full fathom five

According to the Catholic Church, Britains first hybrid embryos are “monstrous”.

There are many things I’d consider monstrous. Some notable examples include:

• Preaching against the condoms in Africa used for preventing the spread of HIV.
• Maintaining dogmatic stances on family planning that result in large families and encourage generational poverty.
• Collaborating with murderous fascists in the Second World War.
• Seeking forgiveness from some dude who doesn’t exist for a multitude of hateful acts across the millennia (including the above collaboration) but not seeking the same from those who were wronged.
• Fostering a culture of pointless guilt with the young, the impressionable, the stupid, the oppressed and the masochistic.

Catholic Church, get your priorities right.

But you could be forgiven for thinking it was so. It’s been a long time between posts and there’s a good deal to report and a few things to celebrate.

On the professional front:

• In January I celebrated my first year of working for Cenqua/Atlassian (in August 2007 we were acquired by Atlassian). Working for Atlassian is much like working for Cenqua except rather than working with 7 really smart people on 3 cool products in a different time zone, I now work with around 150 really smart people on 7 extremely cool and increasingly well integrated products across 3 different time zones.
• This also means I’ve completed my first year of working from home. Home working has been a surprising adventure (and not always for good reasons - more on that in a future post) but I’ve survived and feel I’m now in my groove (well, one of them, anyway). Atlassian has also ramped up its European presence so I now have developers in my geographic region to work with.
• In May of last year attended my first Java One. I worked along side of the other Cenquans in the JavaOne trade hall demoing our products, talking with customers and networking with other nerds.
• Clover and Fisheye both won first prize Jolt awards! For those not in the know, Jolts are kind of like the Oscars of our industry. As a long-time reader and fan of Dr Dobbs Journal there’s a deep sense of pride I feel from being part of a team producing something worthy of a Jolt.

On the personal front:

• Today we celebrate our 5th anniversary of living in London. It was initially tough going but ultimately worth it. Moving countries always is tough, I suspect, but doing so during the worst part of the tech crash was not something I’d relish again. London is a fantastic and vibrant city which constantly surprises me - despite the seductive charms of the (for me, very accessible) cities Sydney, SF and Singapore, there’s no place I’d rather be right now than Finsbury Park, London.
• Wei Kiat recently celebrated his first anniversary of working at the British Museum. In that time he survived his first blockbuster exhibition, The First Emperor (ending on Sunday). Having someone on the inside with a thorough understanding of the events and celebrations taking place there has meant for a very culturally rich 12 months.
• In December we celebrated our 6th anniversary together.
• And finally, I’d like to announce to you all that I’ve decided to have my gender reassigned. Of late, you may have noticed my enlarged manboobs and assumed I’d been hitting the Krispy Kremes a bit too hard. Well, now I can now announce that this evening*, after several months of hormone therapy I’ll be going under the knife and will come out a new woman. Please kindly refer to me as Brenda Studman in all future correspondence.

* Tonight, 1st April, 2008 - April Fools day

I’ve been a long term user of Thunderbird (on both the PC & Mac) and its sluggish UI, lack of integration with OSX’s addressbook and its pitiful spam detection had been slowly wearing me down. Don’t get me wrong, it’s actually done its main task - receiving and sending email - with aplomb. I just expect more from my application experiences now I’m a OSX neophyte.

Late Sunday afternoon, with a migration tool on hand with a decent rap on macosxhints.com, I reasoned I had exactly enough time to try out a migration to Mail.app before this evening’s Dr Who re-run stole my attention for the night’s remains.

The migration seemed to go fine - the number of emails in various folders seemed to tally correctly and a spot check of a dozen emails with attachments yielded the right blob of bits. Then it all went wrong. Subsequent clicking on emails that initially seemed fine before now delivered a cryptic message telling me the body had not been downloaded from the server. Cryptic, indeed, as the message was lying on the Mac’s file system and I had yet to configure any POP accounts.

