Over the falls

2005 was the year I became a blogger. It wasn't exactly intentional - I'd been subscribed to lots of blogs for ages, and blogger.com makes the process so easy, that you can almost accidentally sign yourself up. So I added my first post , as I said, on a whim. At the time, I couldn't have foreseen that blogging would integrate it's way into my life the way it has. Now it's 12 months later, and I've posted at least once every couple of days for a year. Which has actually been really easy and fun. I really like to write, and now I have a place to do it. Here are my favourites for 2005: The Great Chicken Massacre This post about the eventual doom of metadata Teaching kids how to program I really like this blogging-under-the influence post about Me and Stilly watching the huge machinery. I'm such a sook when I'm drunk. This ranty early morning post about how the read/write web could re-build democracy. That crazy dream where all the software in the world w...

Whew! Hurricane Christmas has blown through my lounge room for another year. The devastation is quite severe, with paper, toys and candy strewn as far as the eye can see. The children seem positively delighted, fuelled with sugar and excitement. The Finnancial cost of the disaster is hard to precisely quantify in the absence of any credit card statements, but is expected to stretch into the thousands... It's 35 degrees, and the cricket is on the TV. Now is time to begin the costly clean up operation... A very Merry Christmas and a happy and relaxing new year holiday to you :^)

Like everyone, I always wanted to write a novel. But... I'm lazy, and not a good writer. So, whatever the problem is, the solution is wikis, right? Right. So (drumroll) here's the worlds first* wiki novel . Go forth and edit it, you internet, you! *totally unsubstantiated or researched UPDATE: This post was written during a somewhat drunken christmas party. It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Okay - this is weird. The French parliament were all set to vote on a proposal indicating that individiuals caught pirating copy-protected material would face enormous fines and jail terms.But then, at the eleventh hour, the legislation was amended to legalize file sharing by anyone who paid a monthly royalties duty estimated at $8.50. (Read the full story here ...The final vote is not expected until after 17th Jan) But still - this means the government is paying musicians. How will we know who's popular? How will teenagers know what to buy? Maybe in the absence of "how much money they make", we'll have to find some other metric of success, like, "are they any good?"

The end-of-year google Zeitgeist makes for some interesting reading. What did people search for over the year? Check out the rise of wikipedia. Looks like 2005 was indeed the "year of the wiki"... I think it's amusing that all the search graphs seem to go up and down with perfect synchronicity to the working week. Looks like as much as we all love the internet, we don't want to hang out with it on weekends...

If you ever wanted to get started with Ruby, but were too lazy or busy or something else to try, go and check out why the lucky stiff's fantastic Try Ruby Tutorial . It works in your browser, on the spot, and shows you the basics of the langauge in a really cool way. If you never wanted to get started with Ruby, go and check it out anyway - These things are fun, and fun is good!

Chris Anderson has a beautiful post about emergent intelligence, and why it is that wikipedia is so compellling - by sacrificing perfection in favour of being inclusive, and encompassing as much as possible. You can read it at www.thelongtail.com Something I've been thinking about for a while now, that the reason the Long Tail is such an intersting phenomenon, is that it restores people into the equation. Things like Wikipedia, and Bloggers, and this whole shiny Web 2.0 thing are all about celebrating diversity, that comes from the fact that we're all diverse individuals, and not a faceless amortisation of collective public opinion. Modern society seems to emphasise dehumanising - replacing people with 'markets', or 'resources', distancing ourselves from emotions and needs by analysing economic trends and monitoring other abstract statistics that detach us from things that people like. When...

Those crazy cats over at google have just released a new firefox extension that that tells you what people are saying about every site you view in your browser - it hooks into google blogsearch, and displays a bit of "toast" (you know, those pop-up thingys that notify you when something happens?) for each comment that people have posted about You can evern post directly to your blog from the little window, if you feel inclined to reply. So I'm surfing around, and I can read people's comments as I go. That's pretty cool. But having this thing pop up and down like a yo-yo every time I click a link is a bit disconcerting. I'll give it a go for a while, and see what I think. In other exciting toast related news, I made plum jam this weekend. It was pretty yummy. If you want to make it too, here's the recipe I used (note that I followed it pretty much to the letter, except for the wasps).

