I mentioned a while back that I’d been going to a physio to deal with the ravages of age combined with being kicked around a football pitch. It turned out that it was nothing to do with age and everything to do with me having no flexibility at all. I started spending time every day stretching and noticed a dramatic improvement in recovery times after games and improved movement during them. But then my physio started nagging me to try yoga and how it would be perfectly suited to me and I’d be crazy not to at least give it a go. So I did. And to show I was serious I actually cut back on a game of football a week to go to yoga instead.

Like many men I thought that yoga was just a bunch of attractive women in a room bending themselves into different positions, showing how flexible they were and that I’d find it pretty easy and relaxing. I was right about the first part, however completely wrong about the second.

I started going to an Iyengar Yoga class weekly and found, much to my surprise, that I rather enjoyed it. The first thing I was wrong about was it being relaxing and easy – I quickly learned that some of the sessions can be really hard work. Holding positions for periods of time that require quite a lot of strength it turned out I didn’t have meant I was sweating in no time. However after every session I’ve come out feeling great, relaxed and really glad I listened to my physio! Since yoga concentrates on good posture and doing the positions correctly I’ve found it a lot more useful than just doing stretching on my own – having an instructor really helps to make sure you’re getting the best out of it.

My middle back (which has always been stiff and inflexible) is starting to actually have movement in it, my endlessly tight hamstrings are gradually loosening and a lot of aches and pains I was living with from playing football are no longer there. In fact my footballing has definitely improved as my movement is better, my flexibility is improved and my recovery after playing is a lot better even than when I was stretching daily (no more hobbling around for days after a match). Heck, I even bought my own gear so I can practise at home:

While just doing stretching can be a bit tedious and easy to give up after a while, yoga’s one of these things you can spend a lifetime getting better at and while there are some things I can do, there are many I’m awful at. However the motivation to improve and feeling myself improve (albeit slowly) makes me keep coming back for more.

The one thing I was right about was the room full of attractive women. But while I was worried I might find it incredibly distracting it turns out that you lose yourself in what you’re doing so don’t have time to ogle the ladies (and that’s the line I’m sticking to!). Plus a few men go and they’re definitely not my type!

So while the last time I recommended going to a physio and doing flexibility work, this time I’d definitely recommend trying yoga whether you’re male, female, an athlete, a couch potato, old or young. Give it a go, you won’t regret it! And don’t be scared, I guarantee you won’t be as terrible at it as I am!

I make no secret of the fact that I love luggage. Whenever I see luggage in a shop I imagine standing in some far-flung country waiting for it to come off the plane. Or slinging it over my shoulder as I check into a 5 star hotel. It’s not just the luggage, it’s the potential I see in it for adventure. While you’re travelling you’re relying on this thing to carry everything you need with you, that it won’t abandon you or let you down, that it’ll be a constant companion and even though it’s an inanimate object, it’s shared your adventure with you and lived to tell the tale.

I wrote a while ago about my current strategy of flying with hand luggage only in a bid to avoid queueing to checking it in, waiting for it at the other end only to discover it ended up in Bora Bora while you’re in Stockholm and that it’s Winter and you packed your warm clothes in it. I spoke about the bare essentials you need to survive up to a week with just that one bag but I didn’t really go into much detail of the actual bag itself. Anyway, since that article I’ve been using a Briggs & Riley 17″ expandable rolling brief – which is just a fancy way of saying one of those cases that has a telescopic handle, wheels, fits in an overhead compartment on a plane and can carry enough kit for a week-long trip. The case itself looks like this (click on the pictures below to read some details):

The case rocks and I’d heartily recommend it. What’s particularly impressed me about the case is that it’s clear every detail has been carefully thought through. I’ve travelled enough that I’ve noticed various things that have bugged me about previous cases – however this one is pretty much perfect.

