donder.co.uk

It’s been an odd start to the new year with a lot of change. I’ve applied for 3 junior Perl developer positions and as of this week have some business cards on order, I’ve already blogged that the portfolio is in a presentable state (but not perfect). In order to help with planing and motivation I’ve been trying out mindbloom.com (which I found via an article on lifehacker.com).

In a nutshell it’s represents your life as a growable tree with each area as a leaf. Accomplishing todo tasks in a certain area of life grows that leaf but neglecting other areas causes the leaf to start to turn brown so it’s kind of like a balancing aid, and a bit of fun too.

Mindbloom screenshot of a tree that needs some help

The major categories are pre-chosen but broad and the delivery is polished (and free). I’m not sure I’d replace toodledo.com with it but I might use it side by side. It seems to turn the goal management and task setting into more fun and makes it feel less like something you need to take a break from.

So how did 2011 go?  Looking back at this time last year I made the following resolutions:

Save up money for a holiday to Nova Scotia

In the end we saved up enough and went on the holiday, it was a good fact finding trip if a bit stressful. I’m glad I went. I don’t think I’ll do the same this year because for one I’ll probably be settling in with a new employer and secondly the cost would outweigh the benefits.

Civil Partnership Documentation

Both pension companies put my partner down as the recipient should I die but both sent back a letter confirming they’d acted on my instructions but not naming who the instruction was intended for, so I can’t  use the letter as part of the evidence for a civil partnership in the event of emmigrating. It was a bit frustrating, especially as it seems to take a long time to get a response. I’ll have to write back to them both which is on my todo list.

Pass the CCNA

This didn’t happen, I’m afraid it was a year of pure firefighting at work as we’ve not yet recruited to fill the space someone senior left when they left the team 1.5 years ago, mainly due to lack of applicants or the applicant wasn’t what we wanted. This has made it more stressful than normal and has resulted in little development or study time without sacrificing support for services. I’m not sure yet if I will pursue the CCNA in 2012 as my career might go in another direction.

Make an art portfolio style resume

The online site has been a lot of fun and has two projects put up. In terms of a physical A3 folder I’m about 1/3rd done. Everything I need is in place so I should be able to finish this (or at least a first release) this month. I think I’ll always keep developing my portfolio from here on but need to draw a temporary stop line, document what I have and make that physically presentable (print it out), then continue to develop it.

Improve other sources of income (diversify skills)

I did raise the value of donder.co.uk using www.sitevaluecalculator.com as a measure. The site went from $123 to $1000 in value. I didn’t manage to blog every month in 2011 but did keep the blog active. I’ve also improved the hosting and tweaked the style slightly. My other target involving Triond I dropped up with as the income was too low. I’m hoping March will see me start a software development related position which should help broaden my skills a lot.

My last targets had been guitar related, which I’m afraid has taken a back-burner.

This article is about my experience with the HP slate 2 and some of the fixes I’ve found for various issues, and other issues I’ve no fix for. It also gives an example software setup.

Why a Windows based tablet?

I purchased the HP Slate 2 knowing it was a windows tablet and that the windows based tablet experience isn’t as good as the apple ipad or android based tablets – however – I already had a android phone and thought that a android tablet would overlap with the phones duties too much. On top of this I was leaving my workplace and so had to return the HP2710p tablet work had purchased me 4 years ago, leaving no more Windows based machines in my house (I have no apple devices either). I had a need for something with Windows on, just to run the odd critical thing now and then that for whatever reason refuses to run on anything else. So for me the  Slate occupies the niche of laptop, larger organiser and Windows machine. The New years sales were on and it was discounted, so it was a good deal.

It’s not perfect, here’s the problems I had, some of which I could fix, some of which I haven’t yet. I’d like to hear from you in the comments if you’ve found a solution to any of these.

Logging in

The HP slate 2 doesn’t feature a fingerprint reader so you have to laboriously thump a password in to the standard windows screen each time which takes time. I wish they’d put a fingerprint reader on like on the HP 2710p and similar so you could log in in a second or two (the world and its dog thinks you can bypass a fingerprint sensor with a gummy bear but in practise it’s actually quite robust).