Several unsuccessful re-imports later and I asked the Google Gods the meaning of Mail.app’s messy entrails. The revelation came to me in the form of a humorous technical note by Apple: Mail.app doesn’t work properly when you have more than 2gb of email. The workaround seemed to be: clean up your mail boxes to a “reasonable” size. I may expect more of my application experiences nowdays but that still includes the expectation they don’t impose unrealistic limits on the amount of data they will handle (or at least warn me when they’re exceeded).

With my trial complete, I decided changing the emailing habits of a decade were beyond the scope and time available (or is that time and space?) before me on a lazy Sunday afternoon while waiting for the Tardis’ familiar hum.

Poem: A famous Chinese poem with translation - by one of China’s most famous ancient poets - Li Bai.

Quote: John de Francis on the nature of Chinese characters Repeat after me: “Chinese characters are words, not pictogaphs”.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been studying Mandarin on and off since about 1999. I’m shite at it, but not as shite as some. It’s time to share my reading material with everyone else in the hope we all get less shite together.

Quote: Nerds and coolness

Proof: Elvis Lives!

Ramble: Recycling vs Consuming Less

What the fuck is a tublelog? The wiki gods sayeth this. I just hope it gets me blogging more often.

The rumours are true, come the new year I’ll be starting with Cenqua - the creators of Fisheye, Clover & Crucible. I’ll be working remotely for them from my little corner of north London or to put it another way, I’ll be their premier UK employee. ;) My task will be to design, develop and support new and existing software development tools you will actually use.

This move has been a long time in the making - I first interviewed with them (a beer in hand, if I recall) back in the middle of the dot-com crash when they were transitioning from a service company to a product company. Unfortunately, like many, they’d just laid off staff and weren’t in a position to take me on. More recently this year I did some work for them but found my 9-5 racket was proving too exhausting to deliver anything substantial or on-time. Now the timing seems right for me to come on board full time.

You gotta love a company that calls its head office the “Central Command” and describes my role as “Senior Software Engineer / Architect / Code Poet”.

Matt, Conor, Brendan and Pete - thanks for giving me the chance to work on some great products! I can’t wait!

Last month Charles Nutter, Aslak Hellesoy and myself were all interviewed by Pat Eyler on getting RSpec framework working on JRuby. This was quite a milestone for the project and Pat thought it deserved a bit of publicity. It also came at a time when my current employer issued the “thou shalt only use Java” edict so you might detect a bit of emotion in some of my responses.

The version that made it onto InfoQ provides some nice soundbites and the full interview is well worth the read. Enjoy!

The JRuby trio have just released version 0.9.2 of everyone’s** favourite scripting language for the JVM.

New and notable in this release:

• Extensions openssl and readline now working
• Code for a new graphical irb console
• Partial support for iconv and bigdecimal extensions
• RSpec now supported
• Improved Rails support
• Fixed all known block and scoping bugs
• Enhanced parser performance
• More compiler and performance work
• Refactored variable scoping logic
• 127 Jira issues resolved since 0.9.1

My modest contribution to this release included:

• Getting RSpec supported
• Implementing the Enumerable::Enumerator class and associated Kernel methods
• Fixing the Java::clazz.naming.Binding syntax implementation to properly work
• Fixes for visibility issues with some Kernel methods

So go and download it now! What are you waiting for?

** Favourite to all but those nice Groovy folk, oh and those BSH and Javascript/Rhino wierdos

It seems Singapore, that paradise of mindless shopping, hawker food and Famous Amos cookies may soon become a paradise of the carnal sort. The Ministry of Home Affairs recently announced the government’s intention to repeal Section 377 of the penal code which criminalises a bit of “ant ‘n’ decs” and “difficult brown” among other things.

Consenting same sex partners keen for a bit of the old “in out” will be disappointed to learn that section 377 doesn’t apply and that 377A, that other relic of British colonial law, will not be repealed. One will just have to make do with chaperoned walks by the seaside, I suppose.