Don’t light my fuse

In the fabulously funny (I may be overselling it) Mystery Men, the hapless heroes are brought together by the shadowy Sphinx; scrum master by day, crime fighter by night, a figure whose aphorisms inspire his team to save the city from Prince Practitioners. Judge for yourself:

He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.
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To summon your power for the conflict to come, you must first have power over that which conflicts you.
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When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.

I’m psyched. I’m exaggerating. The Sphinx, as far as I’m aware, isn’t an Agile consultant; though sometimes my Twitter feed suggests he could be. A 140 character per-post social networking service does tend to encourage brevity, tending to meaningless. It’s harmless enough, and within all the chaff there’s an occasional nugget. It is - and I wish I didn’t feel the need to say this - in no way indicative of the worth of this set of development methods, as Twitter is in no way indicative of the worth of anything. It makes me smile, if not always in the way intended. Sometimes it makes me frown:

Legacy maintenance is nothing but a pay-cheque. Sustaining a healthy, talented team of engineers in that arid environment is impossible.

Now there’s a statement that troubles in a multitude of ways, it’s a dead-end, a mixture of obvious, worthless and insulting. “Obvious” because we learn nothing in being told certain tasks aren’t that enjoyable; you might as well comment children are our future and fun things are... erm... fun. “Worthless” as one definition for legacy is any live software (I read that on Twitter!) and therefore most projects would require, bar the first iteration, some level of “legacy maintenance” - how do we live with ourselves? “Insulting” since telling those who do such work they’re only in it for the money, and (unintentionally?) insinuating they have no ability, isn’t very helpful. It doesn't progress the subject. It’s also bollocks. It’s a cul-de-sac of thought; at worst a “talented people don’t do these kind of jobs”, at best a “some jobs are more enjoyable than others”; well, you don’t say, but they still need to be done. Just what kind of world do we seek; one that would ghettoise certain types of work, or one where all can contribute, and all contributions are valued?

Police misuse of the English language is “criminal”

The Home Secretary Theresa May, speaking at the Police Federation's annual conference, did so in front of a stage bearing the slogan “Cutting Police by 20% is criminal”. Literally speaking this isn’t true, but of course this is wilful ignorance on my part; it’s a play on a word, though its passive-aggressive tone serves a purpose – to discourage debate.

The Police don’t want to discuss how a 20% cut might be achieved, because their most recent complaints have included how much time they spend doing paperwork. Some of this, they claim, is the result of cuts to back-office administrative staff, presumably to keep up the headline number of the boys and girls in blue.

I share this concern, and as I want to help might I suggest one obvious measure? Since it is cheaper to employ someone trained for admin work in an admin role, we can save money without affecting those on the ‘front line’ by making the highly trained (and expensive) police officer – the one his/her Federation says is stuck at a desk - redundant.

It’s useful to know what you’re voting for

If there’s one lesson to be learnt on the referendum held in 10 cities on whether to have directly elected mayors, it’s this: it’s useful to know what you’re voting for; because without detail on what the job entails, voters will justifiably question the need for any change. In a Guardian article, Chris Game from the Institute of Local Government (INLOGOV) comments that in mayoral meetings the two issues that came up were “what additional powers would a mayor have and how do we kick out a deadbeat?” I don’t doubt it and the “Yes” campaign are right to be disappointed in not having an answer to give, but earlier in the same article we’re told:

It was thought white, working-class communities in Birmingham were most opposed to what they saw as another layer of politicians.

Quite who “it was thought” by isn’t made clear, and neither is why “white working-class” people are singled out, let alone identified as a community. Only kidding, this is The Guardian; lumpen profiling a speciality. Never mind the perfectly reasonable concerns at another layer of bureaucracy, it’s as if the idea of replacing one layer with another hasn’t even been considered by INLOGOV, though one supposes that might result in biting the hand that feeds it.

Enough with the passion!

They should have shown more passion, thus spoke the commentator and the various studio heads nodded in agreement. A simple diagnosis adopted by the press because passion is something we all understand, but since when did simple and the truth become such easy bedfellows? I’m pretty sure England’s failure to win the World Cup in my lifetime isn’t down to a lack of enthusiasm. Likewise I don’t think those who succeeded did so because they wanted it more.