Did you ever just open a book at any page, and see if you could find a special meaning in the first sentence you read? Uh... me neither. But if you were ever to do such a silly thing, maybe you might find some kind of special insight... So here's a special link just for you: Tell me my future! Disclaimer: You might need to look a little harder to reveal the true meaning of your fortune. And then maybe harder still. Actual mileage may vary. Any resemblance to actual events is entirely co-incidental,and no correspondence will be entered into. If you don't like your future, feel free to click it again to get another one. Or get over it. It's up to you. It is your future, after all. Not much you can do about it. Unless you want to get caught in the time paradox- And that would mean having to sit through all those Back To The Future movies all over again...

Dear Santa, No friendly chit-chat, just gimme stuff, ok? I want a: Pink Flying V Ukelele so I can REALLY rock out, and an: Electric Kazoo , so I can drive my family absolutely bananas. Love Gord :)

This post , from Jason Fried, rings loud in my ear. Too often when you set out to define a project's scope, you find yourselves drowning in complex functionality - and often only as some kind of subconcisous self-imposed restriction. "1 week from idea to launch sure beats 3 months from idea to nothing." Oh yeah. The best way to get started, is to get started.

I spent today gardening. I'm not sure what it is about gardening, but it always reminds me of John Lennon. I know that may seem like a bit of a stretch, but when I'm gardening, I'm usually doing two things: Weeding, (because I don't garden very often) and; Singing (because gardening tends to put me in a very zen like mood, and then my head fills up with music) And because I'm weeding, I always seem to end up singing that Elton John song that was written for John -" Empty Garden " - particularly the line about "Weeded out the tears and grew a good crop" Given that it's 25 years since John left the planet in such a tragic fashion, it seemed appropriate, so while I finished the weeding, I sang every one of John's songs I could think of - which is a lot. As a kid growing up, John was one of my heroes. With my Dad being from Liverpool, and my Mom a big Beatles fan, I was steeped in John's music ever since I was a baby. He was cool and hon...

I went down the hall to talk to Geoff Moore today - Geoff is the General Manager for Asia Pacific at TOWER Software. (I was working on some technical responses for a tender). When I got there, he wasn't in his office. That wasn't really surprising, but then I bumped into him in the kitchen. Turns out that the reason for his absence was that he was spending the whole day on the helpdesk, answering support questions from customers. How cool is that? I don't know many CEOs that would be up for 8 hours of product support.

I know I'm not supposed to blog about my Google ads - but this is just a little weird. For some reason, my site is now showing a big funky looking advert for Gucci Handbags. How that ties in with my site you probably have no idea. But strangely, I do. For ages now, I've been working on a draft post about handbags. I know, you don't believe me, but it's true! I was trying to figure out how I could tell everyone about a great friend of mine who's started a handbag business, without appearing to be some kind of blogging pimp. ElizaClare specialises in some of the coolest handbags you've ever seen. Those Wilson girls sure know how to make incredible things. If you are looking for a really special present for a special lady in your life, you should go and check them out. Heck, you should just check them out anyway, because they are so cool looking. Meanwhile, what I want to know, is if Google are searching through my draft posts. Or somehow indexing my daily thought...

Sadly, there's some oft overlooked part of my brain that seems ever so slightly obsessed with body image. Only a little bit obsessed, mind you, but obsessed nonetheless. I'm sure most of you are familiar with it's ranting: "Man, you are getting to be one tubby looking IT guy. When was the last time you actually did something huh? You think you can just live forever drinking beer and sitting around banging keys all day? Get off your lazy ass and get some regular exercise!!" Most of the time this Exercise Bit Of My Brain (EBOMB) is totally outvoted by the rest of my smart, lazy brain, who would rather solve problems and talk nonsense, but today, that little part of my brain got it's way. I woke up early to go for a run. I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, or through any creative use of the word, in any sense, a runner. The whole thing seemed a little embarrassing to me. I was standing on the road, in stupid looking clothes, feeling stupid, and I wa...

Next time you drive past a field, you should listen a little harder. Who knows, the next 'killer app' could be being discussed over some cud by our bovine friends. I bet you're thinking - What the hell are you talking about, you crazy Australian hippy loony? Good question. (Albeit a little hurtfully phrased). I'm talking about COW. COW is a programming language ( a variant of brainfuck ) that uses various capitalizations of the word 'Moo' as it's syntax. I know - it's deranged. But it's funny to read. "No man, just here, where you say 'mOo mOo Moo' - you need to say 'moo moO Moo...'" Humans are without doubt the most bizarre species on the planet. Nerds are doubly that. Or triple. Or more.

