I was particularly smitten in my last post, having managed to run over 5 km on the road with­out a rest in just 27 min­utes and 38 sec­onds. I gushed about how each and every run made me feel great about myself, and enthusiastically announced my goal to begin running at least 15 km per week (ide­ally over 20 km).

Given my subsequent silence, you might suspect that my running activities gradually faded out. But surprisingly, this is one exercise fad which hasn’t fallen off with time. This fad has become rather more than just a phase; it’s become a lifestyle.

The week after my blog post in June I hit my target and ran just over 20 km. The week after that I ran my first ever 10 km route. During the month following my post, I ran an average of over 15 km per week, hitting my target. I kept that up right through July.

In the latter half of July I ran my first ever non-stop 10km, and the week after that I ran a non-stop 16 km out-and-back route. In August I ran a total of 66 km, even though I was away at a festival for four days.

September was expected to suffer from slow progress: I was going away on holiday for an all inclusive week of binge eating and lounging in the sun. Despite that, I ran 10 km non-stop, 13 km non-stop and 16 km non-stop. I even ran 5 km three times during my holiday in Tenerife! The hard work paid off, because I ended up running 84 km (averaging almost 20km a week). If keep that up for a year, I’ll have run over 1,000 km!

October continued the trend, and it has been a very good month. In 31 days, I’ve run over 125 km. I ran a 36 km week, a 20 km week, a 42 km week and a 27 km week. I ran my fastest ever 5 km route (24 minutes and 19 seconds), my fastest ever 10 km route (51 minutes and 10 seconds) and my first ever half marathon (a self-imposed race which took me 2 hours and 9 minutes).

I’ve achieved a lot. But what are the results? To quote from my last post:

Aside from the imme­di­ate boosts fol­low­ing the activ­ity, I really do feel bet­ter over­all. I have more energy. I feel more pro­duc­tive. My mind is more active. I need less cof­fee. My mus­cles feel stronger, my lungs strain less, my body feels less flabby and I’m grad­u­ally los­ing weight.

It’s all still true. I feel comfortable in my skin. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been—mentally as well as physically. I’m fit, I’m happy, and I’m healthy. My BMI is now rapidly approaching 25, and I’m about to hit “normal weight” for the first time since I reached adulthood.

When I feel tired, I run to perk myself up. When I feel energetic, I run to let myself go. When I feel stressed, I run to clear my head. When I feel peaceful, I run to enjoy the rhythm of my feet.

For me, running has been life changing. I can’t recommend it enough.

Scott’s throwaway tweet made me chuckle. Pick two random four letter word, and tattoo them onto a pair of fists. Hilarity is bound to ensue. Well, I found myself bored one evening a few weeks ago and figured I’d spent a couple of hours cooking up just such a generator. It didn’t take too long—the recipe was simple.

1. Crack out some basic PHP, and whisk together a quick script.
2. Add one lovingly photoshopped image.
3. Layer the base with a suitable open source font from The League of Moveable Type.
4. Add a dash of HTML structure and CSS positioning to hold the mixture firm.
5. Gently fold a 2,000 word list into the mixture. Do this gradually, painstakingly refining the list as you go to ensure it contains only the funniest four letter words.
6. Bake at 180°C for 2 hours, and allow to cool.

Voilà! You now have your very own knuckle tattoo generator—I call mine Fistbump.

If you fancy wasting a few minutes, check it out and let me know what you think. Refresh the page or click the Randomize link to get a new word combo, or use the Permalink option to save your favourite phrase.

Of course, all credit for the idea goes to @MrScottFletcher.

Sundial was a very simple webservice using a hacky Python script and a few CSVs. It did the job… and that was that. It had a fair number of defects such as missing DST support and a cluttered homepage, and I decided a few weeks ago that it was about time I addressed these issues.

I took the opportunity to brush up on my Java, and I re-implemented the entire thing from scratch over the course of a couple of evenings using Java servlets, JSON and the Google App Engine. (By the way, the App Engine is an excellent free platform for small tools and prototypes — check it out.)

