Weblog by month (October 2005)
Latest rubbish from Forbes
Ole’ Dan Lyons is at it again, the silly chump. This time he has written a “piece” entitled Fighting Back or Attack of the Blogs, depending on which page of Forbes you go to. Interestingly, the publish date of the article is 14th November, so Daniel is also travelling in time. No link because (a) the one the site provides doesn’t work, (b) the article is utter bilge and (c) you need to log in to read it.
Anyway, Dan Gillmor takes a closer look at this latest piece of “journalism” from Forbes if you really want to know more.
As an aside, given the three issues highlighted above, what on earth do they use for their content management over there? It should be binned!
DominoWiki 1.0.1
The latest version of DominoWiki is live. Go get. Nothing major in this release, just a few tweaks. You can read more in the release document.
What’s your ’blog worth?
Bugger all it would seem:
My blog is worth $32,743.32.
How much is your blog worth?
Oh well
Via uneasysilence.
Replication is the devil’s work...
...And now I have incontrovertible proof, oh yes.
Yeah, I know, 666 may not actually be the mark of the devil, but what the hell... (sorry) indulge me; it amused me on a gut-wrenchingly tedious day!
Interruptions
According to a recent article in the New York Times, information is no longer the scarce resource it once was, attention is. The piece, entitled Meet the Life Hackers, is a fascinating look at how modern workers divide their attention x number of ways. The article delves into a recent study conducted by Gloria Mark, a scientist of “human-computer interactions”:
Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.
Augh! Thinking about a typical day at work, it became obvious to me that we often only have ourselves to blame. Let’s examine a typical day in the office. If you’re anything like me, once logged on, I fire up Notes, Sametime, and Firefox. Once done, I check out the day’s news and some of my RSS subscriptions whilst catching up with colleagues, prioritising email, logging on to the telephone system and reading changes to our wiki. That’s a lot of information flowing around already, and the coffee’s still cooling.
Of course, I soon open up the IDE and start on the real work to be done. But all through the day I am interrupted — and I interrupt others — via Sametime or the ’phone. It seems that whilst we may moan about “information overload” and the horrendous amount of multi-tasking that goes on in the modern workplace, we also welcome all this stuff. Else why fire up the instant messaging system? Why log on to the telephone? Why start the email client first thing in the morning? Why get so involved in this new-fangled RSS thing??
“In fairness, I think we bring some of this on ourselves,” says Merlin Mann, the founder of the popular life-hacking site 43folders.com. “We’d rather die than be bored for a few minutes, so we just surround ourselves with distractions...”
There is a lot more in the NYT piece, and it’s well-worth a read. The article ranges over modern office life, the history of “interruption science”, astronauts, how multiple computer screens can help, GTD, HAL-like software, the rise of the Post-ItTM, and so on. Go on, interrupt your working day to read it.
Via Jennifer Pahlka.
Update: I’ve just noticed that Joel Spolsky posted about this the other week, and has some interesting comments.
Open source and ads
This made me chuckle last night. I was reading up on the release of Maven 2.0, and eventually got directed to the Apache news weblog.
Now, as one might expect, Apache need to get money where they can, and one obvious route is advertising. It just made me chuckle to see who is paying to place advertisements on a website wholly dedicated to open-source software development... . Click through on the image to the left to see what I mean.
Guffaw!
Bruce presents
Bruce recently presented at a Las Vegas Lotus User Group meeting, and he took his cues from a certain style of presentation . Even just reading through the PDF file he posted, it’s clear that this style of presentation worked well — I would have liked to have seen him in action!
» Bruce Elgort: My Las Vegas Notes Users Group presentation.
» Brian Benz: Another Great Las Vegas Lotus User Group Meeting!
Ant
Emboldened by recent forays into the world of Maven I decided to actually look at Ant properly. Of course, if you mince around in Eclipse or MyEclipse like I do, then you already have some lovely Ant integration right there in yer IDE. Like me again though, that doesn’t mean you’ve actually tried it
Well, everything changed this week. Sick and tired of exporting projects in WAR format and then removing extraneous files, I decided to sit down and learn about targets and so forth, with a view to automating my wee builds. “Should be easy” thought I. After all, Ant gets used everywhere, so the silly little problems I need to solve will have been covered ad nauseam all over t’internet.
Or so you’d think.