First of all, it’s expandable – something that’s much more useful than I realised before I got this case. It must be some strange law about travelling that when you pack your bag you think to yourself “it’s a bit of a squeeze, but don’t worry, when I come back there’ll be less in it and therefore much more space for a couple of presents”. However what actually happens is that no matter what you do, you can’t fit everything in as you pack to come home and you end up having to crush everything in hoping it won’t burst. Cue the expandable case. If you keep it in its smaller size when packing on the way out, then coming back you can expand it and you have a very useful extra bit of space to pack in those new Hawaiian shirts. If you’re not flying but are going to stay with friends for a few days then instead you can use that extra space to fit in your dancing shoes (something you probably won’t bring on a business trip). So the expandable clothes section makes the case an absolute winner.

I always take my laptop and an assortment of cables and chargers with me wherever I go (such is the enslavement technology brings). So having a stiffened storage compartment is essential to stop those 3 pin plugs from stabbing through your shirts. Also, since I travel with hand luggage only that means bringing bottles with shower gel, shampoo and toothpaste with me. I know from experience that if you put your toiletries into a compressible bag then you find the first thing you do when arriving in the hotel is wash the shampoo out of all your clothes (it’s amazing how much damage one small bottle of shampoo can do). So the fact that my case has a stiffened compartment means I can put my laptop, cables, plugs and toilet bag in without worrying about damage or spillage caused by bottles being crushed no matter how rough someone is throwing their bag into the overhead luggage compartment.

One thing that’s ticked me off about previous cases is the way the designers decide what you should put where. You’ll find a perfectly good sized section that’s ruined by having a bunch of separators sewn into the case that effectively means you can’t neatly fit things in unless they’re a specific size. Normally I get the scissors out and remove the separators! However my current case doesn’t enforce that organisation on you – there are separators, but you don’t have to use them and they don’t compromise the raw size of each section. And when you think you might be attending an ambassador’s reception you’ll need that extra bit of space to fit in your bow tie and cummerbund.

Some of the other cool features my case has include a very useful magnetic pocket right on the front. This is ideal for putting travel documents or newspapers into for easy recovery (handy when standing in a queue or at passport control). Likewise there’s another useful zip pocket right on the front that’s ideal for putting your passport into that you can get at quickly. It comes with a detachable laptop pouch that you can quickly remove to pass through an airport scanner separately without having to fiddle around fishing it out of the case – it’s designed to come out quickly and go back in the same manner. It even comes with a shoulder strap – something very rare in cases like this and makes life easier when you’re forced to walk up long flights of stairs. Finally, the material the case is made of it seems very hard wearing but not too hard, so it looks like it’ll last me many years and can be compressed somewhat to fit into whatever space it needs to (very useful when you’re travelling on certain low cost airlines).

As I said at the start, I love luggage and could talk about it all day – I think my ideal job would be as a luggage designer! Anyway, if you’re looking to cut down on travel time and go hand luggage only, I’d definitely recommend my Briggs & Riley 17″ expandable rolling case. As with most things in life you get what you pay for and if you want to own a piece of luggage you can rely on that you can take to the edge of the earth and back and still have room for a packet lunch knowing that it’ll take everything you can throw at it, then go get yourself one! Alternatively they have a host of other cool cases. Although I’d better not look or I’ll spend hours staring at them imagining taking them to far off lands!

Every time I start work on a new version of John’s Background Switcher I’m full of optimism that I’ll be able to add hundreds of new amazing features, take it to previously unheralded levels and of course fix all the bugs in the previous version. And of course every time life gets in the way.

I maintain a list of every idea and suggestion I get for JBS along with lots of things I’ve thought of and would like JBS to do and my ultimate plan is to implement all the good ideas and quietly brush the bad ones under the carpet. However since I have this unfortunate financial situation where I have to work during the day to keep a roof over my head it leaves only my spare time to develop JBS. So unless I win the lottery I have to pick and choose what I spend my time doing to JBS and in this version I’ve concentrated on bug fixes (shed loads of bug fixes), performance improvements (particularly when using folders of pictures on your machine) and three very useful features.

