. Many times over the years I’ve been tempted to migrate my site over to Wordpress. It’s been ahead of MT for ages in terms of features and the fact that it’s written in PHP (which I know) rather than Perl (which I don’t and don’t particularly want to) makes me like it more. The latest version - 2.3 - has just been released and after installing it I’m impressed. The management pages are much faster than MT4’s, nicely laid out, and best of all - it uses TinyMCE for entry editing! I can quite easily write a plugin (plugins are incredibly simple to write since they’re PHP which I know as I said) to use the same options I use in TinyMCE on my current MT install. I’ve looked into migrating the content (pretty straightforward) as well as the layout (time consuming, but not hard) and maintaining the links structure so no links get broken and it’s mighty tempting.

Of course, you as a reader couldn’t care less, you see the output, not the tool that creates the site. “So why are you telling us about this John?” I hear you say - to which I reply that “you’ve got some attitude mister!”. Well I spend most of my time in Movable Type and very little of it actually browsing my own site, and you know what they say: a change is as good as a rest!

I know that the sensible choice is to just stick with what I’ve got now. It works and changing platform won’t really make any different to those reading my ramblings. Just because something is new and shiny doesn’t mean I should instinctively use it. But if I know me I’ll find myself sitting in my house on a rainy Sunday with nothing better to do and then port the lot to Wordpress. Or maybe I’ll properly crack putting a decent editor into MT4. We shall see… And in Yorkshire most Sundays are rainy Sundays!

If - like me - you've just redecorated a room in your house (in my case my office / second TV room) then you've probably got some excess furniture. Particularly if you went to IKEA for shelves and came back with stupidly expensive floor-to-ceiling book cases (which, to be fair, are both solid and very cool). Normally I'd just break them up and throw them down the local tip but these are different days. Now I have a Mac that just begs me to do creative things with it. When combined with the fact that everyone who knows me probably thinks I have a massive ego - I don't really but nobody believes me - I thought I may as well give them what they want. So I came up with the following picture and emailed it round work to see if there were any takers:

And incredibly I got rid of the lot within about 20 minutes! Excellent! Now, when it comes time to sell my car, I wonder what I'll be able to come up with… You see, this is one of the many reasons that my brother works in marketing and I don't - I think he got the marketing gene and I got something else - not sure what!

I haven't read a non-technical book for well over a year. The main reason for this is that when I read books I tend to do it to excess. Like my mother before me I'm able to read books rather quickly - I can get through an average-sized 300 page book in a day or two (although normally I like to take it easy and stretch it out another day or so) - and when I do that I'll pick up another book straight away and so on. This means that I can get through a lot of books in a short period of time. The side-effect is that I tend to burn out after a while and a year can go by when I don't read a thing. Then I'll pick up a book and the cycle starts over.

For example, I borrowed the first Inspector Rebus book written by Ian Rankin from a colleague a few years ago. I really enjoyed it (being set in Edinburgh was a great start). After reading it I realised that Ian Rankin had in fact written a dozen or so Inspector Rebus books (17 now) so I made it my mission to read them all. I ordered 3 sets of trilogies and then proceeded to read 8 of the books back to back. Then I burned out and didn't pick up another book for quite some time.

As I said, I haven't read a non-technical book in over a year (maybe two now I think about it) and while I was away on holiday on Arran the other week I spied an Andy McNab book on the bookcase (called Aggressor as it happens). I sat down and read it and rather enjoyed it (an easy read with adventure, sex, guns, and lots of tough-guy SAS-speak). Following that I spotted the first two books from the Terry Pratchett Discworld series. For years I've been meaning to read them but since there are so many I knew it would be a major ordeal to get through them all (which my compulsive reading habits would demand) and refrained.

So here were the first two books in the series and I had no excuse but to read them. Which I did. I was halfway through the second book when we left but I decided to "borrow" it and return it when I'd finished (reminder to self: make good on that promise). Pratchett's humour really cracks me up and I kept annoying my good lady by bursting into laughter at random times. When I finished the second book I was straight on Amazon marketplace buying up more of them for 1p a pop. Then I had a look and realised that he's written about 36 of the damn things! Since I want to avoid burnout this time I'm attempting to pace myself by only buying 3-4 books at a time, reading them and then getting some more - trying to drip-feed myself instead of binge eating them.