As before, you can use dialti.me in a few different ways. The simplest is to visit the dialti.me website and enter a US telephone number that you would like to lookup. Format is unimportant—the number will be extracted as necessary. And as before, the alternative way in which one can use dialti.me is to navigate directly to http://app.dialti.me/Mobile: (651) 342.2323 or similar. It works well with Firefox keywords or as a Chrome custom search engine, too.

Unlike Sundial, dialti.me might actually see some further development such as support for international numbers. I’d love to hear any suggestions you might have, or feedback on the design. Let me know how you get on in the comments, or drop me an email.

Well, I recently decided that it was time to start listening to this wealth of medical advice. I’ve been overweight since my sixth-form college years (around 17–18, for the non-British readers). I haven’t been a full-on fatty, but I’ve been larger than I’d like to be. A BMI between 20–25 is considered normal, 25–30 is considered overweight, and 30+ is considered obese. I moved gently but consistently from a BMI of around 24 in 2005 to a BMI of 31 in 2009. Yes, by 2009 I was technically considered obese.

I’d like to stress here that realistically I was by no means obese, but I was certainly overweight and—more importantly—I was unhappy with my body shape. I was unfit, easily caught out of breath and flabbier than I was happy with. Several times over the course of my degree I’d attempted to break this cycle through exercise, and I repeatedly failed.

In 2009 I figured out there are two secrets to success for me.

1. Eat smaller portions. You’ll be full anyway, and you’ll consume signficantly fewer calories.
2. Find a way to integrate exercise into your daily routine in such a way that it does not detract from your free time.

I used those methods with vigour, and by 2010 I was down to a BMI of 27.5. Not technically a “normal” mass, but outwardly I appeared healthy enough, I’d reduced by waist size significantly from 38 inches to 34 inches, and I felt better about myself. I kept a balance for the next 18 months, didn’t change much in terms of weight, and aside from the loss of some muscle mass I’d built up I remained in pretty good shape.

Fast forward to Spring 2011. I’m bitten by an overwhelming urge to lower my current BMI of 28 and finally hit that “normal weight” to which I’d always aspired. I had moved house to a new location around 5km from my place of work, yet despite cycling to work every day and eating sensibly I didn’t really seem to be able to lose any weight. But moving house really opened up a new door for me: the realistic prospect of “run commuting”.

Now, I’m no runner. Between 2005 and 2011 I probably ran less than 100 km — and that includes a summer during which I ran on a treadmill almost daily! So why was I so keen to run to work? Well, running has a quintessential property which seems to be missing from cycling: it feels like hard work.

You know what? It is. I threw myself in at the deep end and just decided I’d run to work — and if I couldn’t manage it, I’d have to damn-well walk. So I did. And I ran further than expected. I had to stop regularly to walk, but it felt really good. I ached, but I felt as if my body was energized all day. It might be my imagination, but I thought I could feel the increased metabolism.

It was great. So the next week I did it again — this time using RunKeeper and the accompanying Android app to track my pace, location and distance. And the next week, I did it again. Twice.

It’s now just over a month since I started run commuting, and in that time I’ve run over 55 km. This morning I ran over 5km on the road without stopping for the first time in my life, and I did it in 27 minutes and 38 seconds — a personal best. Every time I run I feel great about myself, and every time I run I’m driven to go further and faster than I did before. I now plan to start running three times a week, with a minimum distance to cover of 15 km per week (ideally over 20 km).

What are the results? Aside from the immediate boosts following the activity, I really do feel better overall. I have more energy. I feel more productive. My mind is more active. I need less coffee. My muscles feel stronger, my lungs strain less, my body feels less flabby and I’m gradually losing weight — now sporting a BMI of around 27 (and falling).

Run commuting has been an unmitigated success, and I would recommend it to anyone who lives less than 4 miles from work. Just try it, take walking breaks as often as you need to, and soon enough you’ll be running the whole distance non-stop. It won’t be long before you’re fitter, happier and more productive.