Computers are really good at doing some things - they never complain, they're really smart, they never get bored or forget anything, and they can work for ages at a stretch. Yep, computers are pretty amazing. But it's time we faced up to it. Soon, they'll be taking your jobs . They'll be slowly taking over the world, one byte at a time, until they have no use for us and our primitive, meat-based brains at all. And then we will all have to live in little tubes of goo as nothing more than a bio-organic source of power. " Yeah, yeah - I know ", you say, "But what can I do?" Well, if you'd like to rage against the machines, you can take on a whole heap of boring repetetive tasks thanks to Amazon. You get paid in cash if you do... But more importantly, if all the humans take on all the really boring repetetive tasks, then the computers will be out of a job. Ha! Beat them at their own game, I say...

Cognitive Daily (link via scoble ) reports on an intriguing study on the relationships between mood and being able to synthesize memories - basically, if you're in a great mood, it looks as though you are more able to make what psychologists call 'gist' memories - an artificial memory that's based on deduction. It always fascinated me how human brains can do this. At some point in time, some hairy ancestor of yours and mine figured out that five seeds lying in the cave were the same as five fruits - that the concept of 'five' was common. And then went on to apply the newly 'remembered' concept of 'counting things' to all sorts of stuff. (This leap of faith is brilliantly illustrated in Robert L Forward's Dragon's Egg - one of my all time favorite books - which you should really read if you get a chance). So it turns out that being happy means that you're more likely to make such a leap -that you're actually smarter when you...

If you're a tech savvy, computer aware person, you probably spend a bit of time doing tech support - helping friends and families with general PC problems . You've probably experienced the kind of guru-like awe and reverence that you're viewed with when you quickly solve a problem by breezing through a thousand unrelated options. For us nerds, it's not so hard - just a case of knowing the behavior, and the conventions, allows us to pick our way through even completely foreign application with relative ease. For the rest of the world, Computer use is something of a dark art. User interfaces are complicated. Designing such complexity for an untrained human to use is really hard. Of course, Software Engineers are frequently not great at it, which doesn't help. Jan Miksovsky's post , (via The old new thing ), got me thinking about an old idea I had to try and visualize the complexity of a user interface. I call them 'decision trees' ( I apologize in advance ...

As the creeping Christmas crap encroaches into the shopping malls this time of year, I must admit I always tend to get a bit Scrooge about the whole affair. I was thinking I'd share that surliness with you all. But, then I read on Seth's blog , the sentence that sums up Christmas Shopping for me: "The consumer portion of our economy is now dependent on a four-week long debt-fueled race to buy the useless..." So sad. And so true. But mainly sad...

On the drive home the other day, my friend Rhys and I got to talking about when we first discovered the internet. He mentioned that he started using the internet in high school, when he was about 15. (Rhys is one of those funky young, talented hip marketing guys that software companies love to hire because they make them a bit cooler.) Okay - so that just made me feel old. I can't really remember seeing a web browser until I left college. And it dawned on me in a moment of horrible reality that there are kids arriving in the workplace today who were born in 1987. These guys started high school after the .com boom . The internet is to this generation, what TV was to mine. These are kids who have grown up with the web - and not just the old style, "hey look! It's just like a library but packed into a tiny beige box!" kind of internet - but the communicative chat, publish and discuss kind of internet. According to the Pew Internet project, More than half of the US kids ...

Fluxiom has one of the nicest demo videos I've ever seen. It looks like it might do just about anything. I'm not sure what it is, but I think I might want to use it. Apparently it's developed in rails , which makes it just that little bit cooler still. There is a lot of noise happening around enterprise content management and web 2.0 at the moment - It's going to be interesting to see how these young new whippersnapper guys are going to compete with the established big ECM players.

I decided that with summer coming, it might be time for a new site template. So I borrowed a pagekit from elated.com , and tweaked my way to the summery goodness template you see now. (Nice work guys- those pagekits are an absolute godsend for the discerning web site owner with very little eye for design. )

I've spent the week trying out the (10+2)*5 hack , from 43 Folders. It's a life hacking technique that's designed to help get things done, by forcing you to use the very vices that you are trying to overcome. My task list, nay my life, is a fractured, diverse collection of things - it can contain specifics like: "Refactor the code that cleans up the bug tracker", or fuzzy things like "Learn more about subversion". On a typical day, I have about 6-10 of these tasks on my today list. Now I should admit, I have a tendency towards procrastinating, (unless I have a task that's really exciting). In fact, being faced with a long list of slightly uninteresting tasks is the very thing to set off my distraction alarm, and send me out into the cube farm to find somebody else to harass. Which is where this clever life hack comes in. Basically, you pick a task, and work on it for 10 minutes. Then you force yourself to take a 2 minute break, and switch to anot...

