stream.red56.co.uk: Archive

Sharing the pain...

After hours of wrestling with what should have been a trivial integration with facebook (facebook share button), have finally worked out what was going wrong for me. Facebook share ends up calling a url (what looks like a php page - sharer.php) which is provided with a u param for the url you are trying to share (there’s also a t param for the title, but see below). Many people are...

Jun 30th

CodeKata: Kata Nine: Back to the CheckOut →

Did this “code kata” last week as part of getting onto a contracting recruiter’s books. Much more interesting than I suspected. I kind of get the point of kata now. Let’s hope it leads to interesting contracts! Note to self though: don’t try to combine python work and ruby katas in the same day - can be braincrunching.

Jun 14th

"Bruce Eckel is Wrong" (on Checked Exceptions in... →

Good quality debate on the design (and use) of checked exceptions in Java. Eliotte Rusty Harold argues for the use of Checked Exceptions and why in general they are a Good Thing. I tried to hard to get behind this, but having been doing so much python and ruby for the last few years, can’t get my head back into this. In fact when I used Spring I found that there’s always loads more...

Jun 2nd

The School of Artisan Food (Radio4's Food... →

May 2nd

“SPIEGEL: You include a nice list by the French philosopher Roland Barthes in...”

– Umberto Eco on Lists (Spiegel Interview)

Nov 24th

annotate models plugin

Just discovered Annotate Models plugin for rails (thanks to post in railspikes). Looks fab.

Nov 16th

Nov 11th

Problem-driven development?

Another reflection after listening to Seddon on “Rethinking Lean Service” Seddon argues that you need to let the actual problems (that disrupt your delivery of value) dictate what activities you perform, and what processes you set up. This implies that you need to be brave enough to allow problems to occur (and have a way of catching and solving them). It means (in software terms)...

Nov 2nd

Study your organisation as a system

Thanks to Mark for encouraging me to listen to this great podcast of John Seddon rethinking “Lean” and going back to its roots in the Toyota / Japanese miracle Some notes: Customer pull, worker pull. Let workers improve (and own!) the processes. Let the problems you encounter determine the processes you set up. The measures in use must relate to the customer (“For any flow,...

Nov 1st

1 note

"Streetlights and Shadows" by Gary Klein (book... →

The problem of decision-making in public life: particularly the disincentives from “doing ones best” and the way that is contradicted by ”clear procedures” (which are conventionally the best way to get clear results).

Oct 30th

Ident Engine →

javascript library (lovely demos) which aggregates social profiles etc

Oct 29th

Oct 28th

Understanding BDD motivations better →

I posted earlier some reservations about BDD – largely based (as I now understand) on the declared motivations of some BDD practitioners (ringleaders even) that BDD tools enable customers to…

Oct 21st

Oct 10th

The importance of banning anti-social media →

While I’m generally against censorship and banning sites, in this case, I can see the need to make an exception. NB: involves irony

Sep 27th

Conduct like Gustavo Dudamel

Free iPhone app (for free): set tempo by waving, and conduct “March to the Scaffold” or “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique

Sep 27th

Sep 23rd

“For the first product in a startup, your initial purpose on meeting customers is...”

– The Four Steps to Epiphany, Steven Gary Blank

Sep 22nd

MVC reading list

An ex-smalltalker* friend always tells me (forgive me if I get this wrong) that MVC is one of the most widely misunderstood programming concepts, and that it gets misapplied and the terms misused, nowhere more so than in web frameworks. Maybe that’s why you’ve got a number of people talking about MVC considered harmful, an anti-pattern. It turns out these authors are really discussing...

Aug 25th

Aug 13th

Mail-order customer service

http://swimshop.co.uk sends me different size swimsuit to one I ordered. I ring up. They send me right size AND a prepaid envelope to return original… Now that’s great customer service - almost better than getting it right first time, and to be frank, makes me feel really good about ordering with them another time.

Aug 12th

The DO Lectures | Andrew Whitley →

Real bread man talks sense. “Le pain se lève”. Vive la revolution!(painienne)!

