Over the falls

Nintendo has just announced, to the internet's astonishment , the name of it's next generation console. Stand by, and prepare to have the next incredible generation of gaming made available to you through the brand new console, available this November, the Nintendo Wanger Wanger was a bit of a strange choice for a name, but when you put aside your initial reaction and really think about it , it makes a lot of sense. Nintendo has been trying for ages to transcend the more traditional gaming audience, and to reach out for people who traditionally wouldn't buy a video games console. 'Wanger' is accessible, fresh, innovative, and certainly posesses that human touch that's been missing from the market. Add to that the marketing potential, and it becomes immediately apparent that 'Wanger' is a much better choice than 'Revolution'. Possibilities for slogans abound! For example: 'Reach out and touch a wanger' 'Shake hands with a wanger'...

As the challenge plays on, I'm beginning to think that iTunes 'Party Shuffle' algorithm for randomly playing songs is more than just a random mathematical function. Okay, maybe it's just getting late, but I think maybe Apple has got some voodoo magic going on somewhere in there... For example - I'm writing the help documentation for the new 'favorites' feature in ICE, and iTunes starts to play Coltrane's My favorite Things . As I prowl through the Triage queue, looking for bugs to fix - or more importantly, which ones to not fix - iTunes comes up with the Cure's "Cut" ... And most telling of all, when I returned from a hastily swallowed takeaway dinner to resume my work this evening - The Torture Never Stops Part Two , by Frank Zappa.... iTunes knows, I tell you...

Picking up the gauntlet from Simon's post , personally, I'm feeling confident (even if he is cheating by deleting songs...). I'm not confident that I'll win , but I am confident we'll probably both get bored long before the end of this silly quest. (Long work hours and No Weekends make Simon and Gordon something something...) 371 songs, 1 day, and 1.73 Gb to go. The longest tune in my list is a live version of John Coltrane's My Favourite Things , at 17:25 and the shortest is Primus's Intro from Antipop coming at a mere 17 seconds. Hang on.... Make that 370 songs to go...

In a moment of 'Why-the-hell-not?', I've accepted a position with TOWER Software in the USA, as a Senior Technical Consultant. My role will be to help people get TRIM Context, and ICE installed and working as part of an ECM Solution. The US office is doing amazing stuff right now, so I'm really excited to be able to join them and help out where I can. Meanwhile, there's this business of having to move my whole family across the Pacific, to Virginia. Throw in a confusing maze of immigration bureaucracy- and sorting out which stuff to sell, which stuff to chuck, and which stuff to store, and things are looking pretty busy around here right now... I'm really looking forward to a new country, a new culture, and most of all, something different. I've been in Canberra for 15 years now. It's time for a new perspective.

Camping out on the headland, miles from anywhere. Big swell, off-shore winds, clear crisp nights and smoke from the wood fire. Sometimes it's so rewarding to get out from under the pressure of your life and just be a family of humans.

Joel Spolsky returns from his wilderness years with a triumphant and truly wonderful essay on how to manage software development companies. From the article: "Management, in a software company, is primarily responsible for creating abstractions for programmers. We build the yacht, we service the yacht, we are the yacht, but we don't steer the yacht." Tacking towards the deadline...

I sat down today with my four kids to play an enthralling game of MouseTrap - a game that has been around since 1963, and is still as much fun today as ever (especially when played as it should be -with four hyper-excited kids on the lounge room floor...) The game itself is based on what is known as a Rube Goldberg Machine. Rube Goldberg was an American political cartoonist, who became renowned for drawing exceedingly complex inventions to accomplish very simple tasks. Just like the one in MouseTrap - (Where the player turns the crank, which rotates the gears causing the lever to move and push the stop sign against the shoe , which tips the bucket holding the metal ball which rolls down the stairs and into the pipe which leads it to hit the rod held by the hands, causing another ball to fall from the top of the rod, roll down the groove, fall into and then out of the bottom of the bathtub, landing on the diving board. The weight of the ball catapults the diver through the air and ...

As a wannabe Ukulele player, I was totally awestruck by Jake Shimabukuro's rendtion of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=829401773913198414&q=ukulele

The latest version of Context ice (1.1) has been the sole focus of my working life for so long, that I have trouble recalling whatever else it is I've done... The arrival of April puts us one month out from our release date, so for those folks who stumble into Over The Falls looking for info on TRIM Context ice , I thought you might appreciate a quick overview of some of the cool new features. We've added new UI enhancements to make it easier to work with TRIM Data. You can enter dates using a neat little DHTML widget. Editing Classification and Thesaurus terms is easier than ever with our new AJAX powered browser controls. We've refined and improved the code used for dropdown boxes, so that it updates in real time, and makes it clearer exactly what object you're looking for. We're working on some useful tools to help you work with records - notably to manage multiple record actions, and enhanced our Active Labels feature to make it easier to understand (and less a...

That a Day on the Moon is the same as a Year on the Moon? A day is defined as a celestial body's period of rotation around it's axis. A year is defined as a celestial body's period of revolution around whatever it's orbiting. The moon is in synchronous rotation - both of these periods are 27.321 days, which is why the moon always shows us the same face. Which, of course, led to that dreary Pink Floyd album. (There's currently a furious debate going on between our help desk manager and LHS as to how this can be so. I hope it doesn't come to blows... )

When I was a kid, we had a marble craze sweep the playground. But it wasn't the traditional, knock the marbles out of the circle kind of marbles. Oh no. This was way more 'Lord of the Flies'. What happened was that kids set up shop by drawing a line in the dirt, and then putting a particularly attractive marble a certain distance away. Other kids could then front up to this 'stall' consisting of a dirt line and a kid sitting in the sand, and throw marbles at it. The rules were simple. If you hit the marble, you got to keep it. If you missed, the stall-holder got to keep the shooter marble. So every lunch time, the playground would be turned into this kind of dust bowl marble bazaar, with all these kids yelling 'One shot a Tom!' or 'One shot for two bird-cages!' As I recall, there was a discreet order of value, with 'normals' being near worthless shooter marbles, and a whole dazzling array of 'milkys', 'sheenys,' 'Steelies...

