Mockery for beginners

I'm moving this from Blogger to Drupal. I am effectively going to be eating my own dog food. I wonder how to move the content???? What about comments? I only really got comments when I offered joost invites. I think I'll be ok without those.

I reckon copy and paste is much faster than trawling for software.

I'm writing Drupal websites at the moment and had a big pc crash that needed the power plug pulling. On reloading winamp actually had Drupal code in the playlist window. Naturally I pressed play but it didn't produce a web page.

If you want to trace a single files activity this tracing page on microsoft.com. Unless you are patch levels above Service pack one on Server 2003 then the command

adsutil.vbs set w3svc/n/TraceUriPrefix=pathtoURL

won't work.

Just replace the = with a space and it works.

Labels: programming

I have just spent far too long trying to get Scrubyt, rails and MySQL working. Scrubyt is amazing but very particular about the versions of Gems it needs. When and if you install, remember to install with gem install -v ... e.t.c. and you will need to remove some stuff and put older versions in, for instance RubyInline will be too new for scrubyt. That's annoying. However the killer was MySQL, I spent a while just not being able to get Ruby to call it until http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/ruby/wiki/Troubleshooting solved my problems. Now I am scraping pages easily and saving table info into MySQL in erm 5 lines of code...

Labels: programming

I still don't see any tools out there to help me choose where to move to. Why isn't there something that lets me compare train journey times with house prices?

I just had to link to this. I love trips down memory lane that show patterns in modern life.

http://www.dashes....-facebook-and-the-new-tables.html

I actually feel relieved today after reading TechCrunch's post on the facebook fbFund, a program to give grants to facebook platform developers. Whilst on Project Red Stripe we solicited ideas from the web and we took a bit of a slamming from slashdot and other places over our t&c's. To be fair we also received praise for even trying to do it.

It is plain difficult to be a company that is trying to embrace the power of the crowd without upsetting some people.

After our initial offer to the market asking for ideas we added to the blog a few paragraphs that read like this.

So if you have a flash of genius that you don't mind someone else taking to market then let us know. If you have a flash of genius that you want to take to market then good luck.

This is essentially because most people couldn't start a business with The Economist's customers, content or brand recognition. Ideas are great but execution is everything.

The whole point of this piece is that I feel relieved that facebook have had to put out a huge terms document to it's potential developers who may get funded. I feel proud that we got it right first time round and sent out the t&c's first time.

I'd worry about building a facebook application around a new or non existent brand.

Labels: crowd, projectredstripe

Check this guy out playing the Mario theme on two guitars.




For more see this blog post

I am an intrapreneur currently so why not post two rap videos about intrapreneur. They are not embeddable booo so here are the links.

Slim shady - Will the real intrapreneurs please stand up

Hollaback intrapreneur

The lughenjo logo is now available at lughenjo courtesy of the fantastic Zak Youngman.

Labels: lughenjo, projectredstripe

The facebook toolbar is available but be careful, installing it on my firefox installation (2.0.0.2) caused the enter key and go arrow to stop working in the location bar. I had to disable the toolbar to get firefox working properly again. Hyperlinks etc still worked but no manual entry.

Of course I have many plugins installed. It could be a compatibility issue with the Dictionary, delicious bookmarks, DOM Inspector, Firebug, MeasureIt, Screen grab!, StumbleUpon, Talkback, User Agent Switcher or Web Developer.

Labels: crowd

I love this Japanese site for making me feel like a god.

Labels: fun

I am the only reader so I don't expect a single comment. Still if anyone does want a joost invite. I have lots

Labels: joost

The crowds are annoying. Just as Chelsea went out to Liverpool on penalties, I hate penalties, twitter public timeline went mad with people saying stuff like "john terry is boo hoo hooing! that's made my day". Why aren't the Liverpool fans on it saying Yay. erm that's because they are watching the game. ok I'll be quiet. The crowds are unsurprising.

Labels: crowd, sport

I think this is bloody important. Dell are to have Linux as an option on machines they sell. This shows the power of the crowd, look at dellideastorm. They will be shipping Ubuntu on particular machines.

Is today the day it changes?

The crowd have argued for Linux. Linux is built by the crowd. Happy days for the crowd.

Labels: crowd, innovation, linux

We've been linked to from around the blogosphere. It's getting seriously interesting. Just as a person who is watching as well as taking part I find it fascinating.

These are just a few that are linking. I will definitely try to keep watching these blogs and others that are linking to Project Red Stripe.

http://www.midasoracle.org/2007/03/11/the-economist-seeks-fortune-tellers/

http://open.typepad.com/open/2007/03/more_media_inno.html

http://candide.blogsome.com/ 2007/03/11/yay-the-economist-boo-kleptocracy/

http://www.julianonsoftware.com/?p=1824

http://bloggingrbi.blogspot.com/2007/03/project-red-stripe.html

http://ketcheson.net/2007/03/11/links-for-2007-03-11/

http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2007/03/project-red-stripe.html

http://citmedia.org/blog/ 2007/03/10/ economist-magazine-tests-open- system-with-tom-sawyer-economics/

http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2007/03/blogger_base_ca.html
(Tom should tell people he was in sales!)

http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com/ 2007/03/why-i-no-longer-read-economist.html

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Project_20Red_20Stripe

http://eoinpurcellsblog.com/2007 /03/09/the-economist-cool-who-saw-that-coming/

http://www.enriquedans.com/2007 /03/project-red-stripe-the-economist-investiga-el-futuro.html (Spanish I think)

http://www.triarchypress.co.uk/blog/2007/02/ assumptions-and-bad-science.html
Our Project Red Stripe publishers blog!

http://nomadlife.org/2007/03/economist-innovation-unit.aspx

http://lenedgerlydotcom.blogspot.com/ 2007/03/web-smart-skunkworks-at-economist.html



I'm using Google Blog Search to track them

Labels: blogging

We've received comments on
http://projectredstripe.com/blog/2007/03/09/going-live/

I think mainly from the slashdot crowd. