Author: Mike Roberts

Super Furry Animals @ Bowery Ballroom, Beth Orton @ Hiro Ballroom, Hot Chip @ The Music Hall of Williamsburg

Since I got to New York 2 years ago (is it 2 years already? Yikes) I’ve been managing to get to a lot more gigs than I ever used to do in the UK. Last year I  went to 10 or so shows, including my personal highlight of the year of seeing The Police at the Virgin Festival (a special ‘between album’ show by Franz Ferdinand at the intimate Bowery Ballroom was a close second.)

This year is kicking off similarly as concert season gets up and running.

The first show of the year was Super Furry Animals (SFA) at the Bowery Ballroom, a quick 5 minute walk from my apartment. I’ve never been a fan enough to buy any of their CDs but I heard they were a decent live act. The show was definitely worth going to, the one disappointing part was the crowd who had pretty much halved in size by the time the band played ‘The Man Don’t Give a Fuck’ (pretty much the only song I know from hearing the band in other people’s college rooms in 1996(ish) .)

A week ago I saw Beth Orton on her first live tour for a couple of years. I remember first hearing Beth Orton on a Glastonbury show on the BBC in the summer of 96. Her first album, Trailer Park, came out later than year and has been a regular in my listening ever since, but I’ve never seen her perform. These days she’s dropped the electronica leanings she had back then (partly from her work with William Orbit and The Chemical Brothers) and her style is a very pleasing folk / indie crossover. Her live voice was a lot better than I thought it might be, she had a fun stage presence and I definitely hope to see her again in a few years time.

Finally for now I saw Hot Chip last night at the newly refurbished and renamed Music Hall of Williamsburg. Hot Chip’s ‘The Warning’ was the driving-force of the UK’s electro renaissance of a year or 2 ago. I liked it, but wasn’t overwhelmed, but this was another band I wanted to see because of the promise of their live act. Again, no disappointments here – they were energetic, unpretentious, producing a very tight show full of opportunities for the crowd to stretch their dancing legs. I think that seeing these guys in a couple of years with a little more experience under their belt at a bigger venue would be a fantastic experience.

All 3 of these venues are relatively small and it was nice to be able to get reasonably close to the artists at all of them. The Hiro Ballroom probably wins ‘best gig venue I’ve ever been to’ though – the sound was fabulous (especially for an acoustic show like Beth’s was) and the interior was lovely too, more than making up for the strange practice of keeping the crowd waiting outside for ages and only letting people in in small groups.

I already have several more shows lined up – the highlight of the summer so far is looking like the triple bill of REM, Modest Mouse and The National at Madison Square Garden, but it’s the unexpected surprises that I’m really looking forward to.

Job opportunities in my group at NYSE Euronext

I’ve been on my current team a year now, and things are coming along very nicely. We’ve got a great bunch of people, the agile / XP practice is moving along nicely (lots of pairing, big whiteboard walls, TDD, automated acceptance testing, etc.), and we moved the desktop development environment to fully-specced MacBook Pros with 30″ external screens. Oh, and the pool table is still here so we’ve been honing our skills on that too.

The business has also got more exciting since the update I gave year ago. The NYSE merged with Euronext, and the team here is working closely with teams in Europe and Asia, as well as obviously working with our external customers too. We’ve also purchased Wombat – these guys have some great technology and I’m looking forward to our engineering groups working closely together.

We’re growing, and growing quickly! As such we’re looking for some more great developers to join the team. The most number of open positions are for our Senior Java Engineer position – this is a server-side java role. If you’ve got at least 4 or 5 years development experience and have very strong Java fundamentals skills (including concurrency / multi-threading) this would be most interesting to you.

Furthermore we’re looking for a small team to take ownership of the UI parts of our application. This is going to consist mostly of a re-write and adding new features, and the technologies would be largely up to you (assuming that they can run on a JVM on the server-side.)

The specifics of these are 2 roles are available below:

We’re also looking for product managers / business analysts, ideally with agile experience.

If you’re interested in finding out any more about these roles please email me – I look forward to hearing from you!

Kent Beck on code maintainabilty

I don’t often have entries that are just quotes, but I liked this from Kent Beck on the importance of code maintainability:

Your organization is going to spend a lot more on somebody – you or somebody else – reading what you’re writing right now than they are ever going to spend on you writing it.

