Author: Mike Roberts

July 7th – 2 years on

Yesterday was the 2nd anniversary of the July 7th London bombings. For those new to my blog, you probably don’t know that I was on one of the trains that was bombed, thankfully far enough away not to have been injured. I wrote about my original experiences after the day here and my experiences of the first anniversary here.

Last year I was definitely anxious on the anniversary day but I’m happy to say this year was very different. Apart from anything else the anniversary falling on a Saturday meant I wasn’t traveling to work at 8.50 am, and in fact there was no need for me to get a subway all day so I never even went near a train. In fact I was so distracted by other things that I didn’t even remember what day it was until I’d been up for about 4 hours!

I think I’m pretty much as over my experiences now as I will ever be. There’s certainly still some emotional scarring but I’m not sure I’ll ever lose that, and it’s a long way from stopping me doing anything I want to do in my day-to-day life.

Rachel North (another survivor of July 7th and frequent blogger on the subject) has just had a book, Out of the Tunnel, published on her experiences of the bombings and on other incidents in her life that have caused to her to live through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I’m hoping to pick up a copy when I’m back in the UK in a week’s time.

The continuing attempted attacks within the UK are obviously a big worry, partly because there is no apparent way forward beyond just defense. At least when the IRA was bombing the UK there was some kind of hope that a truce could be found, which was indeed what eventually happened. With the terrorism of fanatical religion though there’s no clear road forward that I can see beyond educating our children about tolerance and the benefits of a plural society.

Finishing up, I think it’s good that this July 7th saw the worldwide mega-event of Live Earth. I think what Al Gore and the rest of his organisation are doing to promote the repair of some of the damage we’ve done to our environment is a wonderful thing (and for those that think it’s all a load of baloney please do spend 90 minutes of your life watching An Inconvenient Truth.) Maybe in years to come ‘July 7th’ will become synonymous with a day when humanity started to come together across national and racial divides to actually make the world we live in a better place. If it meant that we forgot about the events of July 7th 2005 I think that would be a sacrifice worth making.

iPhone night in NYC

It’s the night a million Mac fans have been waiting for – the launch of the iPhone.

I’ve been pondering whether I would get one ever since it was initially shown off at Macworld.

I finished work today after 6pm (the launch time) and walked up Broadway past an AT&T. I bumped into a couple of colleagues who had been lining up but had given up after the store had run out of 8GB models (apparently they only had 20 in stock.) They wanted to get one, and I wanted to see the line outside the Apple Store in Soho (which is only a 5 min walk from my apartment) so we walked up there instead.

We got there around 7pm and the line was around the corner, but only about 10 minutes in time. Once inside, the Steve-Jobs-clones were organised perfectly. There were 2 demo desks setup downstairs and a fast moving line to actually buy them upstairs. My colleagues went straight for the purchase option and were done lining up and buying in less than 5 minutes.

Still reticent I decided to spend some time trying it out. The good things about it:

  • It’s a great design. Pretty small, feels very solid, easy to hold, very lightweight.
  • The touch-based user interface works well, especially considering this is a first-of-a-kind device.
  • The screen is great. Bright, clear, huge for a phone.
  • It’s just wonderful to use – it really does put every other phone out there to shame

The not so good:

  • EDGE really is pretty slow. I tried using Maps – it works ok but not great. To really push it I tried Flickr which of course was dog slow. I loaded up the front page of Meebo (which would allow using an instant messenger, an app which the iPhone doesn’t have natively) but didn’t want to log in on a shared device so I don’t know how it works.
  • Some weird text functionality is lacking. Selecting chunks of text, no cut/paste.

Then the other things I didn’t like which I already knew:

  • No push email – if you regularly check for updates this could kill your battery life.
  • only 8GB – not enough to be an iPod replacement for me
  • $600 for the handset and no rebate on the $60/month plan, and only 200 texts/month? I can afford this, but that’s damned pricey, especially since I’m going to want to replace my (now dead) 20GB 2nd gen iPod soon.

So in the end, despite the peer pressure, the hype, the Steve-Jobs-reality-distortion-field I didn’t buy one.

But there’s always tomorrow. Or maybe I should see what the 5th avenue Apple store is like at 4 am…

I'll be at Agile 2007, speaking on Continuous Integration

My conference attendance this year will be a short trip south to Washington DC, to Agile 2007. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a big agile / XP conference and I hear they’ve grown a bit so I’m interested to see how the community has changed. Indeed, Agile 2007 is already sold out with 2 months to go before it actually takes place.

I’ll be speaking on the Wednesday, giving a beginners’ track session – Introduction to Continuous Integration. It’s a subject I’ve been speaking on for years now, but it’s always enjoyable to be able to share this kind of stuff with people new to the area.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

Pigs, pokes and Parallels

There’s an old saying – Never buy a pig in a poke – which roughly means “don’t pay for something unless you’ve seen it”. It was one that came to mind as I forked out for the Parallels pre-release upgrade a week or so ago.