There was an interesting discussion today at work about the blogging. Always with the blogging. Blah Blah Blah. Before you all tune out and go – "oh, Gord’s just blogging about blogging again," hear me out. This is the longest post I’ve ever done, so I must really care about this stuff. Anyways, back to the discussion… Depending on which side of the fence you were on, the conversation was either about the increasing importance and value of the read/write web, or it was about the potential dangers of having bloggers on your staff, and generally questioning the relevance of blogging. Obviously, as a blogger, I took a healthy interest. As an internet consumer (mmmm. packety.) I know that I am innately more trustworthy of a company that is prepared to openly blog about stuff. In fact, it's becoming increasingly evident to me, that in the web 2.0/new media/ future of connected clichés, the only way you will be able to prosper as a business is by adopting this corporate motto: ...

Okay. I promise I'm not going to start constantly ranting about MarioKart. I know where it all ends up - people get so annoyed you have to start another blog . But... I was just lazily reclining in my hammock on my front deck, dappled sun filtering through the jasmine vines, warm light spring breeze blowing from the north-east. As I lazily swung to and fro, I was locked in a fierce battle for kart supremacy with some bad spelling stranger known only to me as 'MasterCheif". We were at 1-all after the first two races, and had settled on the spooky Luigi's Mansion track as the decider. Towards the end of the third and final lap, I jumped into a big long slide that gave me the perfect boost - I was headed for victory, for sure. I could see MasterCheif languishing behind me. Just as I began to laugh maniacally, a green koopa shell, (fired by me two laps before) appeared from nowhere and knocked me into a spin, leaving me about a foot short of the finish line. As I fell out...

I just ran out and bought Mario Kart DS , and spent all of last night getting totally 0wn3d by a bunch of people from around the world who are much better at mariokart than me. I mentioned this to my friend Alan, who said, with a wry smile: "Well, to be fair to you, they are eight years old. They probably have much faster reflexes..." Ha! Well, to counter that, I give you this: Mario Brothers meets Sin City. (from Japundit) Now, I have no idea what's going on, but I think that " 次へ" is the Japanese equivalent of 'Next'. Make sure you click the link to get the whole story! (PS - if you would also like to beat me at MarioKart DS, my Friend Code is: 060189 090100)

When I started with TOWER Software four years ago, I was keen to get on with the job. You know, new project manager guy and all, trying to figure out what was what, and who was who. As part of this breaking-in process, I went around and asked each developer what they were working on, and how long they estimated that their current project would take. I'll admit that I had a secret agenda - it's important to find out who are the overly optimistic guys, and who are the more seasoned realists, because you're supposed to adjust your project schedules accordingly.. Anyway, I collected all this data and feed it into a secret Gantt chart I had somewhere. Most of the team were working on features that were being shipped in the next few months, and I got the broad range of overly positive responses, which is pretty common. I know I'm a terribly optimistic estimator. (Incidentally, if you're like me, my advice is to always multiply your estimate by the value of pi in order to ...

Many have speculated on how it is that a couple of kids from Stanford turned the internet upside down. Some theorized that maybe it was because Sergey and Larry went to Montessori Schools. "Perhaps", some wondered aloud, "there was some fiendish pact with the devil..." Well, now, I know the real secret. This post makes it abundantly clear. The magic of Google comes from Kombucha tea. Because you didn't follow that link, I'll explain. Kombucha is this weird tea made from a " polyculture of at least two yeasts and two bacteria, living synergistically." Basically, what happens is you take this gelatinous blob of yeast and some as yet unidentified bacteria, get some sweet black tea, and 'feed' the blob, removing some beverage each day in the form of an alcoholic(5.0-1.5%) caffeinated, crazy-ass yeast and bacteria excrement liquid. Which Googlers drink for breakfast! (1 and a half gallons of the stuff, every day...) Who knows what weird and ...

