First came the worlds first most modernist computing conference, “PoMoPro”:http://www.bcs-spa.org/pomopro.html, then came this great bit of post modern spam:
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Let’s ignore the fact that I often blog about blogging, shall we?
This month’s meeting will be on Monday the 2nd of October – I’m hoping to try and make the first Monday of each month the regular time for these little get togethers. As usual, it’s informal, no real agenda, however I’ll probably be talking about Database refactorings and Microformats.
After an interesting meeting earlier this month, where Jason provided us with a very cool Selenium demo, I’m once again hoping for people to bring along stuff to show off. This time around I’ll do my best to get a quieter space – hopefully one of the rooms at the Olde Bank of England. We have a room at the Olde Bank of England. Starting 7pm as usual, although I’ll probably be there from 6.30pm.
Please let me know if you’re going to attend – either by leaving a comment or mentioning it over at “Upcoming”:http://upcoming.org/event/108986. As always, the event is on the “London 2.0 iCal feed”:http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/c7ilcesmkkn0e3bkirk4kgf5cc@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics too.
I’m in the process of saving up for a new Mac (probably a MacBook Pro) for photo editing. I’m seriously considering getting Apple’s “Aperture”:http://www.apple.com/aperture/ software. I know the history of the project has been “beset by problems(ThinkSecret – Aperture future in question as Apple axes bulk of team)”:http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0604aperture.html, however with things having stabilised (and the price being slashed), I was thinking of giving it a go.
Does anyone have any experiences with it? Should I consider it? Or should I wait for “Adobe Lightroom”:http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/?
Overview
I’ve had a chance over the last few years to observe various different types of tech leads. Collated here are my views on what I think makes a successful one.
A Tech Lead Should…
A Tech Lead Should Not…
I’ll be in Brighton tomorrow at “d.construct”:http://2006.dconstruct.org/ tomorrow – generally mingling and causing a nuisance. I’ll be the one with the big hair raving about Javascript and “Selenium(Selenium – in browser testing)”:http://www.openqa.org/selenium/.
I just got this from an old colleague:
Despite all of our many successes, our architect has started making noises to the product management team that pair programming is a waste of money.
Why should he let mountains of academic research and our own project metrics get in the way of his own personal opinions!?!?!
Sometimes I just want to pack up and go home
Now first off, when people start talking in favour of Pair Programming, I tell them two things:
# From what I’ve seen, it’s the most efficient way to transfer skills, reduce “truck factor”:http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/2005/05/truck_factor.html, ensure quality and (say it quietly) stop slacking. It’s also damn hard to get some companies to try it for a number of reasons.
# Read “this Hacknot article(Hacknot – A Critical Look At Some Pair Programming Research)”:http://www.hacknot.info/hacknot/action/showEntry?eid=50 before you start quoting studies.
I don’t happen to agree with the editorial bais of the Hacknot site – my own (and my company’s own) experience has shown that we produce better software more efficiently when pairing. That said the study quoted is clearly flawed for the reasons mentioned. There have been more studies since – one day I should really get round to pulling them all together. The major problem in producing such a study is that I don’t know anyone who would spend the money creating a real world experiment over a long enough period of time to produce conclusive results.
I am however fairly sure that “pairing with a cat”:http://www.hacknot.info/hacknot/action/showEntry?eid=21 yields no benefit over pairing with an alternate programmer.
Is, to put it simply, *driving me nuts*
h3. Lovely Code Highlighting
Geshi was annoying me. Not driven by stylesheets, it uses some pretty bloated markup which makes it very hard for you to do much about changing how the code looks. That markup is being pushed from my server, increasing my bandwidth use and increasing page load time.
“dp.SyntaxHighlighter”:http://www.dreamprojections.com/SyntaxHighlighter/ is a Javascript library which performs syntax highlighting on the client side. It supports all the languages I’m likely to post code snippets in, and best of all it’s driven by CSS. To use it, I need to put my code sample in a textarea, like so:
... some code here ...
h3. Evil Textile
Textile is great – and evil. On the one hand, it makes writing post pretty easy – I can use Textile shorthand to quickly churn my useless drivel out. Textile performs its substitution on the server side – and it seems was clobbering my textarea blocks. To be fair it was trying to be helpful – it was escaping ‘<' characters as '<' and the like.