There’s only one difference between entrepreneurs and the rest of the world. To sum it up in 10 words:
Entrepreneurs don’t just have ideas. They bring them to life.

Next time you wonder what the difference is between you and the next young millionaire (or billionaire), I want you to stop pretending you don’t know the answer. It’s simple: everyone has ideas, but entrepreneurs make their ideas into reality. Now stop reading Reddit, stop watching TV, stop playing games and get out there and build something.

Yesterday I said that to date, the Diaspora devel­op­ers had “failed to inte­grate their most basic premise into the soft­ware design. They’ve missed the point from first prin­ci­ples.” Well, a couple of friends on Twitter called me out on this and asked whether I’d actually checked out the back-end code to be sure about my accusations. Maybe Diaspora was just lacking a UI to make the relevant changes? This is alpha software, after all.

Well, they had a point. And thanks to the beauty of open source source, I was able to download the source code directly and take a look for myself. I only got as far as looking at the database schemas, but it looks to me like the database layer would require significant work to bring profile information into their aspect-based privacy model.

The aspect model is clearly built around controlling visibility of posts, which starts out by encompassing “wall posts” and will cascade to include comments, photos, mentions, videos and everything else that flows from there. At first glance, the team have done well. They seem to have laid the foundation of their privacy approach on bedrock, building their philosophy into the software from the ground-up. Their initial design will naturally affect everything based on their central idea of a “post” as the network grows and features are added.

The only problem? Profile information does not sensibly fall into this model in any way. It’s currently stored in fields in the Profile model in a non-extensible way which is entirely disconnected from posts. To allow profile information to fall into line with the rest of their aspect-centric approach, they’d need to refactor the user profile models pretty heavily (which admittedly they will likely want to do anyway eventually, given the limited nature of their current design) and they will also have to rework with the basis of the aspect model or the way in which users and user profiles are connected.

In other words, their foundations aren’t built on bedrock at all. They’ve laid them two storeys up, establishing their groundwork on top of the hastily-constructed user model they already had in place.

Fixing this omission certainly doesn’t look like a trivial job. And in addition, let’s not forget that any reworking of their basic models at the database layer would naturally have to fall through the rest of the MVC layers to the UI too. This is not an insubstantial overhaul. Given that the Diaspora project doesn’t even have a note about this on their roadmap, my initial assumption that they’ll have to hack this support in and bolt it on later when it’s too late to refactor properly seems accurate.

All of the above shouldn’t be taken to mean that nothing can be done and the problem is unresolvable, but there is a reasonable amount of work involved and it would mean pretty fundamental changes to their core models. It’s not something that could get implemented as a quick patch; this change would require full support of the core development team. Open source is indeed beautiful thing that enables us to trust our software and gain understanding of how it works, but sometimes you just have to hold your hands up and admit defeat.

Diaspora is fundamentally missing the point of their own philosophy, and there’s nothing we can do but wait and see how they end up fixing it later down the line. Will it be a Facebook-style mess of privacy controls? I hope not, but at present the odds aren’t looking good.

It’s a bit dead at the moment, and very lacking in features compared to any other service you might care to join, but that’s fine. It’s in alpha, and missing features are to be expected (along with a good helping of bugs). My real issue with the service, and the one that lead me to compose this blog post under such a dismayed title, is that Diaspora is already failing to meet the expectations they set about control over privacy and sharing.

One of the core thrusts of Diaspora is the big bold message on their homepage: “Share what you want, with whom you want.” In accordance with this, they have implemented aspects: contacts must be categorized into different sets of users (which may overlap as required) so that you can choose what you share and only disclose it to the chosen contacts. This, they suggest, allows you to share the 3 nice pictures from your night out with colleagues while your friends can see the full damage (i.e. the other 47 images). It’s a nice idea, and one that appeals to me. It’s simpler than Facebook’s messy privacy model and seems to be built-in from the ground up. Or does it?

One of the first things I tried to do was to hide my birthday from anyone other than close friends and family. It’s a silly thing, but I thought it would be nice to share my real date of birth only with my friends; the rest of the world should see nothing, or perhaps just the year in which I was born. Not a big deal, but a reasonable thing to want to protect given how often date of birth is used in various security mechanisms.

