All dogs go to heaven, that's just science. But cats are contrary buggers and hang around long after their nine lives are up. My cat, Busby, was the scourge of squirrels. The menace of mice. The dispatcher of rats. Legend tells of the day a dozen foxes ran screaming from the bushes, being chased by a jet-black missile of fury. I'm not saying he was maliciously evil. But we frequently saw squirrels without their tails, and rabbits without their heads. Occasionally we would find them with our …
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Well, that was a whirlwind! After 18-months at NHSX, my 6-month temporary secondment has reached its end. It's always hard when a job finishes. The secondment was twice extended, and that let me carry on defining open technology standards for the NHS. Now it is over and I'm a bit sad. The pandemic seems to heighten all emotions, doesn't it? I'm luckier than most. I'm still employed. The whole point of a secondment is a short-term loan to share skills and experiences. I'm returning to my home …
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We're exactly halfway through 2020. Fuck. It feels like I've spent two-thousand-and-twenty days living through the year 2020. I know how lucky I am to be employed and to be shacked up with a loving spouse. I'm festooned with privilege, but it's emotionally tough. Liz and I have spent the best part of four months without leaving our home. We have a small garden, and enough exercise equipment at home to stave off utter madness. I always wondered how I'd cope on a mission to Mars. Turns out,…
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I started dating Liz - my now wife - one cold January back at university. We were young and disgustingly in love. This was it - 💕true love💕! And then, right in our honeymoon phase, she left to Australia for the summer holidays. We both wailed and made overly dramatic speeches about how we'd stay true to each other. And we'd write every day! And nothing would tear us apart! Those eleven weeks sssuuuuuccccckkkkkeeeeddddd! Skype hadn't been invented, and long distance calls were prohibitively exp…
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Early Internet pioneer, Jon Postel, beautifully captured the "Robustness Principle" for networked communications. "Be strict in what you send, and generous in what you receive." That is, any computer sending data to another, should stick closely to the specification for that communication channel. Any computer receiving data, should expect that the sender isn't following the principle, and interpret the data as best as possible. This is what makes the modern net work. We expect errors in…
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Many years ago, when I worked at Vodafone, we had a senior network engineer give us a talk about keeping the network stable in the hours after the 7/7 bombings. He was completely dispassionate. He spoke about analysing network traffic, predicting demand spikes, routing around damage, physically securing sites, supporting the emergency services - and all the minutiae that goes in to running a complex system during an emergency. He then explained that his wife worked in Central London and his…
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At a recent Staff Away-Day, we were encouraged to write a "Manual of Me". A quick summary of the general ways that you like to work. I don't spend much time on introspection and I found it disturbingly personal. So here's mine for you to enjoy! Excuse my crappy drawing and even crappier spelling. Here's a cleaner version with a bit more detail: Conditions I like to work in Quiet I hate it when all I can hear is other people's phone conversations. I either use earplugs, white-noise, or …
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I've been blogging for a long time. Over the years, I've linked to tens of thousands of websites. Inevitably, some of those sites have gone. Even when sites still exist, webmasters seem to have forgotten that Cool URls Don't Change. I use the WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin. It periodically monitors the links on my site and lets me know which ones are dead. It also offers to link to Wayback Machine snapshots of the page. It doesn't always work, of course. Sometimes the page will have …
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As you know, I'm a supporter of open technology. I write open source, I work on open standards, I care about open data. So I am delighted to have joined the board of OpenUK. Our purpose? To develop and sustain UK leadership in Open technology. I want to make the UK the best place to be for open source developers, users, and buyers. I believe that code written by the public sector should be freely available (libre and gratis). And I know that talented open source developers want to be able to …
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Way back in 1999, I moved to Canada for a year. Ottawa got down to -30℃ - so I grew my hair to prevent my ears snapping off in the cold. And then I kept growing it. Very occasionally I'd go to a barber for a trim, but I hated the experience. I'm not good with strangers touching me, I don't like making small talk, and I resented paying for a needless expense. So I stopped going. Fun fact - nothing bad happened. As I hit a significant birthday recently, I decided to let the "wisdom" of the c…
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I'll admit it - I never really got the selfie. I was trapped in the mistake that they were a mere narcissistic folly. I couldn't have been more wrong. The more I travel the world, the more I see a change in people's behaviour around monuments. It used to be people jostling to get the one perfect shot of a thing. Even if they got the perfect shot, they never looked at the result. Why? People want to take a photo like this: But it often ends up coming out like this: That's not intended…
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Post-birthday haze, it's time to set out my resolutions for the upcoming year. Get better at empathy I have a theoretical understanding that other people are humans, with their own complex lives and decisions. I'm not always good at putting that into practice. Groups of people and abstract personae, I feel like I have a good handle on. Individuals, less so. I don't want to be this: But I want to get better at understanding people. Healthier living I know it's a cliché, but I have an …
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