Nick Carroll

One of my photos that I took during a trip to Moreton Bay in Queensland was recently selected for a Schmap dynamic travel guide.

I was working in Brisbane earlier in the year and decided to spend one weekend sightseeing with Kimmy. Brett Dargan, a colleague at ThoughtWorks, recommended heading down to Moreton Bay as something to do. Kim and I caught the train down to Moreton Bay from Central station in Brisbane. We had coffee at one of the local cafes, then walked along the bay area taking photos. One of our photos (shown below) of the picturesque bay area was selected from our Flickr account by Schmaps for their Moreton Bay travel guide.

I’m heading to Singapore next week for a holiday with my partner Kimmy. Unfortunately Kimmy is heading to Singapore for work, so I have had to find things to do to keep myself entertained during the day. I could have been content with heading to the Raffles hotel and knocking back a few Singapore Slings, but I did one better and organised to give a presentation at the Singapore Java Meetup at a microbrewery and restaurant called Brewerkz. I will be presenting on Agile, Mingle, and working through a Test Driven Development exercise with the group. The event will be sponsored by ThoughtWorks and it is already booked solid. Goes to show that you have to get in quick when free beer is on offer!

Update: My presentation is available online as a Google Doc.

… and it’s a Nokia n95!

My Sony Ericsson stopped working yesterday and I still had 5 months left on my 2 year contract with 3. It caused me a lot of problems yesterday as nobody could contact me, and I was even stranded at the airport because of this. Luckily when I got home I found a leaflet from 3 notifying me of a free upgrade. The upgrade meant that I didn’t have to pay out the rest of my existing contract, but only if I sign on again for another 2 years with a new phone. Talk about perfect timing!

After a quick review of the latest and greatest phones in Australia, I made my way to a 3 store to check out the Nokia n95 and the e65. The e65 seemed to be a decent phone, and many of its features were targeted towards business users. It has a smaller form factor than the n95 and I think I would have been happy with the e65. The reason I went with the n95 was that it converges a number of different devices into a single package. It has a phone, a web browser, digital camera, video camera, voice recorder, music player, and GPS all in one.

The 5 MP camera in the n95 was what sealed the deal. I wanted a new camera to replace my aging Nikon Minolta, and having a decent camera built into the phone saves having to purchase another device. Also there have been many moments when I wished I had a camera with me, and at one point I started carrying around a camera, just in case I stumbled across something that was worth turning into a happy snap. This phase soon wore off when the extra baggage kept weighing down my pants so much so that I almost got caught flashing my budgy smugglers. So with the n95 I am glad that I don’t have to carry around a camera, mp3 player, video camera, along with my mobile phone anymore. Happy days!

I also feel at ease with the news that Australia won’t be seeing the iPhone until 2008. But if this comparison between the iPhone and the n95 at CNET is anything to go by, then I’m sure that I have a phone that is as good, if not better than the current iPhone. So now I can sit back until my current mobile contract expires in 2 years, and wait for a better iPhone to arrive. Hopefully the iPhone in two years will have a replaceable battery, a better camera, GPS; and can support IM, MMS, and 3G.

Connecting the Nintendo Wii to the Internet is quite easy, especially if you are connecting to an Apple Airport Express. However, if you don’t properly configure the Airport Express, then you will suffer slow downloads and constant timeout errors on your Wii. All you really need to do is configure the Airport Express so that the Channel option is set to 1 instead of Automatic in the AirPort tabbed page, then update the configuration of your Airport Express. Simple as that.

If you want to add security, then use WEP. Either 40 bit WEP or 128 bit WEP works with the Wii. Remember that 40 bit WEP requires a 5 character password key and the 128 bit WEP requires a 13 character password key. If you want to lock down your wireless network to a list of MAC addresses, then retrieve the MAC address of your Wii from the Internet settings, and add it to the Access Control of your Airport Express.

I accepted a job offer yesterday and will be working for ThoughtWorks in the new year!

I had a number of job offers to consider, so it was a hard decision in the end. I decided to go with ThoughtWorks because they are a dynamic IT consultancy, that essentially try to make large companies develop software like small more agile companies. They have the culture of a startup, which reminded me of the great times I had working at a startup called Xylogy. A good corporate culture does go a long way in making work fun and enjoyable.

I had the chance to meet a lot of ThoughtWorkers during my brief trip to Melbourne for the Graduate assessment day. Normally in job interviews you only get to meet an HR person and your future manager. At ThoughtWorks you get to meet the whole gang! So you get the opportunity to assess whether what they say about their employees is true or not. I can now vouch that they are a friendly, enthusiastic, and intelligent group of people. They were a lot of fun too, which was kind of strange, because none of my other interviews or assessments with other companies were considered fun!

The graduate day at ThoughtWorks consisted of individual and group activities. These activities tested my presentation, consultancy, and group interaction skills. I have to say that these activities were fun, especially the “competition room” that tested how I would interact with a potential client. However, they were at times quite stressful when the pressure was turned on. I tried very hard to keep my appearances relaxed, focused and confident. However it was a different story on the inside. My brain was switched into overdrive, the adrenaline was pumping, my heart was thumping, and the knot in my stomach was just getting tighter and tighter. It was a buzz, and I enjoyed the challenges they presented to me. If this is any indication of things to come, then I am going to enjoy working for ThoughtWorks!