Firstly, I’ve added support to what has now become my favourite wallpaper site – Vladstudio. Vladstudio wallpapers are created by digital artist Vlad Gerasimov and once you start using them for your desktop you won’t bother using any other picture source if you’re anything like me. If you’re a registered Vladstudio user you can enter your credentials into JBS and benefit from the full-sized non-branded wallpapers. If not you’ll still see high resolution wallpapers and I’m sure soon enough you’ll be signing up yourself! Speaking of which, if you sign up for a lifetime Vladstudio account using the code ‘JBS’ (without the quotes) you can get it for $19.99 instead of $29.99 – a bargain! (Note: I don’t benefit financially in any way from the offer, I just love the wallpapers and I’m sure you will too!).

Next I’ve added support for downloaded Webshots pictures and collections. If you’ve previously been a Webshots Desktop user you’ll no doubt have a large number of pictures and collections either downloaded or created with the application. You’ll no doubt also have found that without Webshots Desktop there’s not a lot you can do with them. No longer. If you add either Webshots pictures or collections to a picture list in JBS, or if you add a folder containing any of these files then JBS will magically start choosing from the originals as if they were just regular pictures. Pretty cool huh?

Finally, JBS is now available in English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese-Brazilian and Japanese (even thought I don’t understand a word, the JBS user interface looks very cool in Japanese). I’d like to take a minute to thank the JBS users who’ve taken the time out to help translate the 750 phrases JBS uses into their own language for the benefit of all the other people out there who can now use JBS in their native tongue. So maximum respect to Albert, Sidnei, Erix, Thierry, Niels, Lorenz, Nico, Asabukuro and the other translators who helped out when they could. It’s very much appreciated!

Anyway, if you’re a current John’s Background Switcher user then it’s a recommended upgrade – just run it over the top of the current version. And if you’re bored of the same old background on your Windows PC or you’re a Windows 7 user who wants more than just local pictures that the built-in desktop slideshow offers, then go and download John’s Background Switcher now!  And for the full details you can read the full release notes too.

I’ve always been a cat person. Maybe I liked to think of a cat as the animal equivalent of me. Sleek, lean, athletic, an independent thinker, a ruthless killing machine – no wait, that’s not right. OK, the real reason is that I like the fact that cats look after themselves, they’re low maintenance with maximum reward. So you can sit in your mountain-top fortress scheming and planning while stroking your cat on your lap, getting all that relaxation and concentration you need to outwit the good guys. And when you’re done you can throw the cat away, get one of your minions to feed it and then it’ll walk itself – low maintenance!

But over the past couple of years I’ve started to change my mind about cats and dogs. The more I’ve interacted with friends dogs the more I’ve started to see the benefits in having one. They’re lots of fun, give unconditional love, they encourage you to get out and exercise, they’re like a member of the family and best of all, unlike a wife you get to tell them what to do and they do it!

Anyway, the more dogs I saw the more I started to like them and when another friend brought their very cute and well behaved Lhasa Apso to the house (pictured right) I really started to think that maybe we should get a dog. Around this time we started watching The Dog Whisperer. For those of you who’ve never seen it, the premise is that people with problem dogs (aggressive, out of control, etc) call in dog expert Cesar Millan who comes along and very quickly sorts everything out. But the most interesting thing to me is that in all cases it’s not the dog that’s the problem, it’s always the owner.

Every few years in the UK there’s a horror story about a pit bull attacking a child, causing hideous damage and the press (and Government) bang home the point that certain breed of dogs are dangerous and should be exterminated. Indeed if you own a pit bull in the UK it’ll be destroyed under the Dangerous Dogs Act. But you know what? It’s all complete bullshit. The only reason dogs like pit bulls become aggressive is because the owners, unwittingly or otherwise, let them behave that way. The problem is that humans instinctively humanise dogs, treating them like they’re children and expect them to respond in the same way that children do.

What The Dog Whisperer demonstrates episode after episode is that dogs are instinctively followers, and when they are they’re calm and submissive and easy to live with. But if they feel that there’s not a pack leader (to a dog you and it are members of a pack) then they’ll step up to the role which means they’ll be more aggressive since defending and disciplining the pack is the job of the pack leader. If they see another dog they’ll impose their authority and try to dominate that dog too. However if you’re the pack leader the dog will hold back and look to you because it’s your job to decide if another dog is OK or not. But the real problem is that a dog only sees the world through a dog’s eyes and if you don’t assert yourself as pack leader in a dog-understandable way then you won’t be the pack leader in its eyes.