You’re going to read that code yourself 10 to 100 times for every time you write it, so it’s worth taking the trouble to make it readable. You’re going to modify it five times after you write it the first time, so it makes sense to make it easy to change.

Facebook & Work

I’ve really enjoyed using Facebook for the last year or so. Of all the social networking apps out there I  think it’s been one that has actually added to my overall happiness.

That said, with any new social medium, we still need to figure out what the ‘rules’ are to what we as individuals are happy with. A good case in point for me has been what to do with Facebook and colleagues at work.

Facebook has work ‘networks’ which are interesting ways of seeing what your co-workers are up to if you’re friendly with them in an extra-curricular way, but this situation can start getting complicated if your work relationship gets strained in any way. For instance, I recently saw a Facebook status update of a ‘facebook friend’ who I work with that made an already tricky situation more frustrating for me.

As such, I’m introducing a new policy for myself to limit my Facebook / work overlap somewhat – I’m not going to have any ‘facebook friends’ that are within my reporting hierarchy (i.e. if they report to me to any level, or if I report to them from any depth). For now, I’m happy to be linked to people outside of that, but even that is questionable for the long term.

Has anyone else thought about this at all?

HD-DVD going Beta, Blu-ray to follow relatively soon

The high definition disc war is pretty much a done deal now – Blu-ray is the victor. I knew it was happening, but when I got an email from Netflix today telling me I wouldn’t be getting HD-DVDs from them for much longer it confirmed my suspicions.

I did pick the wrong team – I bought an HD-DVD add-on for my XBox 360 only a few months ago. In fact the speed at which the tide has shifted is the one thing that has surprised me.

One good thing is I didn’t waste too much money – most of the HD-DVDs I’ve watched have been rented from Netflix (Heroes Season 1, Letters from Iwo Jima, etc.), so I’ll just buy a Playstation 3 in a couple of months and switch to rented Blu-ray discs instead.

That said, I don’t think Blu-ray will even last – Apple’s new HD movie rental is the sign of things to come, and I predict before too long on-demand, internet streamed, HD content will dwarf any Blu-ray sales or rentals. So my PS3 will likely be the last physical medium video entertainment device I buy.

Summer '07 music

This entry is a little late coming, however I have a whole new batch of CDs arriving in the next week or so I need to clear this out!

Following my Spring music purchases, I collected some more over the summer – some bought, some given.

Summer 07 Albums

Jose Gonzalez is a Swedish spanish/folk/indie guitarist singer/songwriter of Argentinian descent. Confused? Don’t be. Just buy Veneer, turn the lights down, and let your ears tell you how much they love you.

I first heard Editors second album, An End Has a Start, at a July 4th party in Brooklyn. My immediate impression was that they had grown a long way, and that this was a really good album. Unfortunately after 2 or 3 listenings the impact was lost and ultimately I was disappointed. Birmingham’s answer to Interpol unfortunately they are not.

Belle & Sebastian’s The Boy With The Arab Strap has been one of the purchases this year that goes in the ‘buying the artists I listened to at college but never got around to buying’ bucket. Along with it (but unpictured in this list) go Echobelly’s On and Sleeper’s Smart. One interesting thing about Belle & Sebastian is that they sound a little like Nick Drake, but 25 years on. Both artists go in the category ‘music to wake up on a cold Sunday morning’ by.

Another British sophomore effort next – Arctic Monkeys Favourite Worst Nightmare. It doesn’t have the punch of the first album but still a worthwhile purchase. I’m looking forward to where these lads go next.

Hybrid are one of my favourite electronic music outfits. They play what I can only describe as orchestral, film soundtrack, trance. Wide Angle is one of their earlier efforts, but probably my favourite, I’d just never got around to getting it on CD. This version, Wider Angle, came with an enjoyable second disc which was a live show from around the time the album was made.

Mint Royale are another electronic group, and pop is.. is a fantastic ‘best of’ that I heard played very loudly while being driven back from Baltimore to Philadelphia from the Virgin Festival. Their music ranges from big beat (the remix of Terrorvision’s Tequila from ’99) through pop (Don’t Falter) to more Ibiza-friendly tracks (The Sexiest Man in Jamaica) As summer CDs go, this was a good’un.