For the last six months I’ve been wondering what I will be doing with myself after I’ve completed my PhD. I have applied to about a dozen graduate positions over this time, and have only heard back from a handful of companies. I don’t know if the companies that I haven’t heard from are taking their time

I find it strange and sometimes rude that some companies these days don’t bother to let you know that they will no longer be considering your application for a job. Especially after it takes so much time and effort in answering all their questions in the application forms. They should at least have the professional courtesy to inform you that you will no longer be considered, especially since they can easily bulk mail a few thousand applicants using a mail form. The problem with being kept in the dark is that you have no idea whether they are still processing your application or have trashed it altogether. I’m sure others like me will not consider working at these companies in the future.

The companies that I have been thoroughly impressed with so far are: Google, IBM, ThoughtWorks, and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).

The RBA is the odd one out, but they have a very large IT department, and have some serious IT infrastructure for moving money around. They do all of their IT work in-house, so nothing is out-sourced. It seems to have worked well for them. Now I’ve heard a lot of companies try to pitch their work-life balance to me, but this has got to take the cake. The best thing about the RBA is that being a government agency you only have to work 7 hours and 22 minutes for each working day of the week. You also get rostered days off, which is one extra day off work per month on top of your 4 weeks of annual leave. Any extra hours that you work can be claimed as overtime. This has got to be the best work-life balance in any IT role out there.

Google is Google. Every software engineer wants to work there, and why wouldn’t they? They have a lot of perks, such as free food and drink, video games, pool tables, etc. Sounds more like Club Med than an office. I think they are smart in providing these fringe benefits, as it confines you to the office so you work longer hours. However, I also want to sharpen my business acumen, and I don’t think Google has the capacity to do this.

ThoughtWorks is an IT consultancy that develop custom software solutions. They have a graduate program where they send you to India for 6 weeks of training at their “ThoughtWorks University”. I am familiar with a lot of the open source software that they work on, such as Selenium and CruiseControl. I am also attracted to their agile methodology, and their use of Ruby on Rails. However, I have my doubts that they actually use rails in Australia. It seems to be mostly .NET and Java development in Australia. I guess most of their billable jobs are in the finance industry, and Java seems to be the language of choice amongst the big banks.

I have also been very impressed with what IBM has to offer. They are a global corporation with close to 350,000 employees worldwide. There is a lot of room to grow and progress within the organisation. Not to mention the flexibility of changing roles along the way. I also like the amount of investment that they put towards developing their employees to become “future leaders”. The job that I am going for is within their Software Group. I have heard a lot of good things about this branch of their business from friends of mine that work at IBM. Even those that left IBM also have good things to say about them. I have also been very impressed with their recruiters, as they continue to keep me updated on the recruitment process on a weekly basis. I guess the only downside is that I will have to use a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows. I wonder if the Thinkpad can be reformatted with Ubuntu Linux?

Damn this site is looking old! I’m going to have to change the theme one of these days. Hopefully I will have time after I submit my thesis in January next year. I will no doubt start working in late February, which will give me a month to work on a few little projects of my own, or to just have a good long holiday before I start full-time work in industry.

I am undecided as to whether I will use another blogging system, or continue to use WordPress, but with a different theme. There is nothing wrong with WordPress, except that I would like to start hacking my own blog, and I really don’t want to do that in PHP. Now that my hosting is with TextDrive, I am restricted to PHP, python, and ruby on rails apps. This rules out any possibility of using OpenACS, which is a web application framework that I’ve been using for the last 5 years. So it might be a good opportunity to do something different with rails or django.

Sunrise Theme

I installed Beryl/XGL on Ubuntu Dapper over the weekend using these instructions. I then selected the Wombat theme and customised it to look like the image above. As you can see, you are able to create some really cool glassy effects with your window manager. If you are interested in the Sunrise theme, then feel free to download it from here, and import it into your Emerald Theme manager. You can download the background image from here.

Beryl provides some eye candy for the linux desktop. If you are a Mac user, then you’ll feel right at home… well almost. You can minimise windows with the genie effect or select a running application a la Exposé. Switching desktops is similar to switching user accounts on the Mac, which is done through a rotating cube effect.

Something different is the wobbly effect that seems to turn your windows to jelly when you move them around the screen. This was cool for like 2 minutes, until I started feeling nauseous, so I disabled it.

For a 0.1 release, Beryl is quite impressive. However, it seems to crash a lot. In fact it crashed twice whilst I was trying to write this blog entry.

Bugger… I missed out on the NBCF Treasure Hunt this year. Nathan, how come you didn’t organise it this year? Probably for the same reason I didn’t organise it… just too damn busy. I wouldn’t have had time to work on the team t-shirts this year. Last year’s Average Joes t-shirts were a success, and I doubt I could have topped that effort this year.

Anyway, the National Breast Cancer Foundation is a worthy cause, and so to show my support my blog header is going Pink for October.

Kimmy and I did the Sydney Harbour circle walk over the weekend. It is suppose to be a 23km walk, but it felt like 30km… probably because we left the trail a few times in search for a place to eat. We started off in Darling Harbour, then followed the track clockwise around the map. If I were to do it again I would follow the track anti-clockwise, so that I could stop off at Leichardt or Balmain for a meal towards the end of the walk. However, I won’t be doing that walk anytime soon, especially now that we are well into Spring and experiencing temeratures in the high 20s!