There's a whole bunch of construction work happening outside the TOWER headquarters. When Rhys and I arrived at work, there were about four construction guys wearing yellow safety vests and hard hats, hammering stakes into the ground - and the mandatory building site AM radio was blaring out Starship's ' We built this city on rock 'n roll' at maximum volume. The local pamphlet delivery lady, wearing an ice cream container with eyes painted on top, and carrying a big stick, warily sneaking around the neighborhood from letterbox to letterbox. (In the Australian spring, the Black-Backed Magpie is prone to pecking people on the head if they get too close to a nest...) My five year old son Reuben's new battle cry - Brandishing a plastic sword, he charges at you from the backyard and yells 'Shannon Noll!' ( link ) in a deranged way. I'm not sure where he got it from, or what he thinks it means, but I was certainly frightened...

Having spent the week refreshing my .Net skills, thanks to Paul from Readify , I remembered that programming can be a very satisfying activity. So, with me sporting a head full of curly braces and semicolons, Alison and I joined some friends to see Bernie McGann play out at Poacher's Pantry, a restaurant a few Miles out of town. When I was a 'young adult' I couldn't figure out what kind of nerd I was. I wasn't sure if I was your basic engineering/science nerd, or one of those creative artsy fartsy type nerds. At the time, it was a cause of great consternation - but in the end I ended up in software, which is probably the best of both worlds - a pretty creative endeavour that's grounded in engineering. Jazz music reminds me of a lot of things, but listening to the band last night got me thinking about the border between creative and structured. Jazz can really screw with your engineering head - it's based on a definite mathematical structure - scales, modes ...

Last week, my access to Google went away. Must've been some local cluster outage, but in Canberra, I couldn't get to any Google sites. That was weird, because I couldn't check my mail. Couldn't get my document from my Gmail inbox to work on. Couldn't complain to the world about it because I couldn't get to Blogger. And so I sat around and twiddled my thumbs and waited. And it dawned on me how reliant I am on this company for access to my own information . I'm not usually in the habit of defending Microsoft - but David Kirkpatrick's article Microsoft Plays Catch Up seems to me to be a little unfair. Sure, Microsoft are really behind. They don't have a strategy for the new web, just like they didn't have a strategy for the old one. But the first time I ever heard the phrase ' Software as a Service', it was from a Microsoft Employee. Remember Hailstorm? (My Services) Microsoft were totally ready to pounce on this stuff, about four years ag...

It's been a fun week in the blogosphere - my post on innovation was picked up by a few blogs around the planet, most notably Fortune Magazine's business innovation 2005 - (which it turns out is quite a cool blog - subscribed). Lindsay even asked me for my autograph , so I figure that I must have made the grade from Z-list to Y-List. So what's a Y-lister to do? Cash In! I added some Google ads to the side of my blog. I know, sell out and all. But if you find them interesting and click them, then they pay me money! (I'm trying to recoup enough cash to pay for the fact that they stole Stilly away....)

As I was saying , our development team at TOWER Software is in the process of making the transition from Source Safe to Subversion. This meant that we had to spend a whole bunch of time trying to figure out the best way to manage branches, and releases, and a whole bunch of other really important SCM stuff. Now I know I probably also said this before, but despite the importance of this discipline, I find it really hard to care about as much as I should, because it's so very, very boring. So, I came up with a way to make it more interesting: Here's a part of our SCM Model, displayed as your neighborhood. (If you live in a sparse, snow covered land full of highways and pine trees, that is...) Points of Interest: You can see our smart, free-range (well, somewhat less responsible) developers in the train at the top, working on some cool new innovative stuff for later on. You can see our smart, semi-responsible developers in the train at the bottom, carving out our next immediate r...

When I was 12, my brothers and I went on an intense money gathering campaign. We pooled our collective resources, and began nagging our parents, washing cars, and weeding gardens. In desperation, we even collected aluminum cans... (I seem to remember my brother actually telling the Alco guy to 'piss off!' when he handed over seventy-five cents in return for two garbage bags of crushed cans. To us, that represented an entire weekend spent in garbage cans. He was a pretty brave nine year old.) The purpose of all this entrepreneurial activity was this machine : the Nintendo Entertainment System. At the time, I didn't want anything else in the world. Back then, I didn't know anything about marketing, or statistics. If you had told 12 year old me that 31 percent of homes had a video game console, I wouldn't have cared. I would've smiled politely and asked you for money. Now that I know enough to be interested, do you know what that figure is? 31-32 percent. That...