Anyway, I've just started book six (Wyrd Sisters) and I'll try and take my time about it. It's better than sitting in bed a night reading about regular expressions!

While I don’t like to be on the bleeding edge of new technology and software, I do like to stay on the leading edge where possible so when Windows Vista was released late last year on MSDN I installed it on a machine at home, liked the look of it and then put it on my work machine (wiping the hard drive first as it needed a good tidy up anyway).

At first I liked it. The new user interface looked slick and a cut above Windows XP, the Windows+Tab 3D effect looked very nice indeed and I even liked the way the new address bar turned into buttons so going up several folder levels involved less clicking. After installing all the software I use I even got used to living with the UAC popups - although I eventually turned the whole thing off and ran as an administrator since most of my time at work is spent working with Visual Studio 2005 and IIS which both require you to run as an admin if you want to do any debugging. I know it’s “wrong” but I’ve never once had a computer virus or piece of spyware so I wasn’t concerned.

All was well for a while but as time passed I started to get more and more frustrated with Vista. For one thing, it’s significantly slower than XP. My work machine is a dual core P4 3GHz with 1.5GB of RAM so isn’t a lightweight. But run a couple of instances of Visual Studio, Outlook and a few other apps and it would grind to a halt in a way it didn’t with XP. I’d spend a lot of time looking at the ‘Grey Screen of Misery’ (right - question mark added for emphasis).

So I had to learn to be more patient between starting a debugging session and anything actually happening. I realised that if I was in a hurry I was going to get annoyed so I relaxed a bit. But then Visual Studio started to crash. A lot. And in a multitude of different ways. Like so:

It would crash in the middle of it sitting around doing nothing. It would crash when I was debugging some code. It would crash when I closed it. When I opened it. Just any time it felt like it - and it was driving me crazy! Writing software is something that you need to be able to concentrate for extended periods of time to do well - and when your machine is flaky and falling over frequently requiring numerous reboots you just can’t get anything done. (And before you ask, it was indeed doing the same before I disabled UAC - it wasn’t spyware or a virus, it’s just the standard behaviour that I and my colleagues who installed it came across). I even went as far as to completely uninstall Visual Studio and put it all back on again. No change.

Vista’s nifty feature of being able to check for problem solutions from the web wasn’t very handy either (right). As with most things that don’t work when you’ve tried them numerous times I gave up checking for solutions when it never found any.

I started considering wiping my work machine and re-installing XP and the more crashes I came across doing my day job the stronger my feelings got. Eventually I had a bad day where I got hardly anything done and I actually had a lot of work to do but every time I started something Visual Studio crashed and I had to almost start again. I cracked and copied all my documents onto an external hard drive. The next morning I got out an XP SP2 CD and put it back on.

Here I am a week later and I don’t regret my move one bit. XP is much faster, Visual Studio is rock solid again and hasn’t crashed once. I can safely say that while there are indeed some really nice new features to Vista (I’ll probably write about them once the bitterness has gone), I don’t miss anything at all about it. Not a thing. I’ve read about loads of problems with Vista and graphics cards, other pieces of hardware, iTunes and that sort of thing but my work machine really only has Visual Studio, Outlook and a couple of web browsers running. Nothing special and no on-the-edge hardware. And yet myself and my colleagues who took the plunge have found that Vista just doesn’t cut it as a day-to-day development system. What finally made me roll back to XP was the fact that the other developers who stuck with XP weren’t having any crashes at all.

I can only join the chorus of people who say that Vista really isn’t worth upgrading to for the time being if you’re a software developer. I’ll mention that my good lady’s laptop - which is used exclusively for surfing the internet - is running Vista and has been as solid as a rock since I installed it, so I’m not saying Vista isn’t ready for most people’s uses. It just isn’t ready for mine, or anybody who does the same sort of work as me.

See, I wrote a whole post about Windows Vista and never once mentioned how much more I love my Mac. That’s for another day!

My good lady and I visited our friends in Kent (which is a lovely place by the way, I'd never have guessed there was such a nice area so close to London - although it's a little out of my price bracket) and spent a good 3 hours of our Saturday night watching the stage version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If nothing else I wanted to see how they could fit 3 novels worth of story (the standard films of course totalled around 9 hours - 11 for the extended version). In short, they cut rather a lot out!

