But it was his final point that floored me: IT innovations were mostly Christian. A few confused looks made him clarify with the line, “There are no Buddhist Computer Systems.”

I’m not really sure what a Buddhist computer system would look like, but I came up with the following list that would possibly qualify:

• The concept of karma means that every time the application crashes, next time it starts you get a new, useful feature
• Processes that crash are reincarnated rather than restarted
• Long running processes (dæmons) therefore are said to be in nirvana

Then again, I wasn’t convinced that we actually have Christian computer systems either. Surely a Christian system would have the following properties:

• A vast user manual written by people who claim to have seen the software
• And translated some time later into a kind of pidgin English
• The first half of the manual would be about version 1.0 of the product, which users still claimed was absolutely accurate. Even the bits that contradicted those in version 2.0
• Both versions, but especially version 1.0, often erased your hard-disk or deleted child processes
• Whether erasing your hard-disk or deleting child processes is a bad thing or not is still hotly debated by some users
• Although version 3.0 has been around for a while, many users still cling to earlier versions
• Despite having a third of the market, users often claim that they are being persecuted by people using other software or no software at all

Can you think of any more?

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Crazy traffic in Hanoi, Vietnam

According to my dictionary, “Disorder,” this weeks PhotoFriday theme, means “the disruption of peaceful and law-abiding behaviour.” This image of central Hanoi in Vietnam shows locals on scooters blaring their horns (lack of peace) and zipping all over the road in a display that should be illegal even if it isn’t. There were certainly worse displays of disorder and chaos on Vietnamese roads but I value my life!

Please also vote for my entry in the previous challenge, “Best of 2008.” I’m entry number 174.

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Ten most read pages this year:

1. Installing Oracle 10g XE on CentOS 4. This page was actually 35% more popular this year than last despite the ageing versions of both Linux and Oracle
2. Sri Lanka. This has been one of my most popular pages for years, although it took a 50% dive in page impressions this year due to the loss of a single referrer
3. Oracle on Linux Installation Howto
4. Minolta Dual Scan II film scanner review. Another surprise given the age of the scanner and the rise of digital cameras
5. Belkin WiFi (Skype) Phone review
6. Photobook Group Test (Part 1)
7. Printing-1 Photobook Review (Part 1)
8. Photobook Group Test (Part 3)
9. Sophia Smith
10. Photobook Group Test (Part 4)

Somehow part two of my photobook group test slipped out of the top ten.

I immediately noticed that no post from this year made it into the list, so here’s the Top Ten posts from this year:

1. YoPhoto Photobook Review (Part 1)
2. YoPhoto Photobook Review (Part 2)
3. Eight Best Computer Books
4. Cycling from the Czech Republic to Germany
5. Byline Bypass
6. PhotoFriday: My Little Secret
7. PhotoFriday: The Great Outdoors
8. PhotoFriday: Autumn
9. PhotoFriday: Disastrous
10. PhotoFriday: Tools

A number of my favourite posts of the year didn’t make the popularity grade. I had a good smattering, with some decent IT articles (1 2), a large number about developing my iPhone application Yummy (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) and I was quite pleased with my movie poster edits (1 2).

Overall it was a busy year! Thanks for reading. I’m sure I’ll be back with more in 2009. Stay tuned.

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Wishing you and your family happiness and peace, turkey¹ and chocolate this festive season, whatever your faith or lack thereof.

The above image, by the way, was taken in Reykjavik, Iceland a couple of days before Christmas 2006.

1. Or spicy pancake if that’s your preference.

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It was hard to pick my “best of 2008.” I’ve taken well over four digits worth of images from five countries (Denmark, Italy, Czech Republic, Germany and Portugal) as well as back home. In the end I chose this one as it’s a kind of photography that I don’t normally even try and it worked out okay.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Weathered.” I’m entry number 236.

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Maybe I’m being a little mean to this camel handler from Wadi Rum in Jordan, but for the purposes of this PhotoFriday Challenge I am calling his face “Weathered.”

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Dusk.” I’m entry number 128.

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The dialogue continued for a while, with A not happy to have to learn something new and B not happy to become A’s lackey.

The traditional twist in a story like this is to say that in fact I was Colleague B. Only I wasn’t. And no, I wasn’t A either. But the whole conversation put my teeth on edge.

This is a supposedly smart and experienced guy but he shows a complete unwillingness to both learn something new and to be self-sufficient.

This is whatever is the complete opposite of a winning combination is called.