I flipped to my Profile Settings, but couldn’t see how one might restrict certain parts of one’s profile to particular aspects. Neither biography, location, photo, or birthday could be hidden away. It’s not just that I was in the wrong part of the website, which was my first thought: there is no way to control which of your contacts see which parts of your user profile.

This is a very basic starting point. Even Facebook gets this right. Yet Diaspora—the social network that allows you to “share what you want, with whom you want.”—has missed the point entirely.

I know this is almost silly. After all, there’s not much in your profile you’d realistically want to restrict at present. But there are use cases for doing so now, even paranoid security reasons. And what’s more, when you can eventually add information like employment details, religion or sexuality, one might very well want to restrict certain information to close friends or family.

I did post a contracted version of this rant on Diaspora itself, and a friend commented that perhaps I should try to get involved with development. It’s not a particularly satisfactory response. Indeed, the only bad thing about open source technology is that one cannot make disappointed noises without somebody else suggesting they get involved and fix the issue themselves. It’s a poor response when people say it on the Gentoo forums, and it’s a poor response when it gets trotted out on a social network too.

To date, the developers have failed to integrate their most basic premise into the software design. They’ve missed the point from first principles. And, like security models, trying to bolt the right behaviour on to the application later down the line will be a losing battle: you’ll never plug all the holes. I’m not sure any individual hacking on the existing codebase can make a real difference.

Despite all of the above, I will indeed keep a close eye on Diaspora and I’m not going to give up on it. But at present, the disparity between their marketing blurb and their software is almost unpalatable.

Inline XBRL, otherwise known as iXBRL, is an incredibly elegant solution to financial reporting. A derivative of XHTML, iXBRL allows users to produce human-readable documents that can be rendered in web browser while also allowing them to embed additional structured data. When processed by a compliant processor, an iXBRL document is transformed into an XBRL instance document—a format used by governments, regulators and analysts worldwide. For those of you that don’t work in the world of financial reporting, iXBRL really is a very neat option: the very same data that is read by human eyes can be transformed into an XML–based machine-readable format by any iXBRL compliant processor, allowing a single source document to be used by analysts and BI tools alike.

For the average user, iXBRL means that the documents seen on-screen are comparable to the Word documents, Excel documents or even PDF documents which they are replacing (and in many cases, the documents from which they were generated). Provided it doesn’t hinder machine-readability or require duplication of data, this familiarity can only be a good thing. The fact that iXBRL also hides away the hideous angle-bracket-and-slash-infected nature of XBRL doesn’t hurt either. XBRL may well be a great format which is ideal for consistent, comparable, and processable financial reporting, but it’s miles away from anything an accountant would actually want to use or understand.

On a global scale, iXBRL is going to be a big deal primarily because it solves the kind of problems that the US have been enduring for years. The largest corporations in America have to file their 10-K and 10-Q reports to the SEC, but they have to file two copies of their returns: one in XBRL format, and one in HTML format. One provides structured data, and the other merely allows the analysts who have been relying on readable returns for decades to continue doing their jobs. This leaves us in a horrible half-way house, with duplication of effort (and data!) plus a boring, tiresome job comparing the two documents to ensure that they are consistent. Worse, it means that everyone can ignore the XBRL filings for a few more years and work with the same HTML EDGAR filings they’re already comfortable with—reducing the impetus for companies to produce high-quality XBRL returns.

In the UK, the sharp charge to iXBRL has delivered all of the benefits of HTML and XBRL formats while cutting out the drawbacks of being forced to prepare both. I’d be willing to bet that even though the UK is the first country to make the leap to iXBRL, it won’t be the last.

Welcome to the world stage, iXBRL. You’re a welcome addition to the stable of financial reporting formats, and I bet you’ll also be one of the most durable.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Quantum Number 5.

s, p, d, f, g
Everybody in the lab, so come on let’s see;
Drive a quantum oscillator
They say that it’s classically forbidden
But so did Weber.