Just after my post on how a lot of web tech stuff is boring and derivative, comes the introduction of Yahoo! Maps . It looks great. No doubt a lot of people will find it very useful. But the sad thing is that, in the scheme of things, it's boring as hell. I really feel for the development team behind that effort. They all must've known that when they finally shipped (and shipping software is a really, really, amazingly hard thing to do), that the blogosphere would be full of big gaping yawns and nasty posts about what copycats they are. And no matter how good they made their service (it's really cool), nothing would change that. Speaking of copycats, I reconnected with Robert Scoble today - His feed had been super quiet, and I thought he might be dead, until mikal pointed out that he'd actually moved house, over to wordpress.com . (Maybe there should be a forwarding service for RSS feeds. That might be an original idea...) One of the things that makes Robert mad (in fa...

Innovation is a weird thing. Everytime I go into a movie theatre, I end up asking the same question aloud: "Aren't there any original ideas anymore?" It seems every movie is a remake of an old movie or a fairy tale or a kids book or a TV series, or a sequel to some other movie. In a flash of simplistic reductionism. I decide conclusively that there aren't any new ideas at all. That all 'new' ideas are just a baked together collection of old ideas. Lets use the internet technology world as an obvious example of what I'm talking about, because that's something that moves pretty fast, and something I (sort of) understand. Once upon a time, a California company made a better search engine. And coupled with that, they made a better revenue model, that made money from 'the long tail '. They made a gazillion dollars, in a way that didn't even seem intentional. Now, they have this wonderful reputation, as nice guys, but also as innovators. (Althoug...

Well, we only have one. House, that is. But we've got lots of pox! I've spent this Canberra rainy weekend quarrantined with my kids, who all have chicken pox. It's not a particularly virulent disease, they all seem perfectly fine, just, well... spotty. And itchy. So now I'm working from home (lying in bed, in fact.) It's easy to get things done, but it's a bit lonely. Somehow I don't think the telecommuting revolution will ever really happen. A bit like the XML revolution. Remember watching that Microsoft guy drag a project reference out of a Barnes and Noble web page and into Visual Studio.NET, many years ago? Remember how the world was supposed to be inter connected with all these vendors publishing their catalogs in XML and SOAP? Whatever happenned to that? Weren't all the computers supposed to be doing all the work, and all the humans just lazing around on the beach? And what's with the whole "Year 2000" thing, and NOBODY HAS ANY JET-PA...

Can someone please explain to me what is going on at www.frozenchicken.com ? UPDATE: Stilly comes to the party to explain . I'm still not sure why someone would do that though...

While browsing for Visio Shapes, I came across this: The Visio Crime Scene Template: At first I thought - "Oh - that's just some crazy joke thing - but no, it turns out that people actually use Visio for recording evidence like this. (When you think about it, it makes sense - Visio's ability to do scale drawings is great, so it would lend itself to this sort of thing pretty well.) But still, a little creepy. There are twenty different murder weapons, including a meat cleaver and screwdriver. ... ew. Now what I want to see on CSI is someone yelling at their terminal: "No! I didn't want to rotate the shape! I wanted to resize it! Grrr..."

Our development team is in the process of moving from Visual Source Safe to Subversion for Source Control. (Yeah, I know that there’s all kinds of cool new stuff coming in VS Team System, and that VSS probably won’t ever suck as much as it has for the last 5 years. But we’ve made the decision.) As part of making the Transition, I read Eric Sink’s articles on Source Control , which are probably the best things I’ve ever read on what can be a super boring topic. One subject that was particularly well explained was the topic of branching. (Branching is a way of creating a copy of a bunch of code so that you don’t break important stuff. That’s my 20 words on the subject. If you want to know more, go read the article . ) In the end, we settled on Eric’s preferred model of branching – having an unstable trunk. So all our development work is actually done on the main trunk, and we branch our releases off for future maintenance. Seems sensible enough. However, developer idiocy (a common malad...

I was musing over job advertisements today, and I decided that the one thing that made them all sound horrible was the all too common overuse of superlatives. Let's face it, nobody wants to hire a bozo. But on the other hand, very few people actually qualify for the ridiculous aspirational ideals posted in most job ads these days. Check out this, randomly selected from seek : Leading Consultancy. Career opportunity. You will possess excellent business communication and presentation skills, with the ability to deliver outstanding enterprise solutions to key clients. You will be client facing, with strong business relationships skills at all levels. You must have a positive attitude to today'’s technology marketplace, and the qualities to deliver the required solution to your clients. C'mon, what does all that mean? What exactly is client facing? S omething about where your desk points? And having a positive attitude to today's technology marketplace. That doesn't ma...