You could set a weak/fast to type password or you can set windows to not require a logon which will mean you’re more likely to use the device instead of reaching for a pen and paper but then you trade a degree of security for convenience. A minor security step up from automatic logon would be to have a swipe a pattern to logon system (as on most touchscreen phones) but I couldn’t find such an application for Windows. I found http://www.slidetounlock.me/ however the only action are slide, which doesn’t add security in the scenario I’m after and the configuration screen seems to have some issues (choose directory dialogue keeps reappearing having been used once). There are some bluetooth proximity logon devices that might be of interest but I haven’t tried these yet.

Swype input

A great error message

If you’ve unboxed the HP Slate 2 and it has Swype installed (which lets you input words by moving the pen across the virtual keyboard to each letter instead of typing) then you need to head over to the HP site to upgrade Swypefrom 3.19.91 to the bugfix 3.21.91 otherwise at some point swype will die and give obscure error messages and not input text.

Autorotation

Autorotation is temperamental sometimes, for example I turned it on and docked it today, but windows logon stayed upside down as did the subsequent desktop. Picking it up, placing it level and then placing it down again corrected it. Other times you have to put it in the orientation it thinks it’s in then move it.

Physical Keyboard

If you turn on the embedded security chip you’ll need a usb keyboard. This is because it reboots to initialise the TPM hardware and then asks you at a bios boot prompt if you want to accept the change (Y) or not (N) – except it’s a tablet and it hasn’t yet loaded the operating system so you can’t type anything. You’ll have to plug a USB keyboard in.

Wireless

From what I’ve experienced I think there’s some sort of bug in the wireless driver implementation with the built in winreless (Atheros AR6003). I’ve now raised a HP support case for this but it appeares to be related to WPA Enterprise as far as I can make out. I don’t have a fix for this yet (you could put a £7 slimline 802.11n usb wireless device that uses a common chipset into the usb slot but it will fill the only usb slot). One driver update is available on windows update as of mid Jan 2012, but this hasn’t fixed the stability issues.

The screen

The screen isn’t so great, with a dark background you’ll see the issue with darkness around the edges but also backlight bleed from the top and bottom. The viewing angle on the HP2710p and similar is much better (although it’s not a fair comparison as the elite tablets are 3 times the price). It appears fine with a bright background so it’s probably just the contrast ratio mixed with the viewing angle.

Case

You’ve probably seen the cool looking Bluetooth keyboard combined with fitted case. It’s a shame this wasn’t the default. As of mid January 2012 the UK appears totally out of stock of these so I can’t review them. The default case has some elastic to hold the pen, it would have been nice to see a pen holder like on the HP elite range of tablets.

Software

Above all try and keep it light

Evernote comes bundled with the device, I’d upgrade this from the evernote website, then use ink notes and you can write directly onto it as if with pen and paper. If you upgrade to the pro subscription (£30 for a year) then you should be able to remove the adverts. Artrage is beautiful on these devices. These are the only two applications that are tablet specific for me.

I then use keepass, dropbox (with notifications off) and chrome (and hence gmail for email and calendar) with YNAB via Adobe AIR. Xmarks syncrhosies your bookmarks. Toodledo.com provides my todo list. I pin chrome to the taskbar instead of IE, and pin windows mobility centre to the taskbar (found in control panel)

To make the tablet usable with fingers I use fences from a company called Stardock to organise the desktop.

I tried objectdock from the same company to provide an alternative star bar similar to the Apple mac. Objectdock absorbs whatever was pinned to the taskbar already. I removed the default clock and added a battery indicator, then reduced the effects in favour of performance. I then ditch program icons I wont use from the objectdock. sadly in the end I removed it as the CPU on the slate 2 seems to suffer. I liked objectdock though and would use it if I had a windows desktop.

I’m currently pursuing a move to another employer as part of keeping my career moving. I’ve completed almost 5 years at my current employer but I’m moving on to alter my career path slightly. My plan is to get a more developer orientated position, which may well be a junior position and a slight step down in pay. The reasons for this are firstly to expand and deepen my experience in this area and secondly because if I do successfully emigrate to Canada and lose a job over there, then I suspect it will be easier to find potential subcontract/telecommuting work from contacts that know what my code is like and what to expect of tasks assigned to me. So to explain it better – I’m taking a minor risk now to reduce a major risk later – I want to build up more contacts and skills so I have a bigger safety net to fall back on should I need it via telecommuting development work with previous employers or contacts.