Aug 6th

Watch

Lovely making-of video for the wonderfully conceitful (in terms of process art) iQ font. More background at http://vimeo.com/5233789 and http://www.openframeworks.cc/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2314&p=12582#p12582

Jul 20th

Jul 15th

Todos / Task-tracking: Generic API

Was just talking to Garry idly about how we enjoyed bothNoKahuna and Things and how annoying it was that there was no way of making them work together, and we started building a fantasy API – a generic Task-tracking API which all the task-tracking webservices (RTM, NoKahuna, BackPack, and Mingle, Trac, Mantis, Bugzilla…) might then implement, and all our favourite clients (like Things,...

Jul 14th

Getting mikehale's drive-thru working for bytemark

Just used Mike Hale’s drive-thru (http://github.com/mikehale/drive-thru/tree/master) to get a rails box up and running. The experience was worth persevering at - it will be much easier next time! It required some non-documented things to get working out of the box: some gems need to be installed sparkle json If you are not using slicehost (I was setting up a server on bytemark) then...

Jul 14th

Online Project Management Software, simple task... →

Interesting looking Online project management tool - seems to focus (at least in marketing) milestones and time largely.

Jul 1st

SysAdmins' Chronicles: Ubuntu 8.04 Rails Server... →

fab how-to of how to install rails and passenger on ubuntu

May 23rd

A Theory of Moderation - Blog - Stack Overflow →

Stack overflow (http://stackoverflow.com) have a carefully worked out mechanism for community moderation based on reputation points

May 19th

webdriver - Google Code →

interesting mechanism of driving IE or Firefox (need to work out difference with selenium)

May 5th

Ryan Waggoner dot com " Blog Archive " The... →

May 1st

family organization social app →

just what I need, if I had the time to fill it

Mar 20th

drop.io featureset is overwhelming - summarized in... →

Mindblowing set of features in drop.io - a dropbox for sharing files, ok I get that… that you can add to by mailing to an dedicated email address, ok… or leave voice messages by phoning up, nice… or store conference calls… be alerted to new stuff by twitter, or podcast of contents… and then you can go on to customize views and access, charge people for access…...

Mar 20th

Exceptional | Exception tracking and managing for... →

webapp which manages 500 errors (for rails app) and informs you in a variety of ways. lovely and innovative

Mar 19th

“The School of Life is a new social enterprise offering good ideas for everyday...”

– The School of Life

Mar 17th

"Premiree - More Premium, Less Free" →

‘Premiree’ is the opposite of ‘Freemium’. This is a great think-piece on how focusing on ‘free’ can distort your business - focus instead (even start with) the paying customers.

Mar 12th

Feb 4th

Versioning policies & Ways libraries change →

Although the code is specific to Ruby Gems, this is a useful discussion of what makes a “rational” approach to version numbering, including the forces on why libraries change.

Feb 4th

5 Questions that Freelancers Often Forget to Ask... →

What is this for? (Is this a deal?) How did I do? Is there anything else I can do for you? How has my output affected your business so far? via http://twitter.com/AlexK

Jan 3rd

Permatime update (and more than you want to know... →

Plenty of updates to http://permatime.com recently, partly inspired by the spike in new visitors, referred by the comments and updated posting to do with the recent 37signals-live online…

Dec 11th

Dec 10th

Lunchtime seminar at The Young Foundation on... →

Give and Take at the Heart of Every Community-Time Banks UK Martin Simon will be giving a lunchtime seminar on Time Banks UK.

Dec 9th

Busy weekend →

I had a busy weekend being a social innovator. Well being social at least (let’s keep the claims reasonable): I think I met more people in one weekend than I have done in the whole of…

Dec 8th

AMEE - The world's energy meter →

To measure the “Carbon Footprint” of everything on Earth requires a neutral aggregation platform. (e.g. post post (http://www.sicamp.org/?page_id=279) at sicamp08 used this to measure carbon saving…

Dec 8th

Ungeeking the nation →

Dec 8th

Slow Wave →

“Slow Wave is a collective dream diary authored by different people from around the world, and drawn as a comic strip by Jesse Reklaw.”

Nov 18th

Nov 17th

Agile != Fast

Was reading the Hobo site (“the web application builder for Rails”) and they summed up my understanding of agile: “not going fast, but staying flexible”. However, in its own context, it appeared to me slightly shocking, as if the following sentence might be news to some, who have confused agility with speed: “It turns out that the hard part is not going fast, but...

Nov 15th

Joel Spolsky abandons own rules and wins →

“I have some ironclad rules for starting a technology venture. I broke a bunch of them when I started my latest technology venture” Joel Spolsky

Nov 13th