People will often shout at dogs to try and get them to do what they want. But really to communicate to a dog you don’t need to say a word, it’s all about your posture and body language. If you watch how dogs interact with each other you’ll notice they do it silently. A touch in the right place at the right time with the right intensity communicates in a far more meaningful way to a dog than a thousand words can. Dogs also mirror your emotions – so if you’re tense and nervous then the dog will be tense and nervous. If a nervous dog meets a couple of relaxed dogs you’ll notice that in most cases the relaxed dogs will pick up on the other dog’s nervousness and then you’ve got 3 fidgety dogs!

If you’re hesitant or not assertive when you instruct your dog to stop eating your shoes then your dog will take that hesitancy as a sign of weakness, look down on you as a lower pack member and carry on chewing. But if you prod it to switch its attention and “own” the shoes by standing over them in a confident way, the dog will get the message and back away. At least, that’s the overly simplified summary. Cesar has a complete understanding of dog psychology and can read situations before they occur and correct a dog before it gets into an excited state.

I guess that’s the thing us mere mortals can’t do so easily but it’s fun to see it done properly. And it shows me that with a bit of work and understanding of a dog’s point of view you can have a happy, calm, submissive dog and a happy life. And with the right owner a pit bull can be a far nicer, safer dog around children than an overly-pampered, humanised chihuahua. It’s not about the dog, it’s always about the owner.

I remember being a small boy looking up at the night sky in a state of awe. Awe at what I was looking at knowing what I was actually seeing. I was one of these geeky kids – quiet, thoughtful, sensitive, but above all curious. Whatever I saw I wanted to understand. I’m told by my father that as an even younger child I used to cry when the wind blew in my hair – I like to think that I wasn’t a wuss, I just didn’t understand what the wind was and didn’t like it. (I’m sticking to that excuse!).

When I looked at the night sky and saw twinkling stars I wanted to understand what they were. So I read books and learned that what I was looking at wasn’t the sky as it was, I was looking at history. The stars were so distant that the light from them could take millions of years to reach my eyes and I wondered what they looked like now – were they still there? Was somebody looking back at me? That’s when I started to understand the scale of the universe out there. Cycling to the next village seemed like a long way, yet I knew that the planet we were on was a tiny dot compared to the star we’re spinning around, which itself was pretty small as stars go and there I was looking at countless stars in the sky just like our sun impossibly far apart.

But my eyes were really opened when I looked up at the stars in a remote part of Scotland with no villages or towns nearby – so no light pollution – and for the first time in my life I could actually see the Milky Way. Far from being a chocolate bar, it’s actually a side-on view of the galaxy we’re a part of and there are so many stars in them you couldn’t count them (I couldn’t count up to a billion back then). The feeling of wonder I had just standing staring out into infinity is the sort of thing you can only experience as a child. I was open minded, full of imagination, wondering what the view was like from these far flung places and wishing I could travel between the stars exploring in a vaguely Star Trek way (but without the skin-tight uniforms). Realising the distances were so enormous I started to wonder how I might get there within my lifetime.

Being a child I could think without boundaries or limitations and this led me to wonder about the nature of space, time and gravity (I did say I was a geeky child). I remember explaining to my parents how I reckoned that if you could create enough gravity between two points you could travel from one to the other without going through the space in between and they had no idea what I was on about (many years later my mother watched a programme about just such a theory and thought I was a bit less crazy from then on). Staring at the night sky captured my imagination and I could stare for hours at pictures of galaxies and nebulae wondering at the vastness of the universe and how I was stuck on planet earth staring at it through a telescope rather than being out there experiencing it.

