November 2011
1 post
“The mandatory end-of-month password change: Few common IT policies drive users...”
– When passwords attack: the problem with aggressive password policies
September 2011
2 posts
How bad can a public website get?
I was trying to report a non-urgent crime (vehicle incident I witnessed involving another bike rider) in London. The Met police force site came up nicely in Google and there was a sitemap and looked like the possibility of finding the right form through deep links via search.
Firstly the Met police force site gave me a nice 502 error (any page), in full tomcat style (at least it wasn’t a...
Readme Driven Development →
Really good post on writing your read-me first
Found that writing user manual first was very helpful for writing the sugar api for Brainstorm realtime 3d engine: http://cleverplugs.com/sugar/
Oddly I ended up writing api methods that seemed unlikely to be used other than for a learner trying out the engine. However they made the learning process much easier (and encourage console/command-line...
August 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Watched: The Book of Life, Hal Hartley
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167059/
Jesus wears a suit
Magdalena smokes a cigarette
Watched: Somewhere, Sofia Coppola
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421051/
Read: Managing Career (Harvard Lessons Learned)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Managing-Career-Harvard-Lessons-Learned/dp/1422118614
Holiday: wine-tasting / stretch-limo
Huguette drove us. What you see is what huguette. “I hope we don’t bottom out” (we did). Je suis québecoise mais je parle bon français.
Gainey (wine)
Fess Parker (davey crockett hat, wine)
Roblar (too much wine)
Holiday: Katy Perry
http://www.katyperry.com/santa-barbara-ca-santa-barbara-bowl/
Holiday: Santa Barbara Zoo
Feeding Elephants, Giraffes, Lions
Holiday: Walk on Hendries Beach
Walk, lunch, margaret, playground, jetlag
March 2011
1 post
Workflow for Chef with Vagrant →
December 2010
2 posts
Presentation Patterns →
Fascinating upcoming book in development which aims to operationalize new trends in Presentation methods into helpful patterns and (humorous) anti-patterns. It is being developed in the open with comments and reviews elicited via twitter (@ppatterns).
kim jong-il looking at things →
How perfect some concepts can be
October 2010
2 posts
the ground (and vegetables) shift under my feet
While learning up about how to do messaging in a python stack (and it is quite confusing) yesterday - I was reading up about how to use celery (python distributed task manager which is messaging-controlled) and carrot (python message creator) and suddenly realized that the alpha release (while I was reading) of celery 2.2 basically deprecated carrot in favour of kombu, a vegetable I have yet to...
How Celery, Carrot, and your messaging stack work →
helpful to anyone (like me) getting their head round how celery and carrot coexist in the python view of AMQP
August 2010
1 post
Save The Words →
Lovely concept from Oxford Dictionaries to stop old words going out of our vocabulary. Adopt a word. Order a tshirt for it (umm if you live in malaysia). Beautiful but highly un-ergonomic flash interface.
(via chip & VSL)
June 2010
3 posts
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...
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.
"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...
May 2010
1 post
The School of Artisan Food (Radio4's Food... →
November 2009
5 posts
“SPIEGEL: You include a nice list by the French philosopher Roland Barthes in...”
– Umberto Eco on Lists (Spiegel Interview)
annotate models plugin
Just discovered Annotate Models plugin for rails (thanks to post in railspikes). Looks fab.
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)...
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,...
October 2009
5 posts
"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).
Ident Engine →
javascript library (lovely demos) which aggregates social profiles etc
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…
September 2009
4 posts
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
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
“For the first product in a startup, your initial purpose on meeting customers is...”
– The Four Steps to Epiphany, Steven Gary Blank
August 2009
4 posts
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...
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.
The DO Lectures | Andrew Whitley →
Real bread man talks sense. “Le pain se lève”. Vive la revolution!(painienne)!
July 2009
6 posts
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,...
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...
Online Project Management Software, simple task... →
Interesting looking Online project management tool - seems to focus (at least in marketing) milestones and time largely.
May 2009
4 posts
SysAdmins' Chronicles: Ubuntu 8.04 Rails Server... →
fab how-to of how to install rails and passenger on ubuntu
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
webdriver - Google Code →
interesting mechanism of driving IE or Firefox (need to work out difference with selenium)
Ryan Waggoner dot com " Blog Archive " The... →
March 2009
5 posts
family organization social app →
just what I need, if I had the time to fill it
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…...