MyBlogLog and Wink

Idly meandering through the Yahoo Developer Network, I clicked on MyBlogLog - which I signed up for ages ago, but never did anything with. It's an interesting conceit - so if you do read my blog, feel free to sign up to say you do...Likewise, I'm trying to sort out a Wink profile as I like its use of MicroID - again, feel free to engage!

Web Project Management Best Practice

I was contacted to take part in an e-consultancy review of Online Project Management a short while ago, and received a link to their report on best practice in this area today. [UPDATE 16/05/07 - Linus Gregoriadis, Head of Research at e-consultancy, let me know I was pointing to a link for survey participants only, so - just in case you have bookmarked this, the link has now switched.]

I have to say, having skim-read the first-half, that it very much matches my experience. For instance, as a PRINCE2 qualified practitioner, I would have to agree that the PRINCE2 "exception"-led model of change management (and over-reliance on detailed specifications) can work against managing rapidly moving Web projects (where XP and other Agile methods build this into a rapid and iterative loop).

The great thing about a Web project is that you can manage the overall project with one methodology and branch off (in a controlled manner) software development, for instance, in a slightly different direction. I think it pays to be cute and take a pick-and-mix approach, rather than try to adhere to a monolithic approach, all in the name of getting things done. I don't think this has to be at the cost of losing control of time, cost, quality and associated risks; this is one of the reasons that I enjoy Basecamp as a Project Management tool: it helps me control the project while being flexible enough to stand setting up PRINCE2-type methods, controls and stages as categories.

Note: prince2 link updated on 10/03/2010 thanks to helpful comment.

Recognise pattern, fail to change

I'll probably write this up in more detail when I have two minutes to myself, but reading a recent copy of Wired last night on the plane from Geneva to London, I was just very aware of one very major strength in the human psyche, and another - related - weakness.

It's not a surprising revelation, but I feel that sometimes it is worth stating the obvious: people are great at recognising patterns, but hopeless at turning these patterns into action. I think that therein lies the failure of many a great, intellectually cogitated strategy.

So much for digital whiteboards

Via Mike Kuniavsky, here's an interesting toy which allows you to interactively project drawings in real-time. I know the intended audience is for kids, but this is a very cool way to make a big drawing in real-time when you don't have a whiteboard available. Just project on the wall.

This very much reminds me of a play of a Neil Gaiman book called "The Wolves in the Walls" which my wife did some digital compositing and projection work on where an After Effects animation was composited and projected onto the stage using Watchout software. The effect was to enable the actress to "draw" on the stage in real-time. Depending on the artistic skills of the actress, this toy would have been a simple replacement for this one effect. Scientific Progress does not always go "Boink" to mis-quote Calvin and Hobbes.

Scrollable, multiple selection checkboxes

Via Bim Egan of the RNIB, and passed on to me by my colleague, Sonia Carter, is this nice little accessible solution to multiple checkbox selections and saving space (i.e. "making it look good") at the same time.

This was, as pointed out by Bim, discussed on the webaim discussion board a while ago - to be honest, I was stuck back in the days of thinking that CTRL+ multiple option selection was fine for the "select" element. But, care of Bim is this neat solution on C82: "check it, don't select it". I really like this - neat and easy to code.

Screen Recording - Flashback Express

Having trialled Techsmith Camtasia Studio as well as Adobe Captivate (both great tools, fully featured, but costing $200 plus), I've been on the look out for lower cost replacements for a while.

While I haven't fully trialled this yet, Blueberry Software's Flashback Express looks like it could be a useful alternative (at $49) if you're interested in recording .swf or .avi demos. It's been pretty easy to use thus far, and works nicely with a headphone/mic set-up on my laptop.

Sheer Marketing Genius from the Fitzwilliam

In a perfect example as to how to make the best of a bad deal, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambrige (UK) - my personal favourite museum - has launched a jigsaw postcard. "So what?" you may be thinking to yourself: well, the genius behind this is that the two priceless Chinese vases (I forget which dynasty) were accidentally shattered into hundreds of pieces by a clumsy/unlucky visitor. This pratfall hit the headlines in the UK (particularly as there was CCTV footage of the incident), and I think it is a masterstroke to allow visitors to buy a postcard so that they can piece the vases back together again themselves...!

As an additional note, if you are ever in Cambridge, do drop into the Museum, it has a great Hogarth before/after painting, a beautiful Picasso drawing of Lydia Lopokova, and many other treasures.