I’ve never lost that sense of wonder about the universe and whenever I see photos or video from space looking back at earth I always feel almost emotional to look at where we are. I’m of the opinion that if everybody could go into space just once and look down on our planet as the blue marble that it is – so fragile with a tiny, wafer-thin band of atmosphere that makes our life possible – then the world would be a better place for it. Maybe in that case the first world would stop exploiting and plundering the third world for resources and enable our civilisation to last long enough that we can get out and explore the incredible universe we inhabit rather than destroy the beautiful planet on which we live. As I grew from childhood into adulthood I could see that people’s perspectives change. Instead of looking out into the world and beyond with a sense of wonderment and awe people shuffle along looking at their feet, eyes and minds closed, sleepwalking their lives away. Maybe it’s human nature.

But I’ll always be that kid staring up at the night sky with my mouth wide open imagining what civilisations have risen and fallen in the time taken for the light to travel from the stars to my eyes. How tiny and insignificant we are, how short our lives are in the grand scheme of things and what a miracle it is that I’m standing here staring at all. And fortunately I’m not the only one who thinks that way.

I’ve been a long time user of FogCreek’s bug tracking / project management / customer support / jack of all trades / master of all system FogBugz for many years. I use it at work (where it sits in the centre of our development process, we all revolve around it) but more importantly (ahem) for my own projects such as John’s Background Switcher it’s indispensable – without it I’d be lost. It handles all my support emails, defect and feature tracking, it’s my documentation repository, I use it to create release notes and when I’m doing beta testing of JBS I use its discussion forum functionality. There’s nothing better on the market and it takes away all the pain associated with managing and developing software so I can concentrate on what I’m actually building.

I’ve also used SourceGear Vault for version control for a few years and it has the handy ability to hook into FogBugz such that when checking in some code I can associate it with a case in FogBugz. This means I can look at all the code changes for a given case and see what it was that made me break some vital piece of functionality, although there’s no automatic way to see cases related to a checkin.

My good friend John Topley has been telling me how great distributed version control systems (DVCS) are for ages now (regular readers will know that John is forever telling me how great something is and then 6-12 months later I realise that he’s always right and follow up – like buying a Mac, an iPhone and many other things). When I attended the Scotland on Rails conference last year with John I saw a demonstration of working with Git (one of the DVCS out there) and I was impressed.

Very briefly, instead of having a central repository that you get the latest copy of the source from, make changes then commit them, you clone the entire repository (with all of its history) onto your machine. You can make changes, commit them (locally) and then when you’re ready push all those changes up to your central repository you can. You can also choose when to pull changes from the central repository locally – the cool thing being that you don’t actually have to update your local source with those changes until you’re ready. This means super fast checkins (since you’re not going over the network) and you can work in isolation while being able to unwind changes without affecting other people. When you’re ready you push those changes out so that everybody else can pull them to their local repositories. Suddenly things like branching, merging, multiple development paths and a host of things that can be painful to do in systems like SVN are much easier. If you really want to know about distributed version control systems then read Joel Spolsky’s tutorial here – hginit.com. What, you’ve read it already? Let’s carry on.

So a while ago I heard that FogCreek were working on a version control system – called Kiln – that integrated seamlessly with FogBugz but I was a bit busy at the time so added it to my “to get back to” list. A couple of weeks ago I finally remembered to have a look at it and bought myself a license (knowing that I had nothing to lose with their no hassle money back guarantee). After installing I started importing the source from my projects into Kiln. The first problem I had was that Vault seems to have no easy way to export the source history but since I’ve still got Vault running I can always go back and find older versions if I need to (which I most likely won’t).

The import was easy and it then became a case of getting used to using Mercurial (which is the DVCS system upon which Kiln is built) and how it does things. Having read Joel’s tutorial again (and paying attention this time) I was quickly up and running. Even though I’m the only person who works on my own projects (by choice), being able to have multiple cloned local repositories means I can try radical things out, take advantage of source control while I do that and choose to push the changes into Kiln or just delete the lot. And I don’t need to mess around creating branches only to later delete them or go through the pain of merging them in. Ultimately it means the time between checking in can be a lot shorter knowing that only when I’m finished with a piece of work do I need to push it to Kiln. In a team environment this rocks – you don’t have to worry about colleagues picking up your half-finished work and them complaining when things have broken.