Edan’s Beauty and the Beat came from the same car journey. Hip-hop using 70’s prog rock as the backing? Even a non hip-hop fan like me can’t argue with that.

Onto one of my most anticipated new albums of the year: Interpol’s Our Love to Admire. Unfortunately I felt about it the same way as I did when I saw them live – good, but not the jaw dropping feeling when I first heard their first 2 albums. My hope is that they’ll take this year as a stepping stone towards true greatness.

I enjoyed the Thea Gilmore album I bought in April, so in the summer I followed up with her earlier effort, Avalanche, my dad’s favourite. I don’t know why, but I did actually prefer Harpo’s Ghost. I think it maybe the higher production values actually worked out for her on the later album.

Talking of Dad, he bought me Ryan Adams’ latest (at the time) Easy Tiger for my birthday. I’ve only listened to this a couple of times and it didn’t grab me but I have an earlier Ryan CD coming soon and look forward to a comparison of a bunch of his albums.

Also a gift was Bruce Springsteen’s We shall overcome – The Seeger Sessions. This a very un-Bruce album, being covers of american folk songs. While I appreciated it, I didn’t necessarily enjoy it. I’m looking forward to getting Magic, his latest album of a more usual type.

Yikes, a third British sophomore (I really should have sorted the CDs out a little better) – this time Bloc Party’s A Weekend in the City. Some of the youthful enthusiasm seems lost (there’s no Helicopter on here) but I think it works better as a complete album. They were good live in September too, better than I expected.

I’ve never owned any Manic Street Preachers CDs and their latest record Send Away the Tigers got good reviews. They were valid – this is a great piece of energy-filled brit pop, harkening back to the summer of ’96. More to come on the Manics in my next list.

Closing up this summery collection is the ’07 release from the Chemical Brothers: We Are The Night. This was a big disappointment – there was nothing new here (including a bunch of re-used samples from previous albums), apart from the terrible totally random track The Salmon Dance. I’m a big Chemical’s fan, but this album and the disappointing show at the Hammerstein Ballroom makes me think their days may be over. I hope not.

So that’s an end to this list, but I have 15 new CDs winging their way to me from Amazon, plus a couple of CDs that I got for Christmas so there’ll be another one soon!

The Facebook Douchebag Quotient

Facebook is my second, ok, third favourite new geekyness of the year (after my iPhone and lolcats). Despite the wonderous waste of time in hitting ‘ignore’ for the latest inane pirate / ninja / super-awesome-totally-better-than-the-last-super-wall oriented application I receive an invite for, it has actually provided the ability to contact people I haven’t talked to for ages, and allowed me to email people who change their real email address / lose their phone more often than I complain about tourists dawdling outside of my work building trying to get into Century 21.

But with all good things, must come the bad, and the great Karma Leveller of Facebook is the Facebook Douchebag. All of you who have used Facebook know them – they have a profile photo that makes them look way better than they do in normal life, it takes 10 minutes to scroll to the end of their profile page, they have 5 new brain-numbing applications everyday that you get spammed with notifications for, and that’s just for starters.

In my new found work-life as a manager (yes, I know that makes me a whole other class of douche, and yes I can deal with that, thankyouverymuch) I use metrics often to categorise problems. And as such, I look for a metric to qualify the douchebageriness of certain individuals on Facebook. I think the answer to my search is a simple formula:

Dq (Facebook Douchebag Quotient) = x / y, where x = number of photos of yourself you’ve added to your profile, and y = the number of facebook friends you have.

My suggestion is that Dq should always for any reasonable human being be less than 1. Frankly, anything more than about .5 is questionable. Mine is something around 0.01, but then again, I link to my Flickr page from my Facebook profile so that may be considered cheating. The biggest douche I’ve yet to come across has a Dq of 2.5 – undeniable by any standards, even before you hear that the latest applications on his profile are What kind of flirt are you and How classy are you?

The only question that remains is what to do when you identify a Facebook Douchebag – remove them from your friend list? Humiliate them on their ‘Wall’? Email all their friends? Or just passive-aggressively call them out on your own navel-gazing part of the information superhighway?

Wondering where your Gmail IMAP access is?