[UPDATE]: It's Qing dynasty, and you can purchase the cards at the museum shop online!

Social Networking Silver Bullet

Via Headshift and via Marc's voice, I came across Social networking: Time for a silver bullet, which comes to some similar conclusions that I came to a couple of years ago. Namely, personal profiles (secure, of course) to represent a changing "you" and XFN or some other standard to establish the connections (or "predicates" in RDF speech, "verbs" to the rest of the world!) between them. It would be better to have "entity profiles" and "entity predicates" rather than remaining people-based as this would also allow organisations to keep an up-to-date profile (potentially with individual "person profiles" indicating a staff member relationship). It's all pretty interesting to see what direction the social networking and semantic web space is taking - although I dearly wish for the removal of the "Web 2.0" nomenclature, it really irritates me - personally, I like microformats as a first-footing into the space, and tend to agree with the KISS factor (keep it short and simple) which has led to RSS actually having an impact in this space.

Tell people something...!

I'm still at home in London, having been supposed to be flying out with my wife to Geneva on Thursday to visit her mother for Christmas. Personally, I blame the fog! But, seriously, I have been fairly unimpressed with the airline and airport integrated communications systems: airport sites held rudimentary messages pointing you to airline sites for more information, unfortunately, Swiss (International Air) with whom we were flying had not a single message about the fog-related cancellations on its site: no information as to whether to turn up to the airport or not, whether flights would be cancelled or not... OK, so move to the telephone - where none of the numbers listed appear to be in working order. So we rang numbers in Switzerland, but could not get through - in the end we were lucky, and managed to get in contact with the airline first thing the next morning - but what I am wondering is "why make it so difficult to let your customers know what is going on?". There was chaos at Heathrow, and I'm sure some of this is down to the fact that people HAD to turn up to the airport to even get close to speaking to someone or finding out what was going on. In our case, in the end, Swiss were as helpful as one could expect given the circumstances and time of year, but only once we had jumped through hoops to get in touch with them. So, where next, customer service?

What do you actually use...?

I'm an inveterate fiddler with online tools - I sign up for betas when I can, and have a fiddle and a play, and - to be honest - a number of online applications have worked their way into my everyday way of working. Some of these I've mentioned on my blog, and others I just get on with and use.

Just recently, I've been thinking that I ought to review all the social software and online applications to which I am signed up, and figure out which I am using now that I could replace with improvements, which tools I could have been using but have neglected to do so in any coherent way, and which tools I can just do without - no matter how cool. I'd then like to work out what the unifying themes are with these tools, why and how I actually use them and the benefits they deliver to me.

I suppose a very quick shortlist includes Basecamp, Gmail, Google analytics, Blogger, delicious, and bloglines, but there are ithers - such as PageFlakes - which I use more irregularly, but could see myself using more if I get myself into gear. If anyone else has engaged in a similar review, I'd be interested in hearing the results.

A really good DOM discussion...

Via the Web Standards Project, I just discovered Douglas Crockford's "Theory of the DOM" (this is part 1). I've just sat down and watched part one, and it's great - succinct and clear, and helps to clarify a number of issues in your mind.

Windows Live Writer...1, 2, 3 testing!

I'm just having a fiddle with Windows Live Writer to post a message to my blog. I have used a Word plug-in occasionally (and have never bothered with emailing in posts - I always figured it would be useful if I had a Blackberry!) but usually stick to logging in directly through Blogger (or Blogger Beta as is the case at the moment).

It hasn't managed to download my styles, but hey - it doesn't matter that much, I'll maybe try again later.

The interface is nice and clean:

It's easy to insert images, and format them.

Technorati tags: socialsoftware, blogs

Technorati tags were easy to drop in (and other tagging providers - Flickr, del.icio.us  - are also available).

You can also add in Google Maps and links are easy to drop in (also with "rel" attributes). I'm looking forward to microformat insertion - as I believe that may also be possible. My only negative so far is that they need to add "technorati" and "flickr" into their spell checker index - seems daft that they throw up as mis-spellings when they are used by the application itself.

[UPDATE] When trying to post this message, I was unable to publish it. A little research indicated that you need the latest update for Live Writer to work with Blogger Beta. I've also tried to install the Flickr third-party plug-in which is not working at present, but I'll keep trying with that.