So to this end I’ve been working on the portfolio some more. Two demonstration sites http://weather.donder.co.uk and http://windfarm-simulator.donder.co.uk are online and linked from the portfolio. I’ve recently moved the weather site to a database backend and a different graphing mechanism. I’ll do something similar with the windfarm-simulator site soon.

These two sites sadly aren’t currently as professional as I’d like but they had to be online as soon as possible and it’s also been a little bit of a crash course in to the murky world of Perl graphing which has gotchas like the GD::Graph::Line module having a really odd way of drawing the X axes that can’t be overridden. I had planned on using rrd tools graphing but hadn’t used it before so hadn’t appreciated the ‘lossy’ database backend that goes with it (it condenses data over time, which isn’t what I wanted).

Hence I think for the third project I plan to put in the portfolio I’ll use PHP. This is for the graphing libraries, to expand the demonstrated skills and because it’s in high demand. It’s been a while since I wrote much in PHP so I’ll have some catching up to do but Perl and PHP aren’t too dissimilar (they’re both reasonably sane scripting languages). I’ll need to decide at what point I call the other two projects finished, or at least good enough for the third project to use their output. I also need to be careful that ‘improving’ one of the projects doesn’t accidentally cause a knock on effect that puts all 3 projects offline.

I’ve got testing scripts online in the svn repo for both projects, which I’ve used to automate the coding standard (Perl Best Practises perltidy format and perlcritic -3). Putting the  code online seemed like a great idea until I realised how ugly the code looks – I see lots of bits I want to go back and clear up, or generalisations and assumptions in the code. I’ll fix these in time but I could do with days being longer, maybe 48 hours so I can have it fixed now. For now it’s all online, warts and all.

I also discovered the whole portfolio looked awful in IE7, which could still be running on some large organisations machines (think HR teams with managed desktops) so I’ve been over the site to test it using an old laptop that belonged to my girlfriend and had XP on it.

I updated my linkedin profile and had an approach from a company nearby however I’m not sure it’s an area I want to move into. I also applied to another company in Oxford but haven’t seen them access the portfolio site I referenced and haven’t heard anything from them.

I’m away visiting relations over the Christmas period, but I’m hoping the post Christmas holidays mean I can put some meaningful hours into the presentation of the portfolio and maybe add the third project.

I may as well publish this now rather than wait longer. It’s still rough in places and/or lacking in content but the main site is:

http://portfolio.donder.co.uk

It should at least give you an idea of what I’m aiming to present. I’m not sure I’ll be happy with it for another couple of weeks at least however.

I’ve got the two demonstration sites online (and all the donder sites are now on a dedicated virtual machine) although they look rather like 4 day projects at the moment (which they were). I’ve setup Google Analytics on the site and I’ve got it so that if you click on print you actually get something readable for each page via some print.css work.

I’ve still got lots more to do but work have given me 7 days off in December which should be enough to really get some good content in it. My list of fixes I want to put in is about 2 pages long currently. For now please feel free to explore and poke it.

This week I’ve been working on making my next Canadian vacancy application better, it’s been a week with no reply which I suspect means the overseas candidate option was too big a barrier or simply that the job market there is such that they’ve had many other applicants, some better suited and/or with better applications. The answer to all this is to make my future applications better,.

On the application I submitted last week I could only put ‘low’ for French reading, writing and speaking. This weekend I made enquiries to attend a French course, and I did an hours French revision on Sunday. I remember when I was at school I was certain it was one of the things I would never use but the bilingual status is important for some positions in Canada (and depending on the location), and more so for applications for the government positions.

I also spent most of Saturday changing my Perl module documentation to a more mature format (perldoc) with the aim to updating the code that’s in the example section. I also improved the automated code regression tests that I’d like to make public with the project as testing is important to the programming related employers.

I need to change how the portfolio front end works as I think I’ve seen three people now try to scroll through the one page format portfolio instead of using the navigation options that are visible in front of them. There people aren’t daft so it’s a usability issue – if my coworkers make this mistake when looking at it then I suspect HR personnel are probably just as confused. I might ditch the one page attempt totally and go multipage but use Perl and template toolkit to make it manageable.

I applied to a different hosting provider to move my website to a virtual machine that I’d manage but I’ve not heard back from the hosting company yet. There’s lots of work to be done when it comes to moving the site but I’ll cross that when I come to it.