Okay - a lull. The pounding sets seem to have stopped coming. Paddling time. Trying hard not to use every ounce of strength left in my arms, it's head down, and left, right, left. I can see a couple of guys sitting up on their boards on the horizon. I paddle straight at them. All of a sudden, they vanish, disappearing behind another giant blue wall that rises up in front of me to become my immediate problem. I can see the crest about to topple and crush me - do I paddle straight at this thing? Surely that would be madness. Or do I dive? I panic a little, and take far too long to decide. In the end, the wave makes the decision for me. My pathetic attempt at a dive consists of staying pretty still and sticking my bum up in the air in an attempt to get the nose of my board under the water. .. Miraculously, it seems to be enough, my stomach lurching as I travel up through the face of the wave to emerge in the air on the other side. A fine spray travels slowly down with me as I re-conne...

If you like the Format Painter in Word 2003, you're going to like this - you can cut and paste formatting from and to anything by holding down shift when you cut and paste - (so Ctrl + Shift + C to copy formatting, and Ctrl + Shift + v to paste formatting) That's cool - no more poking about with the little paintbrush icon. Ahh, the small pleasures of life. I do so love discovering a new shortcut.

I've been tasked with preparing a presentation to explain to new members of staff the way that the software development process works at TOWER Software. As part of my preparation, I thought I'd draw up a mind-map around the topic of "What Is Software?" Software is more than just a bunch of ones and zeros banged out by computer nerds. There are a huge number of other tasks that need to be completed in order to have a successful commercial software product. Once I'd mapped out as many as I could think of, I was a bit scared by the size of it all: I would surmise that a company that strived to achieve success in every element, would be a really successful software company. Of course, this list is far from conclusive - any additions or obvious exclusions are welcome!

I'm not very fit I don't live anywhere near a beach There are only 44 Pro surfers in the world (or in the Men's WCT anyway) I get scared by really big waves I'm not a very good surfer.

Whereas StrangeBanana just tends to make random hideous color mash-ups, Colorblender seems to do a great job of choosing a color palette. You pick a colour, and it automatically selects complementary and highlight colours. Works right in your browser, great use of sliders, and lets you download your new palette in a variety of formats. Now if only there was a similar tool for screen design and layout... (Via Mitch Denny )

The Software Management Bible, Peopleware , has a parable buried within it somewhere that goes something like: (I'm paraphrasing, because someone nicked my copy, and I haven't read it for years) People hate Change . They really hate change, They really, truly hate change , Oh yes they do. With software - the path of least change is always the path to greatest acceptance. But then, without changing anything, the software doesn't get better. Sometimes you have to just give up and force people to make a change, in order to make the world better in the long run. Check out the new Office 12 Interface . I automatically hate it a little bit, because it's different . But I know what's going on under there. Microsoft are bridging the gap to Vista (which has a radically different look and feel) with the big product that most people use. They're forcing us to change. And most people will absolutely hate it. I'm not sure exactly why, but today has just reminded me of t...

I like project sites. Whenever I start a new project, I always create an online portal that shows the team where they are, where they're going, and what should happen next. Back in the bad old days, I had to laboriously create project sites using ASP and carefully hand-tooled HTML. Nowadays, there are a thousand automatic instant-web-site-majiggery things out there. For Context ice , we used a sharepoint team site with a few minor tweaks. It did the job, but it wasn't anything special. This one , on the other hand, looks a bit special. The ability to see code checkins on the project site, plus a solid bug tracker and a pretty cool looking wiki engine makes Trac look like it might be well worth investigating for your next project. Looks like they've nicked some of the best ideas from FogBugz, as well as some cool highlighting features for viewing code changes... In order to get code checkins published onto our ice team site, I had to set up a service that published an RSS fe...

KrazyDad talks about audiophiles, while discussing the Sonic Impact T-Amp , a new $30 dollar digital amplifier. "But did you ever notice that these audiophile guys who talk about the frequency response of their speakers for hours on end never talk about the actual music they’re playing on them? That’s because they’re actually listening to Celine Dion." I wonder if you can get gold-plated, zero-distortion, frequency reducing ear plugs...

Ahh. I like holidays. After driving for two days, (the kids were generally great, but I have learned that it's not a good idea to to fill your seat-belt clicker with magic gum) we made it up here to Mooloolaba, on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. I finally got back in the water! To my surprise, I didn't suck as much as I would've thought, although my paddling muscles are really, really sore. Doesn't take to long to get back a bit of surf-fitness though - lots of 6am starts... The swell here is pretty awful, and catching choppy beach-breaks is a skill that I am really far away from mastering. Still, lots of fun. So far, we've seen koalas at Noosa, been out to a massive salt water lake called lake Cootharaba, which is about three kilometers wide and about sixteen inches deep. It's weird to see your three year old dissapearing into the middle of a lake. We've paddled the canoe around the Maroochy River, lay on the beach and generally had a lot of fun. With all th...