I'll start with the positives. The effects really were amazing - like nothing I've seen on stage before - from making Bilbo disappear at the start (I'm sure it was something to do with mirrors - but it was very impressive) to the stage itself (which was composed of several sections that could move up and down independently) to the Balrog (big fiery demon bloke), the giant spider (which produced rather a lot of gasps from people in the theatre). It was clear that a hell of a lot of money had been spent on the production and the result was astonishing.

The athleticism and acrobatics are worth a mention too. The orcs were somersaulting around on springy stilts as though they were on wires (they weren't) and the physicality of the dancing was really impressive. Plus, the guy playing Gollam was really good too. Aside from playing the split personality well, his movement, flexibility and the way he leaped around the stage in a manner no human should be able to was incredible - his body's going to be wrecked when he hits his 40s!

So all in all it was a really impressive visual experience. Which brings me onto the negatives. Firstly, the music didn't really hit the high drama levels you'd expect from a play such as this. To suck you into the plot you need those bits of music that just send tingles down your spine but that wasn't the case here. Also, some of the singing wasn't of the standard you'd expect from the west end. To give you an example, during the first song by the hobbits I thought to myself "I can sing about as well as that" which if you've ever had the misfortune to hear my singing tells you all you need to know!

There was one scene with the Elves leaving middle earth near the start that was excellent. Strong music, strong and powerful singing along with strong emotions. Sadly the rest of the play didn't measure up to that level. Next was some of the acting. The guy playing Aragorn just didn't sound convincing at all. I don't know if he was the understudy or not but his performance lacked any authority or passion. Likewise the wizards were a bit light on the authority front. Hearing Gandalf giggling like a schoolgirl when the decision was made to create the fellowship of the ring at the start just wasn't what I'd expect. Still, it could have been worse, Gandalf could have had a solo! (Actually, that would have been funny).

As for the story itself, the way they fitted it into 3 hours was to cut out a hell of a lot of the original story. This had the effect that if you hadn't read the books or seen the film you wouldn't have had the slightest clue what the hell was going on. It seemed from scene one that they were trying to rush through the dialogue, but then they'd linger for ages on an irrelevant scene like at Lothlorian which is a minor diversion from the plot at best. 

So like the curate's egg, the show was good in parts. Well worth seeing for the incredible effects and stage. But if you're going for the singing or the acting or as a diehard fan of the trilogy, then you might be a bit disappointed.

I've been using the defect tracking / customer support software FogBugz - brainchild of blogging A-lister Joel Spolsky - for a few years now and I've been a big fan. I've used it for work as well as for home projects such as my beloved John's Background Switcher and it's made my life a million times easier. Anybody who writes software, whether for money or fun, needs some form of bug tracking in their life if they want to remain organised (even a simple spreadsheet will do). But FogBugz is much more than a mere bug tracker though.

I also use it to handle all the email that comes into my web site. I get frequent requests for new features or help with my background switcher (as well as random emails about all sorts) and that all gets fed directly into FogBugz. This means I can track each person's request from replying to them for clarification and having a conversation, turning it into a feature for a future version of JBS that I can estimate, decide which version to put it in, implement it (it also hooks into my source control) and create a release note that turns up in the release notes (not surprisingly). It does this all without any thought from me and I don't need to keep a hundred things in my head at once (I can manage about 7 then things start to fall out of it). The chance of me screwing something up, not replying to someone or completely forgetting about a suggestion gets reduced to zero. I also use the discussion forum functionality when I run beta tests of JBS so when people find a problem I can turn that into a bug and fix it with full circle visibility (i.e. I can look at the bug and go directly to the forum post or see the code change I made to implement it and so on).

While I don't use FogBugz at my current place of work (although I would if I could) if I were to run my own company I know I could use it to handle everything from customer support to defect tracking and release management. Nice.

When Fog Creek requested beta testers for the long awaited FogBugz 6 I jumped at the chance. Having seen an alpha version running on Joel On Software I knew it contained a Wiki which would plug a hole that FogBugz 5 had. While it was great for tracking features, bugs and emails, writing a spec and documentation would happen outside FogBugz which was less than ideal. Integrating a Wiki would be cool.

So for the last couple of months I've been testing and using FogBugz 6 and despite being initially a bit shocked by the redesign (mostly because once you get used to something any change seems scary - see below) I like it and really think it's a big step forward.