One of the biggest shocks was that I was trying to make links that employers could use to prove my certifications are genuine. As part of this I  had to ‘rescue’ my Linux Professional Institute account and on resetting the password I discovered that my LPIC-1 certification has been given a expiration date, which has now passed! I’d thought it had no expiration period when I took the test so either my memory is flawed or they’ve changed the policy in the past 6-7 years. This not only means I can’t take the LPIC-2 without taking the LPIC-1 again but it also means that I need to record that the certification has expired on my portfolio and it makes my recent applications mention of the qualification a little unsettling. I don’t think it’s a terribly important certification at this point in my career, however I’d like to keep it valid, it forces me to study a couple of areas not in my normal comfort zone (such as the innards of how printing works on Linux, which I’d otherwise never touch) and lastly some odd part of me likes the idea of thrashing my previous score on the tests.

With some worry I checked my other certifications and discovered that Comptia tried to do a similar thing with the A+ in 2010, a certification that had previously (and when I got it) been without a expiration date. However after some uproar they decided the new expiration period only applied to applicants after the date of their announcement in 2010 so my own qualification is fine.

With an eye to improving my software example projects I contacted two major wind turbine manufacturers to see if I could get more in depth information that their websites about specific models with details about why I was asking but I think the information is too sensitive. Siemens wouldn’t part with any construction, service or maintenance docs and the other manufacturer didn’t reply. Despite this I’ve been reading what is available on their websites and thinking about how to change the program to have multiple turbines of different types, and cope with fundamental differences in turbine design in a clean way. I might need to take some more holiday as I don’t think this is something I can accomplish with a couple of hours each night.

I put another sysadmin example project into my portfolio and brushed up the existing examples but I likely wont make any major changes now until I’ve arranged a new hosting provider some time in the next few weeks. I find the waiting difficult.

I made my first application linking to my online portfolio yesterday. There’s still a lot of work I’d like to add to it, such as information about my sysadmin projects and changes to the example code projects. For that reason I’m not publicly linking to it just yet.

Specifically the code projects are presentable but

• It would be better if I hosted the web based SVN online so that the code was automatically browsable. Currently I have to add a html header and alter the filename, upload the file then reload the unchanged file from svn.
• I should be hosting the example sites live online, so that a working demonstration is usable. Sadly I think I need to change hosting provider for this.
• The modules don’t have a perldoc for them, I need to write the standard documentation
• The modules don’t have test scripts written, some of the most basic functions need automated testing to prevent regression when altering program features. The complicated functions might take weeks to devise effective tests for.
• Once test scripts are written I should auto-produce Devel::Cover output to show the coverage of my testing in a web browsable layout
• Both code projects need web controls added so that the user interface allows adjustment of the running simulation – this also makes the weather server a much more useful test input device for the windturbine project
• A third portfolio example should be quite different to the others in terms of the problem being solved, such as serial port communications in order to prevent all the projects solving similar problems with similar modules. I can probably tie this in to the same subject area by making an application talk to the datalogging hardware commonly used on wind turbines.

With regards to specific project examples, my weatherserver application needs a test harness for the XML output validation, for the module and for the main script.

The windfarm simulation portfolio project could do with the most work

1. I need to approach the major turbine manufacturers to get details for the most popular commercial turbines
2. For each turbine I need to make a configuration file with the characteristics, I also need to think about how to incorporate fundamental differences between turbine designs into the program
3. I need to refine any equations I’ve used that are currently simply proof of concept placeholders. If I ever need to present this work to a energy company as a employment application then the simulation needs to have become realistic enough to be taken seriously.
4. I could do with talking to a turbine operator about the faults they experience in typical operation and any statistics which in reality differ from the manufacturers,especially over time.
5. I need to clarify the units involved for some measurements and the range of expected observations.
6. I should also Visio diagram the program logic

This is all taking time, I’ve started one test script and have ~708 tests working for one of the modules but am probably at less than 15% coverage for that one module as a whole.

I’m going to the London Perl conference next weekend and am working on a kind of apprentice portfolio to take to it. There’s potential future work from home employers there that would be good contacts when I manage to emigrate as backup employment sources. It’s also a good chance to get feedback on my portfolio from Perl friends.

