Internet

I was having a problem with a huge FOP PDF template this morning, a change I had made last week was causing problems in certain circumstances. The problem was how to find the change (my memory is absolutely appalling). Enter WinDiff, a very useful little utility which compares two ASCII files, shows you what has been inserted, removed and moved and where the changes have been made. I recommend adding it to your tools library.

When I got to work this morning and had a quick scan of my Bloglines feeds, there was an error report from Feedburner saying that this site was down from about 08:45. Odd, thought I, for the new server is a meaty old boy and shouldn’t be crashing at any time, let alone the quietest period of the day.

Well looking at the console HTTP had conflicted, for some reason (which Fasthosts are looking into) IIS had taken over listening on port 80 in place of Domino. An easy fix normally, but from within the firewall of the office we can’t get at the server admin console. Queue true geekiness and my new phone, a Nokia E61. It’s got a pretty passable web browser on it, and a 3G data connection which allowed me to remotely control the server over the phone handset. I know this shouldn’t impress me, but it does, we truly are moving into a period where an always-on data connection is possible.

I got stick from the other guys here for being too much of a geek, but I just love this stuff, how cool is it that my mobile phone can talk to my web server, tell it to stop IIS and start nHTTP instead?

The system that I am working on (for one of my clients) required some online reporting functionality. They have a "proper" corporate reporting system in place and we do plan to send all of the Domino data into that at some point but it’s a big job to create the SQL database etc. So in the meantime I’ve been playing for a couple of days with WebFX Chart. This is a truly great set of code that you can drop into a website and be generating pretty impressive looking charts from very quickly. I would put up some screenshots but the data is confidential, you get a very good idea from the demo site though.

I have created a dynamic report generator that uses AJAX and Java with 7 or 8 different templates which covers most of the reporting requirements for the short term, and all it took was six hours development effort and a bit of reading, gotta love the internet sometimes :o)

Make history with us on 17 October by taking part in the biggest blog in history.

‘One Day in History’ is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a ‘blog’ diary which will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life.

Link via Fiona White

Scott Adams, the guy who writes Dilbert is undeniably a smart and funny guy. If you don’t read his blog then you should add it to your daily reading list now. Apparently he was up for consideration for the Nobel Prize for Economics recently. He didn’t win it but his 9 rules for financial security seem incredibly sensible to me:

1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

Not all of the rules translate directly to the UK (401K and IRA are both pension related) but it’s pretty close so this list is going to become a bit of a target for me over the next couple of years.

As the article about this says, this is pretty obvious stuff, but the real skill comes in expressing the rules in such a simple manner. I think most of us in our technical fields are probably guilty of not communicating clearly, Scott is as good a person as any to model your style on I think.

I’m probably running a little behind the curve here, but I heard about Last.fm this weekend. It’s a piece of software which you can download (for free as is usual in these Web 2.0 days), enter your favourite band name, press play and you get similar music which people have tagged with the band name played live over the internet for you. If you’re getting bored with your iTunes collection or just want to find some new music it really is a superb mashup of social networking and music.

I was reading the latest posting on Stevey’s Blog Rants talking about Agile programming, frankly I was skimming it but then came across the section called "The Good Kind" where he describes the environment at Google where he works. It sounds like a developer’s dream…

…
– there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

– developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

– Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

– developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it’s not their main project.
…

And there’s a lot more, go have a read, it’s a long old boy of an article so you’ll need 10 or 15 minutes. I was wondering whether that sort of approach to development would work in a more traditional environment, like an insurance company or a bank. Now obviously there are certain things which just have to be done as they are regulated in the financial services industry but I think a lot of the more peripheral projects which are not business critical (normally the sort of things I work on being a Domino developer) could benefit a lot from this style.

It would take a manager with enourmous cojones because he would inevitably take a beating from his bosses but in the medium to long term the pay-off would be great. I’ll give you my reasons but guess other’s might disagree…

Generally the developers on a project will have better ideas for what an application actually needs than the owners of that application. Once the business process is understood (often the business don’t even know this part which is just scary) the developers by their natures will be organising the application around the best workflow, ideas and so on because, assuming the right incentives are in place, they’ll have a good reason to. Even the "boring" tasks would be made attractive if the project team is given autonomy over the what, how and when elements.

Of course there are problems, Google hires the best people who are well motivated before they even arrive, but whenever I struggle with motivation for a project it’s usually because there are crappy political struggles going on, or the whole approach is wrong and I have no control over redirecting the deliverables, it’s not because the underlying development doesn’t hold some attraction.

The biggest challenge in all of this is to find a manager and a company where it would be allowed. Now I wonder if Google are looking to hire a Domino developer?

At lunchtime today my brother sent me an email saying that he’d managed to get a comment including a link to 50WordReview onto one of the BBC news stories about the 100 coolest websites. In fact it’s not even a real link, just the website address has been added as text so anyone reading it would need to copy and paste or manually type the url into their browser. Even so, within two hours of it being posted the traffic to the site has exceeded a normal day by tenfold, I’ve earned around 2 weeks worth of Adsense revenue (not much I can promise you!) and a load of new reviews have been posted.

To say I am stunned is a bit of an understatement, and I definitely understand a little more why the comment spammers (evil bastards though they are) do what they do. Maybe not on the small traffic sites like your average Domino blog but on the larger sites like Ed or Volker I guess the tiny percentage of click through traffic makes all of the effort worthwhile.

Update: OK so by the end of the day yesterday the site traffic was 80 times what would normally be expected, the RSS subcriptions went up by 1000% and we have had 30 new reviews. Absolutely incredible. Just have to hope that all of this stays within my bandwidth limit for the month!

Following Bill’s lead I have signed up for an online backup service called Mozy. Basically they offer a free service which allows you to back up 2gb of data (perfect for a reasonably sized photo collection) or you can upgrade to a $5 per month service which gives 30gb of space (enough for my music collection). I’m going to give the free service a go for a while before taking the leap with the paid service for two reasons. I want to make sure that the site is reliable and they also don’t offer a Mac client so I’d have to port all of my music across to a Windows box somewhere.

Assuming it’s all on the level though it seems like a cracking service, well worth a look.

Now that I’m settled into the new job and have a bit of a routine going I am able to get back to my own work. It’s one of those ongoing projects that you hack away at for ages with some vague idea that it will turn into the next big thing on the internet. Even if it doesn’t I enjoy playing with it. Anyway it is getting to the point where I am putting the UI together. This is not one of my strong points, I know what a good site looks like, I just struggle to bring it into reality when writing the CSS myself.

So I was looking around today and found Template Monster, a site which sells the basis of numerous site designs. You can either by a non exclusive copy or the outright version of the design. I have gone for a relatively simple design but nicely put together and all for the grand sum of $42. Not a bad investment I hope. I suppose that will become clear if/when the project sees the light of day.