The wiki implementation is great and it's encouraged me to sit down and write some specs for big features for JBS (about time too) as well as keeping notes like my list of beta testers and such things in one handy place. When combined with community users - which means anybody can create an account in my FogBugz and I can give access to wikis and discussion forums of my choosing - I'll be able to interact much more closely with people using my software.

There are loads of new features which you can read all about in Fog Creek's What's New page but one of the really cool ones is 'Evidence-Based Scheduling'. It's a rather clever way of predicting the probability that you'll be able to ship versions of your software by certain dates. Each developer can estimate how long each task and, taking into account how accurate each developer has been in past estimates, you can see a fancy graph that lets you see the probabilities. Like the following which shows that it's 94% likely that I'll be able to release JBS 3.2 on October 3rd if I work solidly on it from now until then (which I won't):

The more releases you go through the more accurate it will be and the more confident you'll become with it. It's rather clever and something I'd love to use at work where release dates are a lot more important than on my own projects.

There are more new features than you can shake a stick at (including a much more powerful search system) and I'm really impressed by it. I'll continue recommending FogBugz to anybody who'll listen with more enthusiasm than ever as it's quite simply the best solution I've come across for managing the whole product development process (not just the software development part, I mean everything) by a country mile. Fog Creek now offer a hosted version of FogBugz so you don't even have to set up your own server if you don't want to. There's no excuse to not give it a try - you won't be disappointed.

I’ve just spent the past week on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. It’s often described as Scotland in miniature and they’re not kidding. It’s an hour’s ferry ride from the mainland and as we arrived we were greeted with the scene from King Kong when they’re sailing through the mist seeing the cliffs looming out of the gloom. Fortunately the weather immediately improved and within 15 minutes it was actually rather sunny and so it continued for the rest of the week.

The next day we took a drive around the island (which is about 35 miles in total) and this was where the ‘mini Scotland’ comparison proved to be right. You’ve got sandy beaches, rolling tree-covered hills, more rugged cliffs along stony beaches, moorland, castles, pointy mountains and everything in between. It’s a lovely place and best of all, it’s not densely populated and there weren’t that many people around - which was the whole point.

We spent most of the days hiking up those aforementioned pointy mountains which meant that my good lady spent most of the week complaining at me for dragging her up those aforementioned pointy mountains! To be fair though, we did get some pretty impressive views of the beautiful island and some nice places to have lunch:

Annoyingly though, each time we went up the main ridge containing the highest mountain on the island (Goatfell) the visibility disappeared meaning no nice views. I’ve had the bad luck over the years that pretty much any time I stand on the summit of a mountain it’s shrouded in cloud and there is no view at all. My good lady turned back before the top of Goatfell as she was knackered and wasn’t enthused by the lack of visibility. I pressed on and while I could see the sun trying to poke through the clouds, I couldn’t see much further than 20 yards in front of me (see right). Lovely! I hung around for about as long as it took to take the photo then started running back down to catch up. It was nice to be able to bound past people from rock to rock like I’m still in my 20’s - I’m not over the hill yet! (Pun intended).

One day we went over to the Holy Island, which is an even smaller island about a mile off the south-east coast of Arran. The interesting thing about the island is that at the north side is ‘The Centre for World Peace and Health’ which has a retreat people can stay at. The even more interesting thing is that on the south side is a Buddhist retreat. We walked over the top of the island (it’s about 400m high at its highest point) and came back around the coast. On our way back we saw quite a few painted boulders (pictured right).

Now personally, if I’m trying to respect the environment and be at harmony with nature then my mindset is to not affect it and leave it exactly the way it is (or as close to that as possible). The National Trust goes to great lengths to ensure that the Lake District looks exactly like it did a century ago for the same reason (even going so far as to pay to have Lakeland sheep - which are amazingly cute - living on the hills). But painting brightly coloured pictures like this every few hundred yards in a beautifully scenic, mountainous place just smacks of bad taste and a total lack of harmony with your environment. I’m all for anybody’s right to follow their own religion but things like this cross the line for me and have no place in my country. Leave graffiti to inner cities, not the Scottish countryside.

Still, I had a lovely week off and will definitely go back to Arran next year (if nothing else than to hopefully spot a Golden Eagle that apparently can be found on the island). If you want to see everything Scotland has to offer but can’t be bothered to drive 300 miles around the place to find out, then visit Arran, it’s got the lot!