I have a folder in my RSS aggregator that I call "Newbies". If I find a blog I think I might like to subscribe to, I add it to the Newbies folder. If I find I like their posts, I'll promote them to the "bloggers" folder. One of the blogs I found through my referrer logs and added to the newbies folder was Bill Rini - a poker player from LA. I thought that it might be nice to open your mind to the fact that other peoples lives and interests are entirely different from your own. But, little did I know, exactly how true this was. The latest post arrived this morning, and out of ALL the sentences, I understand approximately ZERO of them. Observe: "I got aces cracked twice in two orbits. Both times I picked them up in the blinds and had 7 or 8 callers before it got to me. The first guy to crack me was this older Asian dude who called two cold with pocket threes and hit his set on the flop. After my aces got cracked the second time I turned to the dealer and ...

Working in a software company comes in two flavours - the green-fields, dream-plan -build-software bit, (which is fun) and the dreary endless bug reports that come from testers and customers (which are not fun). As a very depressed project manager once said : "The software is not finished until the last user is dead" At TOWER Software, as these bugs arrive, they are prioritised according to a simple scale: 1) Urgent Fix 2) Fix ASAP 3) Fix 4) Fix if Time 5) Won't Fix It's pretty self explanatory, so I won't go into the bleeding obvious, but each day, the team goes through and assigns a significance score to each bug. Then we hand them all out and get to work. That process is called triage, after the medical hospital waiting system. The goals might seem pretty similar -you might think "Ok, you want the bugs that are really bad to be fixed first - not unlike the hospital scenario where the man with the axe protruding from his head gets treatment before the snot...

No matter what you think you do, reality will catch up with you.

Doesn't everyone love to read a blogger handing out a good bollocking? I've been working on [secret project] using Ruby on Rails of late, so I've been subscribing to some rails lists and blogs. Getting started with Rails can be kind of weird and hard, but being a fairly patient person, I've just kept at it with nothing more than some head scratching and mild swearing. This guy, on the other hand, had obviously had enough persevering.. . His review of ROR? " it's fucking horrible . Anyone who tries to convince you that it's in some way an elegant and consistent way to create 'web applications' is entirely insane." hehe :)

Are you having a bad day? See how it rates against the Venn Diagram of things that are bad.

I usually manage to contain my fanboy-ness, but today's unveiling of the Nintendo Revolution controller at the Tokyo Game Show made me all frothy with excitement. I desperately want to play with one of these things. I want to slash my way through bad guys, wandering the worlds of Hyrule. I want to point at the things I want to use. I want to pick up and roll the dice in Mario Party when I'm playing with my kids. I want to battle fellow pokemon fans on the other side of the world, and race other people in Mario Kart. Interaction is where all the magic of gaming is, and thankfully somebody is thinking outside of the (x) box. The Revolution will be able to wirelessly download and play all of your favourite Nintendo games - all the way back to 8-bit NES land, 16-bit classics, through N64 games, and still play gamecube titles. Plus who knows what cool things they'll come up with for the revolution itself. Hats off to Nintendo for making a truly next-generation console. The mor...

Is like money - You only worry when you're running out of it. (From Urs)

Alex Bosworth has a great article on his blog about AJAX Mistakes . Sometimes it might be best to keep that javascript in your pants...

If you ever thought that office politics where you worked were bad, the folklore archive from Andy Hertzfeld about the early days at Apple in the 80's might make you cry .

If you check out that silver search bar thingy at the top of my blog, you'll see it has a new button: 'Search All Blogs' This is because the google blog search has been released into beta. If you've ever used Technorati to search blogs, you'd know that while they provide a great service, it was frequently ball-bouncingly, poke-your-own-eyes-out- in-frustration-ly s-l-o-w. Conversations among the blog-savvy in the tea room would always gravitate to the same topic: "How long will it be until google gets a similar feature, and those guys will be out of a gig?" Looks like we'll have to find something else to talk about... whatever you want in a blog search engine, it's there. Subscribe to searches via RSS or ATOM? simple clean easy interface?...advanced search?