When you’re developing on Windows you can install the “Kiln Client Tools” which puts TortoiseHg and some addons onto your system and makes authenticating and cloning repositories from Kiln dead easy. If you’re on a Mac you can install Mercurial tools yourself and it all works nice and smoothly. Since there are plugins for most development environments (like Visual Studio and Eclipse) you can use Kiln (Mercurial) seamlessly as though you were using SVN with the added security of it being a DVCS. Welcome to 21st century software development. Sweet.

The FogBugz integration with Kiln gives what I like to call “360 degree traceability” (something my friend Ian and I love about Team Foundation Server). If I commit a change with something like “Case 123: Fixed the divide by zero error” as the checkin note and push that to Kiln, then automatically case 123 will show that commit on its case page so I can see the changeset details and likewise when looking at the history in Kiln there’ll be a link from that changeset to case 123 in FogBugz. When trying to find out why changes have broken other parts of a system this sort of visibility can be incredibly useful, particularly where a team of multiple developers work on the same code base.

Another cool feature of Kiln which is absolutely no use to me on my own projects is a powerful code review tool. I’ve never really done code reviews in any place I’ve worked – it’s seemed like there’s never enough time to do it. However looking at how easy it is to create and manage code reviews in Kiln makes me think that were I using Kiln at work in my team then we’d definitely start using them. You’d pathalogically avoid branching and merging in Visual SourceSafe because it’s horribly hard to do (since SourceSafe sucks) but using a system like Mercurial makes that so easy you don’t even think twice about it. And so it is with code reviews, they’re so easy to do in Kiln that there’s no excuse not to do them.

In summary I’m very impressed with FogCreek Kiln. FogBugz has set a very high bar in terms of quality and ease of use and Kiln sits as though it was there from the start. Next time I build a development team and choose the tools I’ll be going down the FogBugz / Kiln route for sure, I’d be an idiot not to!

I’d always heard how the older you get the faster time goes. That youth is wasted on the young. That football is a young man’s game. That time waits for no man. And that there’s nothing in this game for two in a bed (Bullseye circa 1986). And so as the years have passed I began to notice that my body didn’t recover as quickly as it used to. That training and playing regular football meant I spent more time with aches and pains than without. I started to get used to rising in the morning and grimacing as I got out of bed before my legs started working. I accepted that playing football meant having niggling injuries in my ankles, groin, thighs, hamstrings and a host of other body parts. I kept saying “one more year and I’ll hang up my boots”. Time was marching on.

My good lady hurt her knee and went to a local physio to get it sorted out. It turned out I have medical cover with work so she got her sessions paid for. Sick of hearing me moan about being stiff and sore she suggested I get a sports massage to loosen off these tired legs and booked me in. I’d been warned that if they found anything wrong they wouldn’t be able to help themselves trying to sort it out. I sort of imagined a relaxing, sensual massage where I’d walk out feeling loose and on top of the world. Instead what began was a series of fabulously painful sessions where I discovered just how much physical pain one woman (my physio) can cause. Remind me never to fall out with a physio.

Much to my surprise everything was wrong! Pretty much all the muscles in my body were as stiff as a board. My flexibility was non-existent. My posture was terrible for many reasons including the muscles on the left side of my body were even tighter than the right. Joints barely moved and I was only going to get worse the older I got. Things had to change.

So each week my physio would work on a particular area of my body then give me a list of stretching exercises to try in an effort to loosen things off and increase my flexibility. Gradually, week by week I noticed things starting to improve. I could move in ways I couldn’t before (and hadn’t even noticed that I couldn’t). I wasn’t feeling stiff and sore after playing football any longer. I was waking up without any pain at all. Suddenly I started to feel years younger and realise that old age wasn’t getting to me just yet!

And since I’m relentlessly (or tediously) disciplined I’ve continued doing about 20-25 minutes of stretching every night and continue to get more flexible. I feel years younger and realise if I keep up the regimen (which I will) I should be able to extend my sporting days many years further than I thought I would. So if you’re in your mid-30s wondering how long you can keep on being active – get yourself down to your nearest sports physio. You won’t regret it!

Next on my list is finding a way to get rid of all these wrinkles…