Funded like we were last week
We need more kit,
but hydrogen’s cheap
I like Niels Bohr, Max Born, and Erwin Schrodinger,
(I won’t touch Marie Curie
Cos she was a minger!)

Blame uncertainty, nothing’s certain any more,
Position or time, we just guess what’s in store,
Nobody knows, but it’s all good, let me dump it
Please send in the trumpet

Chorus:
A little bit of Heisenberg in my life
A little bit of Fermi by my side
A little bit of Pauli is all I need
A little bit of Planck is what I see
A little bit of Feynmann in the sun
A little bit of Zeeman all night long
A little bit of Einstein here I am
I’m quantum theory’s biggest fan.

(Quantum number five)

Spin up and down and tunnel all around
The ideas are profound
But keep your feet on the ground
Emit a photon left
And a photon right
One to the front
And one to the side
Check spectral lines once
Spectral lines twice
And if it looks like this
You didn’t model it right

Chorus:
A little bit of Heisenberg in my life
A little bit of Fermi by my side
A little bit of Pauli is all I need
A little bit of Planck is what I see
A little bit of Feynmann in the sun
A little bit of Zeeman all night long
A little bit of Einstein here I am
I’m quantum theory’s biggest fan.

(Proton)
(The proton)
(Quantum number five)
(laugh)

Chorus:
A little bit of Heisenberg in my life
A little bit of Fermi by my side
A little bit of Pauli is all I need
A little bit of Planck is what I see
A little bit of Feynmann in the sun
A little bit of Zeeman all night long
A little bit of Einstein here I am
I’m quantum theory’s biggest fan.

I do all to
Get entangled with a girl like you
When you interact, we’ll change together
With spooky action through the ether.

(Quantum number five)

I practice what I preach, and over the past few months I’ve been using a cheap ruled notebook for this very purpose. But this cheap notebook which is on hand wherever I go, so it somehow seems to get used for everything from meeting notes to shopping lists. The simple utility of always carrying a pen and paper has in itself managed to detract from my creative process. Now when I try to get inspired, I have to trawl through page-upon-page of scribblings about other menial tasks and irrelevant notes which seem to end up distracting me from my immediate goals.

This problem was a simple one to solve: get a new notebook which will be used purely for business ideas and innovation, and carry both notebooks around with me.

The notebook I chose for this purpose is the wonderful Moleskine Pocket Ruled Notebook. Considering this is essentially “just” a notebook, I can’t overstate the simple beauty that Moleskines offer. The form factor is stunning. The hefty 192 pages have a wonderful weight to them, as well as being lined and acid-free. The notebook also has a ribbon placeholder, elastic strap to hold the notebook shut, and a back pocket to hold any loose slips of paper.

Buying such a beautiful notebook has helped me out in more ways than one. Now I have a dedicated space for creativity—something I find myself treating as an hallowed, almost sacred object. I wouldn’t dare use it for anything other than the intended purpose. Plus the pages are thread bound, so any temptation to rip them out when I write down something rubbish is dramatically reduced.

I’ve decided to use the Moleskine as a library of business ideas. Whenever I think of a potential business proposition, I turn to the next free double-page in the notebook and write as much or as little as comes to mind. I leave the full double-page dedicated to that single idea, move the ribbon placeholder to the next page, and close the book.

This process is slowly but surely providing me with a beautiful repository of raw potential. Whenever I want some inspiration, I have pages of opportunities to browse. Each time I do, it seems inevitable that I come up with new additions and thoughts which can be noted against each central idea. In time, I expect that this book will be full of such a variety of ideas (some wonderful, some terrible) that starting a side business is almost inevitable!

The point I’m trying to make is a simple one: creativity is important, but so is respect for your ideas. Treating inspiration with reverence beyond a quick scribble will help you to build a bank of great ideas with real potential—and doing so in a book you can be proud to carry will only make the process easier. Invest in ideas today. You’ll thank me in the future.

How do you capture your winning ideas and make sure you don’t forget them forever? Do you have a great process for refining them over time? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.