Anyway, long story short, I came up with a little build.xml file which does exactly what I need for a particular project. The steps are:
- In line with best practice, all folder references are variables defined “up-front”
- Prepare build and distribution directories
- Compile source code
- Move compiled code, plus JSP and include files into the build directory
- Create WAR file from build
- Move “static” content (CSS, Javascript, images) into build directory, and place this in its own “static content” zip file
- Copy WAR and zip files to the distribution target
- Clean up
Simple! But it took a while to put together. So, I think I should share it. Feel free to lambast, comment, rip apart, whatever. There are plenty of comments in there for each target, and hopefully it will be useful as a starting point for your projects: I could have done with something like this when I started! Anyway, big thanks go to m’colleague Palin for his help and patience.
build.xml (3 KB. Updated 21 October for clarity and one typo).
Thinking in if statements
What an amazing piece of work from Joel Spolsky. This post seems to encapsulate what Microsoft are about very neatly, and without being hysterical:
If Microsoft doesn’t shed this habit of “thinking in if statements” they’re only going to fall further behind.
Jealousy
Some great news for Tom, and the interweb in general: Tom Coates, he of plasticbag.org fame, is leaving the BBC to join Yahoo!
Tom will be engaging in all sorts of web-related shenanigans, working with the Flickr and Upcoming teams, as well as being in the same team as Simon Willison and Jeremy Zawodny. Lumme, Yahoo! are picking up some awesome talents of late.
iTunes 6
Don’t rush off and upgrade yet: iTunes 6 breaks JHymn. It had to happen eventually I suppose, so here’s hoping for a new version of JHymn from the geniuses behind it: it’s a brilliant tool for freeing up music that you bought.
Valuing development
Something that's been on my mind lately... heck, as a developer I suppose it’s on all our minds, most of the time:
That fine line between being a jobs-worth gobshite, and a helpful, customer-focused developer (NOTE: I use the term “developer” as opposed to “programmer” — to me, “development” means doing more than just delivering lines of code as per spec.)
In this frame of mind, I read the latest post at Joel On Software and of course, it resonated. Yet Joel is writing from the perspective of a software development house. Tchcoh! We “corporate developers” work like this on every project Joel! Everything is custom:
“Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, ‘are you sure?’ and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, ‘is this what you want?’ and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you've gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you’re really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.”
Joel goes on to write an extremely good essay entitled Set Your Priorities. Of course, this is something you can do when you’re your own boss. It is slightly more difficult when you’re not, more’s the pity.
(As for what Joel thinks about leaving the clutter on your desk, well, our desk police would have a coronary...)
We need WAY more of this
Via the splendid Pete Lyons I learn that Andrew Wharton is now ’blogging. Oh, this is going to be fun . In his first post, Andrew sets the scene:
Lord knows I am not a patient man. Almost everything pisses me off. I swear, I yell, I growl at my computer when it is telling me something I don’t like. I talk back to emails from folks putting stuff on my ever-growing TODO list.
(Pause, as I nod enthusiastically).
My daily cycle looks something like this:
- Attempt to do task #29
- Realize that something elemental has changed underneath me
- Send prickly email to folks involved in my pain
- Get email from boss telling me to tone it down or HR will get involved
- Send apologizing email to folks involved in my pain
- Get laughing emails from folks involved in my pain mocking me for caving
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
Sheer brilliance. And uncannily like the beginning of my work day...
Update: as others have pointed out in the comments, Andrew’s site appears to be locked-down at the moment. Odd.
Death by PowerPoint
Let me state this for the record:
I fucking hate PowerPoint.
How many meetings do we — and by “we” I mean all us techno weeny types — sit through in a given month where the litepro gets dragged out, someone arses around with connectors and screen settings, and BOOM, there they are: three slides of awesome bullet points. Hmm?
It happens a lot. And often it’s us doing it — I know I’ve fallen into the trap on more than one occasion.
Well, sit back and take a lesson in how to do it right:
Dick Hardt presents Identity 2.0 at OSCON 2005.
Download, enjoy, and digest. Oh, and hope that some managers get to see this too...
Ronnie Barker
Rest in peace, Ronnie. As a kid — oh, and as an adult too — I loved The Two Ronnies, Porridge and Open All Hours so it was with considerable sadness that I read of Ronnie Barker’s death this morning. On the bright side, look at the legacy the man left us: reams of some of the best British comedy. Ever.
“Is this a prayer, or a dedication on the Jimmy Young show?”