To demonstrate programming abilities I find you really need a task to solve. To this end I spent the weekend programming a fake weather station in Perl with a XML output and xhtml/css/jquery web interface with graphs by gnuplot.

It roughly mimics the change in weather through a year and through a day cycle. So for instance the wind picks up at night and dies down during the day but is stronger overall in Winter.

This feeds data to the second project which is a windfarm simulator. Essentially it creates a number of wind turbines and then models the effects of the weather from the weather station on them.

As the wind changes so the turbines move to face the new wind heading, as they do stresses alter in the tower base and the speed of the turbine accelerates or decelerates to match the new wind speed. If the wind gusts or drops suddenly then stresses are raised in the aerofoil blade shaft. Hydralics in the tower are modelled although after the Perl conference I should see if I can get a information pack or two from some commercial turbine producers to make the modelling more accurate. At the moment it’s mostly educated guesswork from reading articles online.

I did have planned a 3rd project which was a monitoring system that would monitor the simulated farm, but I think the task of learning the Perl Poe messaging system in two days and finishing the project will be too big, so I’m thinking I might stick with the two projects I have and get them as good as possible in time for Saturdays conference.

I bit the bullet and moved to entirely Linux at home. I ran ubuntu from a usb stick at first and noticed that sound, networking and vidieo worked without any issue so went ahead and wiped the windows install off.

I’ve edited the fstab and rc.local to improve performance on the SSD drive and moved all file systems to ext4

Wine has happily installed Artrage Studio, Steam and YNAB which at first glance appear to be working. The Logitech illuminated keyboard volume controls worked immediately.

I’ve a few things still to work out – flash doesn’t appear perfect and the actual immediate ubuntu desktop is a little clunkier than fedoras, for example making a web url link on the desktop that you can click on copies the html of the page if you drag the link from Google Chrome rather than creates a link.

I’ve been working on producing a code porfolio, to show some of my programming  in a format that I can show to employers. It’s partly for future prospects and partly for my own professional development, since it’s forcing me to learn new things especially modules I wouldn’t normally have gone near but that potential employers have asked for. A design reference I’ve used is some of the ideas in the book Designing a Digital Portfolio by New Riders.

The background is that I applied for a position but while doing so realised I didn’t have any code to show that didn’t have either 2 years of maintenance added to it by various people, or wasn’t a massive improvement on someone elses ancient but fundamentally flawed script that I’ve been maintaining. I dug out the best examples I could but realised I needed a project or problem where I could show case my work. I’ve also fallen fowl of using the standard 2 page Resume, when in fact quite a few places would prefer more information, a link to a portfolio site would be a bonus.

To this end I started writing some Perl to simulate a collection of wind turbines and the monitoring interface for them. My idea was to have the turbines responding to changing weather conditions, in real time on a demonstration server – such as a webserver constantly showing the turbines reacting to the weather in the real world using the data from selectable weather stations.

For testing purposes I realised I could really do with a weather server of my own so that I could run through an entire year in a short time and analyse my simulation. The added benefit was that I couldn’t accidentally DOS (denial of service) someones weather server with accidental queries. Having the code monitor a real weather station at sensible intervals for real time simulation would be a one line config entry so it would also make switching between real life and testing quite simple.

Ssh to a Linux box across my home ADSL was causing too many noticable and annoying delays in typing so I used the VMware player free application to run a Debian box on my workstation, to which I added a modern version of Perl into /opt and installed the modules I needed into that custom perls cpan, which was far simpler than I thought it would be.

So the progress so far is that I’ve built a working weather server that outputs two forms of XML data to Apache served website, but with a different option can also run through a entire year as fast as possible, outputting historical readings to files in /tmp.

At the moment I’ve use gnuplot to generate graphs of the data quickly so that I can see the weather is varying over time. The graphs look a little primitive but the variations in rainfall, sunlight and wind are working, using Tie::Cycle::Sinewave to create simple yearly and day fluctuations in temperature, if slightly crudely – the exercise isn’t to model the environment perfectly, the weather server is just a byproduct of the main task.