Connection Woes

I haven't posted in a while, partly owing to some major problems in getting a broadband connection to my new flat in Blackheath. The nub of the problem appears to have been an LLU marker remaining on the line for the previous tenants broadband/phone package. I have discovered in the process that there is major confusion between service providers and BT , not helped by the division of BT into millions of little autonomous pieces.

I had decided to return to Pipex, whom I had used for three years or so - and been very satisfied with - while living in Glasgow. Big mistake! The Pipex of 2006 appears to have no relation in customer service to the incarnation I knew and respected.

Initially, they were helpful: Pipex informed me of the LLU marker and sent me off to BT to get it removed. I managed to track down the marker removal service, who told me Pipex needed to request the marker removal. Pipex told me I needed to request it. I begged BT and they very kindly removed it. I contacted Pipex - "no, the marker is still there" came the response. I rang back the next day and was told the marker had gone (joy!) and that in three weeks I would have my adsl.

Oh dear - three weeks later still no broadband, and Pipex told me that they had reassigned the work, but that it would be done in 11 days time. Oh double dear, no broadband in 11 days - apparently the LLU marker had re-appeared. So more phonecalls, with one Pipex employee suggesting that with this issue in place we should not have been sold the service in the first place. Eventually, I was told to go back to BT to get the marker removed again.

Well, reader, I voted with my feet - I called NTL who installed cable, and I'm now set up with a 2Mb connection (admittedly less than the up to 8Mb service from Pipex) within 10 days as opposed to the three months of travails with Pipex. The moral of this story at present - in my own experience - is steer clear of any company advertising itself with David Hasselhoff!!!

New Look

After looking decidedly in need of some attention for several months, the look-and-feel of this blog, has just had a 30-second overhaul care of the new Blogger Beta. In the spirit of Bertrand Russel's In Praise of Idleness, this involved using one of the Blogger pre-packaged templates! I'll be playing around with this to make the site a little more unique when I get the chance, so do expect a few changes - I also need to delve into the new features of the beta (although the addition of tags is great).

Too cool for school - contextual ajax comments

I haven't played about with this too much, but this set of Wordpress meets Yahoo UI comments from Jack Slocum is simply too cool for school. I like it because it gets away from the web page as a document model - and moves towards content chunking ("I'm interested in this bit, thank you")...

Note Taking

I'm still trying to find the ideal note taking tool that can hold all my thoughts together. I tried TiddlyWiki for a while, until it lost two separate sets of conference notes (despite a rigorous saving routine), and am now having a fiddle with Google Notebook - which looks like it is great for online research, but very specific to that. But I was surprised that I had never heard of Microsoft OneNote, which looks like it could be very useful in the MS environment which exists at my workplace. Think I'm going to download the trial version in a couple of weeks and see where it takes me...all good for personal knowledge management.

Form Follows Function...Follows the Web

I'm probably slow getting to this, and doubtless this has been blogged already, but I noticed in today's Financial pages of The Guardian (I've noticed a few things in its hallowed pages today) that the article "bulking up in the drugs industry" contained blue, underlined keywords which were then further defined in a call-out box. I think it's really interesting that a print publication is using the default hyperlink formatting to indicate "more information" - the influence of the WWW continues to grow.

A Catalogue of Errors

From today's Guardian Education Supplement somes Improbable research: a catalogue of errors, an article highlighting the need for knowledgeable, experienced library staff. The problem: foreign language books being mis-filed and therefore "languishing unfindable in libraries". The example: Gaelic books being catalogued under "na" ("the" in Irish Gaelic), for instance "Na fir" ("The Men") not being catalogued under "Fir".

"Imagine if The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury and The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark were all filed under 'T'"
Marc Abrahams

Indeed...

Spry from Adobe

While it's not quite standards compliant, I have been enjoying scratching the surface of Adobe's Spry - which seems like one of the easier Ajax frameworks to use.

Perhaps I am attuned to it because we have been working with FLEX 1.5 (not 2.0 yet - shame!!!) and the two approaches seem like close cousins. Likewise the controls and effects available seem to ape the core FLEX items.

Anyway, I used the accordian for a wee training package (within the firewall) this week, and it works like a dream. I'm going to fiddle about some more when I get a chance and look at binding to data sources and tabbed interfaces...

Ajax edit in place - NIFTY

Via Tim’s Weblog – here’s Joseph Scott’s edit in place: you too can have Flickr type user entry fields!