There are two ways which _should_ enable you to escape Textile – that is to turn off Textile formatting for a given block. Both wrapping your block in '==' or with 'notextile' tags should stop the formatting. This didn't seem to work for me. A search on the web (I'm avoiding using the verb 'Google' in case I get sued) showed that even in Textile friendly Textpattern it’s “far from simple”:http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=78277, however it should still work.
I followed all the instructions given – and indeed I can use ” to stop formatting of things like ‘(C)’ which normally turns in to a ‘(C)’ – to no avail.
If anyone out there can work out how to stop Textile formatting angle brackets (or can think of some other way for me to render a textarea with a specified name without Textile interfering) then I’m all ears.
I was asked again today of what my opinion was about Web 2.0 – what was it about all the buzzwords that was actually important? I probably end up anwsering this question a couple of times a week, and thought that todays response was as worth blogging as any of my previous anwsers.
Web 2.0, being a grab-bag of new technologies that emerged at the same time, can mean many things to many people. For myself, there are two primary trends which I think are important – the availability of cheap hardware and infrastructure software, and the ability to create compelling user interfaces on the web.
We’ve seen the emergence of a robust stack of free software on which Web 2.0 applications can be built. Where previously companies seed funding would be spent on buying Oracle and Application Servers, nowadays people are turning to cheap if not free alternatives such as the LAMP stack. Couple this with the low cost of hosting and bandwidth, and companies can focus their money on delivering what is most important – software that differentiates them from their competitors.
The fact that people are creating more impressive, more usable interfaces on the web, is due to one simple fact – the browsers got better. The lowest common denominator browsers have a good enough standard implementation of CSS, (X)HTML and JavaScript that we are freed from much of the work required to make our code cross-browser compatible. This has been followed by a number of third parties creating Web APIs (such as the Yahoo Toolkit) which further isolates ourselves from browser quirks, and help us concentrate on delivering valuable software.
If any of you are interested in Web 2.0 (or beer) and are in London (or want to travel for beer), then feel free to pop along to the next “London 2.0 meet-up(magpiebrain.com – Posts on London 2.0)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/blog/category/web-20/london-20-meet-ups/.
A while ago, I wrote an “article”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/08/08/rss.html on RSS and the Java “Informa API”:http://informa.sourceforge.net/ for O’Reilly’s “java.net”:http://java.net site. This morning, my Google blog search called up an odd search result – it seems as though a certain Dr. Charlie Peng had copied the article wholesale for his BlogSpot blog, ‘IT Architect’. It looks like a blatant attempt to create a high-ranked blog in order to achieve something (probably commercial gain – I don’t think it’ll help him get girls). If achieving high-ranking is his goal, I’m sure he could of picked some better articles to steal, with some better buzzword density – RSS is _so_ 2003.
I’ve flagged the site, left a comment and informed O’Reilly. Knowing how responsive Google are at removing dodgy blogspot blogs, I don’t expect much to happen anytime soon – unless O’Reilly decide to throw so weight around that is. In the meantime, you can view the stolen article at “architectit dot blogspot dot com /2006/07/rss-in-jsp-using-rss-in-jsp-pages-by.html” (no link referrals for _him_) – although I’d prefer it if you simply read the original article over at “Java.net(Using RSS in JSP)”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/08/08/rss.html.
Colleague “Jason Huggins”:http://www.jrandolph.com/blog/ (“Selenium”:http://www.openqa.org/selenium/ dev) is in town as he’s presenting at the “Google Automated Testing Conference”:http://services.google.com/events/londontesters , so I felt a meet up was in order. It’ll also serve as a nice warm-up for “d.construct”:http://2006.dconstruct.org/ later in the week – I’ve managed to snag a ticket so I’ll be going.
Format is the same as normal – laidback, beer, demos, geekery and quite a lot of gradient fills.
As always, the the “London 2.0 Archive”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/blog/category/web-20/london-20-meet-ups/, “Google iCal feed”:http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/c7ilcesmkkn0e3bkirk4kgf5cc@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics and “Upcoming”:http://upcoming.org/event/95916 will have all the details – -I’ll update everything once I have a venue confirmed, but as always it’ll be a pub/bar in London-. The venue is now confirmed as the “Old Bank of England”:http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/66/660/ – we’ll be on the far right of the pub. Feel free to leave a comment if you want to attend or would like to demo something.
magpiebrain 