I was very glad to hear a few weeks ago when Google announced IMAP access for Gmail, the main reason being that this will mean my iPhone view of my email is much more closely tied to the Gmail application’s view of my mail. They’ve even done some clever stuff like using IMAP folders to simulate some of the Gmail experience (e.g. to remove a mail from inbox, but leave it available in the ‘all mail’ view, delete it from your IMAP inbox and it still appears in an ‘All Mail’ IMAP folder.)

The problem for me was that the ‘use IMAP’ option wasn’t appearing in my Gmail account. I waited, waited some more, fired off an email to some friends at Google, still waited, and still no IMAP access. What gives? Well today I found what gave. After trawling some help pages (help pages, who reads them anyway?) I found out that Gmail IMAP is only available if you set the ‘Global display language’ in your account’s settings to ‘English (US)’. I looked and sure enough it was set to ‘English (UK)’ – changing it to the american setting turned on IMAP access immediately.

Leopard First Impressions

I’ve now had some amount of 3 days to play with Leopard, the new version of Apple’s OS X operating system, after lining up outside the SoHo store on Friday night – yeah, I’m a fanboy. Here are some first impressions (and consider I purely use OS X at home, not at work (yet )

New Finder – Yep, I like it overall. The new ‘path bar’ feature is good, but why it won’t let me copy a UNIX equivalent I don’t know. The metaphor still needs a little thinking – it’s not a total hierarchy (I can’t click on the category headings) and sometimes I end up in places I can’t navigate to. No biggies, but a couple of times I’ve gone ‘huh?’

Network shares work a little differently – a couple of times also causing ‘huh?’s – including Airport Extreme disks no longer turn up on the desktop. You can make all network shares appear on the desktop in a preferences window but I just did that on my machine and saw a bug.

I’m not really fussed about the quick look / cover flow stuff but I guess if I was using it more for work that might be useful.

Dock/Menu Bar – Meh. I don’t hate it like some do but it’s not rocking my world. The new ’stacks’ feature is ok, I’ve started using it, but I’m not sure how big a deal it is. The download stack is useful because I’m trying Safari (see below). I’m fine with the coloured menu bar, the interesting thing is on my oldish G4 mac mini it’s solid grey as opposed to the translucent look on my Core 2 Duo iMac.

Safari – I’m giving Safari 3 a go. This is partly because Camino doesn’t quite work as I want sometimes and Firefox has lost the plot somewhere on memory usage / stability (at least on a Mac).

Safari 3 is definitely quick, and I like how downloads automatically go in the download stack and in the case of .dmg’s / .zip’s do the ‘right thing’ without you asking. (e.g. I just downloaded an app in a .zip – it appeared unzipped in the download stack and I could then drag it straight into the Applications stack – nice.)

Safari seems to spawn too many windows when I just want tabs, but there’s a ‘Merge All Windows’ option (but alas no keyboard shortcut.) 2 features / plugins I missed from Firefox were subscribing RSS feeds to Google Reader and del.icio.us time savers but I’m using this and this to mitigate that.

Time Machine – it’s definitely easy to use but is lacking features and needs work. First of all you can’t backup to network shares right now (which was a big reason I bought an Airport Extreme in the first place *sigh*), and also I think they need to be more sensible with large file support (e.g. at the moment if you use Entourage or VMware by default you’re going to backing up new multi-GB files every hour – whoops!) In fact, it needs better support generally of exclusions / inclusions.

Terminal – finally has tabs, plus ‘close window on exit’ and ‘turn off the annoying bell’ in the preference pane. OK, maybe these new 2 aren’t new but tabs is a biggie.

Spotlight – Yes, it’s usable now (at least on my iMac). It works across a network easily and seems to (a) pick new items up quickly and (b) search quickly. Nice work.

Front Row – Despite rumors going around the web last week, Front Row does work even if you don’t have an in-built IR receiver. I plugged a Mantra TR1 into my G4 Mac Mini a couple of weeks ago and Front Row works with it (I’m having some IR issues generally, but that’s not Front Row’s fault)

Overall – there’s no immediate ‘wow’ about using Leopard but it gives the impression a lot has improved under the covers. Despite my angst with the lack on network hard-disk support for Time Machine, and the angst I would have if I wanted to develop in Java 6 (come on Apple – pull your finger out on that one), I still think the $199 to upgrade both my Macs was money well spent. But I’m a fan-boy, I would say that, right?