I was invited to test the new google page creator today. I recently spent some time with joomla , and a few other content management systems, and to be honest I was a bit disappointed at how complicated it was to create a web page. It's easy for nerds like me, but if you're a more casual web user, having to type html, or learn a scripting language is too hard. If a user has to read the manual, you've already lost. So I was pleased to see that google make it ridiculously easy, and all you need is a browser and you're good to go. That makes it easier still. The image uploading process was particularly easy - and a little different to the standard HTML file input that we see so often. The templates are all nice, and there's enough diversity to please nearly every one. So, yeah - nice one, you guys. Less power to the nerds, I say. If you'd like to see the results of my investigation, you can share the love here .

Stilly already posted this one, but I just got around to watching it: Seth's talk to the Googlers. Some great, candid takeaway points about permission marketing, and how making things you love can make products that sell themselves - (As long as someone else loves it, and tells a friend...)

Generalizations are all good. While I'm talking about that, let me just mention that the point of every software team is the same: build something great. A piece of software that fulfils its promises, is easy to use and learn, and adds real value to any human who wants to achieve whatever goals are incorporated in the system. That's great software. That's what we're all trying to do. The Google search engine is an example of great software. I'm not a player, but I bet World of Warcraft is great software. The .NET framework is great software. There are beacons of design that inspire every software team, in every field. When I first started managing software teams, I was a process nut. I just assumed that the best way to get great software was to join the process dots. Back then, it was all about the planning. Plan the planning phase, and then plan out how you were going to build it, in painstaking detail, from the very beginning. Then you build it all (exactly as you...

Google acquires Upstartle , the tiny silicon valley startup that made a pretty neat little in-browser word processor. Naturally, everyone's abuzz with Microsoft vs Google talk , and how Microsoft have got it all wrong trying to beat google at their own game, and how they should stick to what they do best, and whatever. Personally, I think that it makes some sense to move the office productivity stuff onto the web. The more stuff I can do on the web, the better, as long as it's not a hassle. That's the key, I think. If I have to install stuff, and poke around with any configuration at all, then the whole thing is a dumb idea. But the technology isn't really the issue here. But if the focus is true zero-footprint, nothing installed, just write a letter to your mom and save it from wherever you are office suite, then we've got something. Something that might just be the next wave not so much in technology, but in business development models. Naturally, Google will want...

Having spent so long in traveling mode gets really tiring. Crazy scattered thoughts of a tired man. I don't know how I can be so respectful of people as individuals, yet harbor such a deep-seated resentment and dissatisfaction at the money crazed, status chasing society that we've all created. It's like an ant colony- I can appreciate each individual ant for their own qualities, but I don't like the anthill. You know what? I don't want to be successful! I don't want a Raymond Weil 'Timepiece' or a buxom blonde wife dressed in Versace. I don't want to smell like those super attractive gay men in Hugo Boss advertisements. I don't want to 'challenge everything', or 'be a tiger', or 'always come out on top'. I don't want to buy a sports car that goes faster than you are allowed to drive it. All of these status driven capital achievements are stupid and hollow, and they are just stuff designed to compensate for things that ...

But the stupid IE browser at the Heathrow Terraces Lounge somehow manged to erase it. (I have a long, long flight ahead of me, and I can't be bothered typing it all again.) EuroTUF 2006 was really cool. It was snowing, and we got drunk and sang songs at night. We talked business during the day, and shared some new stuff. All of my demos went well. My vote for Worst Weekend Ever: Get on plane Friday Night, get off it Sunday.

One of the things I was dreaming about last night was the concept of precision. I know it sounds a bit strange to be dreaming about a concept, but there you go. When the plane I was flying into Heathrow on descended through the clouds, I was, as always, relieved to find that right there, directly below us was an airport runway. And it dawned on me that the pilot was probably a little bit relieved too, despite the fact that he knew it would be there. Because when you are landing a giant aeroplane, precision is absolutely critical. You can't be "Close Enough", or even "Pretty Good" - try explaining that to the people who's houses you've just landed on: "Come on, it's pretty close to the airport! I'd like to see you fly a giant hunk of metal for 10,000 miles and get it absolutely perfect..." No, precision is one of those things that humans really, really, care about. And it's something that we usually do really well. That's why peo...

I'm flying over to the UK tonight - to speak at the European Trim User Forum (TUF) next week. I'll be talking about the new features of Context 6, discussing some of the future plans for the product and explaining how we built ice, how it works, and demonstrating some of the ways that the web framework can be used. (I know it might not sound that exciting, but it could be a life changing experience for someone in the audience. Although that's quite unlikely.) I'll also be praying to the patron saint of software demonstrations, (as soon as I can figure out who that is). If you'd like to read a laugh-out-loud-funny-because-it's-true account of what it's like to be a presenter who suffers the consequences of not praying, check out Rory's experience. I'm not generally a supertitious person, but some things are too important to risk...

I was just helping some friends set up their new website, and to buy a .com.au domain, I sort of autopiloted my way to melbourneit.com.au .According to them, registering a .com.au domain was going to cost 140$ for two years. Smartyhost , on the other hand, offered the same service, for 49.95$- a saving of 90 dollars! Now, I know that some kind of brand power justifies an increased price - but nearly 300%? That's just plain crazy. A domain is a domain is a domain, right?