These truths are self-evident, yet we persist in this nonsense. Popular culture - for example, cookery competitions - place a passion for what you’re doing ahead of knowing what you’re doing. Worse, far worse, this silliness has infiltrated our work. This is not to denigrate enthusiasm; it’s to challenge the idea that enthusiasm is a pre-requisite to doing good work. I don’t mean ‘good’ in its technical sense, more that definition alluding to professionalism and a strong ethic; sometimes I love my work, sometimes it drives me to despair, always I give my best. The notion we’ll only ever work on what interests us is absurd, so why suggest otherwise, and what use is someone who saves their best for those projects using the latest technology? I’ve worked with a developer who lived and breathed ‘the craft’ - I imagined shelves at home lined with books about coding, and their work when using the newest framework was often brilliant, but we also had a number of legacy applications, you can guess the rest.

Contributing to open source projects, writing a technical blog and all that other stuff is cool, doing anything you enjoy is really cool, but as in any way of life, when we start to think of what makes us happy and productive as the template for others, we should take a step back. Hence my appreciation for the tongue-in-cheek 501 developer manifesto, it’s a long overdue correction to those who have looked pejoratively at others with a different method. Yes, it’s a little bit rude and some humourless types have taken exception, but if you’re going to ‘pity’ anyone you ‘pity’ those on the pedestal because ... that’s how a joke works.

Burn ‘em, Burnham

To get his Bill thru, PM repeatedly told Commons #NHS waiting times were falling. We now know those claims were false. Cameron = NHS Conman.
-- 19-Apr-2012

This is, I presume, what passes for insightful political comment from the Shadow Health Secretary; or what we in the wider world recognise as frontier gibberish. I’m only commenting because 50+ unthinking sheep (and counting) have already re-tweeted this pearl. The trouble is:

1. I don’t remember waiting times being a key subject of the debate, the implication they were instrumental in getting the bill ‘thru’ is too silly; and this is because ...
2. If waiting times had been a key subject of the debate, you’d hardly claim they were falling and then use this as an argument for change. Conversely, if waiting times are in fact rising....

It’s almost as if Andy Burnham MP hasn’t thought it through.

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity

A victim of my never ending tinkering, I noted that of the two blogs using my custom domain, the naked domain was being redirected to the ‘blog’ rather than the ‘www’ sub-domain. On the face of it this is easy enough to fix in Blogger settings, yet when I changed the setting on one blog this was reflected on the other; either both were set to redirect or neither were. Whatever order I unset and then set I seemingly couldn’t change the destination of my naked domain. Until I remembered to clear the cache; fool me once, Blogger, shame on you, fool me twice ... actually, I think this is the second time.

We need to talk about Ken

Tax avoidance to the left.

Oh dear, what are Labour going to do, what are any of us going to do should Ken Livingstone defy the odds - and the supposed intelligence of voters - by winning the London Mayoral contest next month. At the moment it doesn’t look likely, thanks to the recent discovery that on the subject of tax avoidance he’s a hypocrite, or as Boris Johnson is supposed to have said, “a fucking liar”. It turns out Ken organises his tax affairs in much the same way as I (when a contractor) used to, only - unlike the former and would be future Mayor - I never combined this with articles painting the Tories as “rich bastards” exploiting “every tax fiddle”. That would be a bit cheeky, yet Ken did exactly this in a 2009 article in The Sun. How deliciously ironic to find that because of the way he arranges his own tax, Ken Livingstone pays a far lower rate than that of his Tory rival. Indeed, Ken Livingstone pays a far lower rate of tax than most people, including myself, despite having a far greater income.

In some ways this is a relief, as otherwise we might be discussing whether the allegations of anti-Semitism and his association with certain anti-Semites would help or hinder his chances of becoming Mayor. Sometimes it’s what Ken doesn’t say that we should worry about; this from the BBC:

Egyptian-born Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has been criticised for condoning suicide bombings and having anti-Semitic and homophobic views. The Mayor of London [at that time, Ken Livingstone] acknowledged that he and the cleric would not see eye-to-eye on Lesbian and Gay views.

How odd then that despite the double standards on tax avoidance, his openly antagonistic stance to Jewish people and having previously campaigned against his own party, party leader Ed Miliband is today throwing his support behind Ken Livingstone’s campaign. Well... he’s in the club, though Labour party rules suggest he shouldn’t be.