Remote Island

The cartoon strip ‘Dilbert’ never fails to amuse me. Scott Adams has just started a series about the PHB employing a more senior member of staff, and continues to patronise him not understanding that he is bringing a great deal of experience into the team. Today’s strip was typical, “Mature Employee – I was a chip designer in my old job. PHB – Really? Chocolate or Poker?”. This isn’t far from the truth in organisations today from what I’ve read on the ‘net lately. On the BBC News website a week or two back, there was a piece about the impending doom or crisis for the UK IT job market. It seems that we don’t have enough skilled people out there to fill the vacant positions. But reading many comments on the message boards that accompanied news article, it appears that ageism is prevalent throughout the UK IT industry.

I learnt a useful but very simple thing with Ruby today. Using backquotes, you can return the standard output of running cmd in a subshell.

e.g.

> `date`
> "Wed Nov 22 19:11:32 GMT 2006"

Now think about how you could use this in Rails to display the subversion revision of your web application. Simple, using YAML and the svn info command.

The svn info command returns the following output.

Path: .
URL: http://myrepository.tld/svn/projects
Repository Root: http://myrepository.tld/svn/projects
Repository UUID: bab91cb8-3837-db11-9351-0014220fd224
Revision: 143
Node Kind: directory Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: goatley
Last Changed Rev: 143
Last Changed Date: 2006-11-22 17:57:18 +0000 (Wed, 22 Nov 2006)
This looks like YAML to me, so we can load the output into the YAML object.

> REVISION = YAML.load(`svn info`)['Revision']
> 143
Very useful!

Design isn’t a language I speak often, but I’m always out for a bit of inspiration now and again. In my RSS reader, I subscribe to Web Creme for the latest in web design. Imagine my shock when I realised that a site that Fire-Island wrote a few weeks back made the shortlist. The head of tea operations at Fire-Island must be very happy with himself.

I’ve decided to move away from the Rails powered blog engine Typo. I’ve been happy with Typo, it’s had some teething problems, but I wanted to give Wordpress a go. So far, the experience has been a great deal richer from an ‘bloggers’ point of view. Only time will tell.

I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux for some time now. It’s great for a development environment if you can’t afford one of those shiny MacBook Pros. I’ve had one BSOD on my Dell box this week - I’ve never had a crash in the past 5 months running Ubuntu.

The thing that put me off Linux in the past was the support for wireless. I can understand why it’s difficult to support such a thing with different chipsets and firmware. It seems in Ubuntu 6.06, this problem went away. I was running a WMP54G v4.1 card (the one with the Ralink RT2561/RT61 chipset) with no problems using a native driver. However, when I went to test Edgy (6.10), my card was no longer recognized and it tried to force me to use ndiswrapper - this doesn’t seem to work using this particular version of the card.

After reading some threads on the Ubuntu forums, it appears that I’m not alone and it bought to light something I didn’t know. Dapper (6.06) appears to be the stable release, Edgy (6.10) is more of a bleeding ‘edge’ release that contains lots of software that may be in a ‘beta’ state.

I’m going to roll back to using Dapper this weekend and leave Edgy alone for a while. I can live with a slightly slower boot up time for now.

An interesting and funny article/rant about the Agile methodology and the development process at Google. The first paragraph about the ‘Bad Kind’ made me laugh out loud (can’t think why), and the quote about pair programming made me nod a few times - I’ve known companies who feel they need to practice pair programming religiously to resolve spiraling defect counts and/or improve the quality of their code.

From my own experience, I’ve come to learn that Agile doesn’t always solve all your software development problems and a lot of XP techniques are a little unnecessary - probably because they aren’t executed correctly, or misunderstood. Take the good bits from Agile, the ones that promote productivity, and run with them.

Link to Article [steve-yegge.blogspot.com].

The guys over at 37signals prove that another advantage accepting the remote working ethos is the ability to hire from wherever you like. This was the attitude of a company I used to work for. They hired some of the best software developers and programmers from around the UK and we worked together in a remote environment. Dare I say it, worked rather well.

In traditional office environments, everyone needs to travel into work every day. This means that you either recruit from around your location, or offer relocation packages. It really cuts down on your choice when hiring new staff.

After a hard days drive back from meetings on the mainland, I visited my local Sainsburys in Newport to stock on the essential items such as milk and bread, plus a few treats for the wife. When I came to the checkout, I was offered by the assistant to pack my bags, which I always answer no (why can’t you remember that?). When it came to paying, the assistant told me that I needed to swipe my own Nectar card (awards cards for those who don’t know) and then my debit card. Now I usually use this time to catch up packing my own bags whilst my debit card goes through the system, printing of the receipt etc. but now I don’t have this time because I now have two things to worry about – scanning my Nectar card (should I really bother doing that next time I ask myself? Sainburys probably don’t want to know my spending habits anyway) and entering my card, removing it from the machine because it didn’t work first time, entering my pin whilst still worrying about the unpacked shopping and the queue of people behind? I only had three bags of shopping but felt the eyes of customers on the back of my skull whilst I carried on catching up packing my shopping with them waiting.

Sainburys has taken away (in my opinion) one of the important iterations between itself and the customer. Why try to fix something when it’s not broken in the first place? It doesn’t speed things up at the checkout, it only slows things down and gets the customer into a flustered mess. Fools.

(rant over)