For the basic underlying Perl I’m using Config::Tiny, Datetime, local::lib, Log::log4perl and Template(toolkit) which apart from log4perl have been my tools for a few years now. Log4perl I’m new to but it beats custom debug() subroutines. I’m also trying to ensure I use Object Orientated design for all of it, since previously I’ve used OO based modules but only in a procedural code style/structure, it’s time to get stuck in more. I’d like to involve Poe since I sat through a talk about a similar module at the last London Perl event and a local employer was asking for it as a desirable thing for a candidate to know. I should also add test::more and similar based prove test scripts for the Perl code, since we don’t use it at work and I need to practise more with it (actually one script I wrote has +300 tests but it’s the only one).

So this is working but I need to find the time to finish the main simulation itself so I can at least see turbines reacting to the weather, and then once it’s working there’s a lot of polishing to do. I’m reluctant to show the Perl to some of my capable programming friends as I want it to be clearly my own project, but once finished I do want to run it past them for feedback since I’d be an idiot not to. I should also see how my results compare to what goes on at an actual turbine monitoring system, just to add value and some realism to the code. At the moment I’ve been researching via the internet but might resort to making a request to the nearest turbine company to run it past them in exchange for a charitable donation.

I’m a bit torn between my programming and networking career paths. The Cisco based path gives me more employment opportunities of similar pay to my current position (as jack of all trades / networks sysadmin) however I think the programming path gives me more remote working opportunities - more possibilities for maintaining an income should disaster strike. Normally I’d go with the later but then again it looks like I recently missed out on a incredible position due to being too weak on the Cisco skills side.

I need to set aside time for the programming and for the Cisco revision but I’m finding it quite tough – I wrote a paragraph here about how things currently but it just got too long and too upsetting. Lets try again. I’m not enjoying being a sysadmin for 70 linux servers and their services that are in a state of decay. Someone from a team almost 4 times our size told me that team size doesn’t matter, in which case I guess I need to elaborate that I care about the quality of the service we offer and it makes me miserable to realise I have to watch one or more services decay in order to work on something else that’s more important in the long term, especially when your name is associated with that decaying service. Sometimes in order to fix a service disaster you have to work longer hours, I fixed the DHCP deployment at gone midnight last Tuesday after someones retirement event and worked through illness for the next few days due to a serious site wide issue at work. When I ask for more staff I’m not trying to dodge work and eat doughnuts with my feet on the desk – I just don’t want to provide services that verge on broken the majority of their lives or for which I cannot go on holiday or be ill or go home on time depending on this weeks disaster – there is some hope in that I’m really glad we’re recruiting one position and have another person starting next month but for my own health I think I need to finish my CCNA studies and code portfolio, preferably by January.

I get one last look at the cabin then drive up the 101 main road, heading off after about 2 hours down a more minor road to head to the east to the airport and then come down south to it, rather than head towards the heavier traffic at hallifax via the normal route.

There’s no super-inspection of the car unlike hiring a car in the uk, they see it’s in one piece and seem happy (I have it a hand wash in a rainstorm with some washing up liquid a couple of days back so it doesn’t look too muddy).

I get there early and am in the first few people to check in but I’ve assumed the weight allowance is 5kg for hand luggage and 25kg for the suitcase, turns out it’s 20kg for the latter and I’m 2kg over. I cant pay the extra to take it and don’t have weight spare in hand luggage to redistribute it, I ask if I can go to the back of the queue to sort it out but I’m told the computer thinks I’m already booked in. After a while they decide it’s too much fuss and I’m holding up the line so they quietly take the bag and tell me not to worry about it. If there’s any worried pilots out there, don’t worry, I’d lost a couple of kilos on holiday.

I manage to make the security guards upset by walking through their scanner in the wrong way. and then once on the plane I’m surrounding by 5 children aged from baby age to about 5. I don’t mind children at all but it is a long and noisy flight back. Back in the UK the luggage takes ages to arrive on the transport conveyor and I run for the bus, getting there with about 8 minutes to spare (there’s a weird gap and the next bus isn’t for about 2 hours so it’s good to catch it). I fall asleep on the bus but I’m back home for about home for about 8:30am.

I’m really glad to be home. Canada was great but I misjudged the finances for the holiday and didn’t plan well enough – I should have gone for only 2 weeks I think and come back with my girlfriend but then I have actually had a totally break from work and had an actual do-nothing-and-relax past two weeks.

I’m glad we got to see more of Nova Scotia. Both the good and bad bits.