I have regularly come across both traits in my working life. Most often you get the Java programmer who is only interested in Java. These are usually career programmers, people who are in the industry because it pays the bills and little more. There is nothing wrong with that of course. Do people ever get passionate about accountancy? Actually, probably some do, but my point is that to most it’s a job.

However that kind of outlook is limiting. Lapsing into cliché for a second: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This isn’t a problem most of the time. Usually getting the job done is enough. But for the really interesting problems a little Lisp or functional programming or the dining philosophers can make all the difference.

My colleague didn’t even want to learn more about PowerPoint which, given his position, pretty much should have been his job.

But an unwillingness to learn new stuff would have been fine had he been able to work unaided. Unfortunately he needed pretty much constant support. Everything from PowerPoint to making a cup of tea required someone else’s help. Naturally, it wasn’t an inability to make tea rather he was unwilling to do so.

The key here is that it’s not about ability. In your first few weeks in a job there are going to be lots of things that you need to ask about, lots of things that you need help with. But what I really hate to see is an unwillingness to learn, a lack of intellectual curiosity and no desire to be self-sufficient.

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This slightly understated image, taken around dusk, is one of my favourites from my trip to Egypt last year. At first glance it’s just a sunset taken over a “generic” city, but a more comprehensive look reveals the pyramids, meaning that it must be Cairo.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Black.” I’m entry number 226.

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At the moment I have no idea what happened. The company hosting the site have not been terribly forthcoming — no response to the support tickets I raised, no public announcement of the down time — which in a sense is even more disappointing that the downtime. No system is 100% reliable, but you should at least communicate with those most affected.

I am considering whether to move to a different provider (recommendations encouraged), but in the meantime I am hoping that things have returned to normal.

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For a version 1.0 product, Yummy seemed solid to me. It was fast, coped will all my bookmarks and had the ability to add, edit and delete entries. I didn’t think that this would remain as a unique feature for as long as it has, but hey, that’s a bonus.

Within a few days I had exceeded what I had expected to sell and received positive feedback on the iTunes store. But not long after that I also received my first bug report.

This turned out to be an odd one. It crashed early on while starting up and downloading all the bookmarks for the first time. My first guess — incorrect as it turned out — was that it was running out of memory. It took some investigation with the help of a very kind end-user to discover that… Delicious allows technically invalid URLs. By that I mean both that they don’t follow web standards and, worse, that it’s not even possible to open them in Mobile Safari.

I don’t feel so bad about not spotting that one during testing, although I should have put in more error handling to spot various “impossible” events and make sure that it didn’t crash. The reason I mention it is to give an idea of the kind of things that happen in “real life.”

But my biggest mistake has been assuming that I am a typical user of Delicious. I thought a few hundred bookmarks was a lot but I now realise that I was wrong. I have some users with over a thousand bookmarks and have read about another with nearly ten times that¹.

The exact number of bookmarks that you can store depends on a number of variables, such as the length of the URL, title and notes, the number of tags, the iPhone operating system² and a bunch of other details outside my control. Looking at the reviews on iTunes I believe a few people had more than whatever that limit is. Unfortunately the error handling was lacking, resulting in Yummy crashing rather than an inconvenient but understandable error message³.

Version 1.0.2 was actually a big release in terms of the amount of code changed, if not in terms of visible functionality (which is why it was such a small change in the version number). Under the hood, though, I dramatically increased the number of bookmarks that Yummy could handle. However it was starting to become clear that the internal architecture was holding me back. Further increasing the number of usable bookmarks would be hard, if not impossible, without seriously degrading performance and some new features that I wanted to add would end up in a nasty tangle of unmaintainable code.

I decided to take a step back and fix the structure of the code. For much of the time since the last formal release, Yummy has been, metaphorically speaking, in pieces on the floor. Most of those pieces have now been polished and reassembled, and it’s now working well enough that I have replaced the copy of 1.0.2 that I have been using day-to-day on my own iPhone with the development version.

This is a long way of saying that there is a new version coming. There will be a number of great new features but many of the big changes are behind the scenes. I sincerely hope that you don’t notice them.

1. I confess to being a little sceptical about some claims. At some points it becomes a bit of a pissing competition.
2. Upgrading from version 2.0 to 2.1 tipped at least one user over the edge, and many developers do not get previews of new versions.
3. I’ve not got to the bottom of this one yet. It seems that, sometimes, you can only spot a bad memory allocation by noting that an otherwise mandatory field is missing.

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