Parallels is a virtual machine environment for the Mac, allowing you to run Windows applications even when OS X is running as your primary Operating System. Parallels 3 has just been released, but upto a week or so ago you could pay for an upgrade (before getting the actual software) with a discount. This is a classic case of pig/poke alarm, but I thought Parallels had built such good marketting momentum over the last year or so that they would do anything to hurt that.

I paid for Parallels less than a year ago, and so I was already a bit miffed about forking out my hard-earned bucks for an upgrade so soon. However, it had one feature I was particularly interested in, that of 3D video support. I don’t play many games, but it would be nice to play Half Life 2 occasionally wihout having to boot into Windows using Boot Camp.

I was a little surprised to hear that Parallels were willing to sell this functionality without a big test phase, but they mentioned both ‘Half Life 2’ and the phrase ‘at near native speeds’ explicitally in their advertising, so I decided to purchase sight-unseen.

Of course, it was too good to be true. HL2 doesn’t run anything close to native speed, and is pretty much unplayable, even on my beefy pimped-out iMac. The software is definitely not production-ready, and definitely not worth the cash of the upgrade. Sure enough, there was a pile of stones, and not a pig, in my bag.

Parallels had better fix this up pretty soon or all of their good marketting is going to drain away in the direction of VMWare. May the Mac virtualisation games commence!

Flickr (finally) gets a decent slideshow

One of the very few things about Flickr that’s not so great is that the slideshow feature is poor at best. With all the fancy usability-enhanced goodness of my photo-website of choice, the slideshow’s tiny pictures, no descriptions and just sheer, well 2003-ness is just shockingly bad.

But no longer! Flickr now has a ‘new hotness’ slideshow, which looks just fab and groovy. And that’s about all there is to say.

This blog entry brought to you by the letters n, e, and s (plural).

The NYSE blog

One of the many enjoyable parts to my new job is when I get to meet some of my actual New York Stock Exchange colleagues from our famous office on Broad St (the TransactTools office is a 5 minute walk up Broadway.) The people I’ve met so far are a good bunch, lacking some of the harshness I’ve found from some previous organizations. Moreover some of them have huge amounts of experience being here.

As I said in my last blog entry, NYSE is in an interesting space right now, and is changing a lot what with merging with other exchanges, pushing new technologies, and the like. It’s not just the new blood that’s driving this change – it’s the people who’ve been around a while too.

Take Ray Pellecchia, for instance. He’s been with the Exchange for nearly 20 years. When he joined the firm I hadn’t even started secondary school. With that comes a lot of experience, and of course some interesting stories! But not wanting to rest on his laurels, Ray is actually one of the people driving new ideas here. One of them is the NYSE Hybrid Talks blog at http://hybridtalk.nyse.com/ .

As a newbie to the exchange, this blogs helps me get a better idea of what we’re doing, but it’s also an internet-friendly way of telling the world of the new things we’re up to. And as a final kicker, the discussions in the comments allow Ray to interact with NYSE customers, and those customers to interact with each other, in ways that were hitherto impossible.

So NYSE is certainly one of the older firms here in the US, but is embracing new business and technology practices in exciting ways. It’s going to be a fun ride!

Looking for Java developers in NYC!

As I mentioned in my earlier posting, one of my first tasks here at NYSE TransactTools is to hire some great developers. The engineering team right now is 11 people strong, but we’re looking to grow that significantly.

I’m obviously biased, but I think this is something of a unique opportunity. Clearly we’re a technology-focussed business unit, so we don’t have what can often feel like the ‘support focus’ of the IT organization of a bank, yet we’re still in the financial domain and have the backing of being part of the New York Stock Exchange‘s exciting growth. Furthermore, it’s an NYC-based finance job, in the financial district, yet the atmosphere here is dress down (and yes, we really do have a pool table in the office!)

The actual technology is pretty cool too. The core of what we do is a financial messaging engine, responsible for processing many thousands of messages per second. We’re not the only people to do that though – where we’re unique is technologically that we add some interesting functionality around the core messaging server, and also our new position within NYSE is allowing us to offer some industry-leading integration options with the rest of NYSE’s networking technology (go look at our swanky new website for more on that side.)

Most of what we do is implemented in Java. A lot of it is pretty hard-core low level networking / multi-threaded code to allow the performance we need. We also have some web work happening since all of our configuration & administration is done through Java web applications (with a fair bit of AJAXey goodness throw in.) We are moving to a XP / Scrum based development methodology. We’ve already got card walls, 2-week sprints, daily stand up meetings and some of the guys even started pair programming this week. I’m working on getting Continuous Integration going (no surprises there!) and we’re going to keep going from there.

As of today we’re looking for Java developers, specifically ones with real experience doing the kind of hard-core code that makes up the core of what we do. We’ll no doubt be looking for some less experienced folk later, but not right now.

The official job posting can be found on our career’s page. If you’re interested in knowing more, drop me a line!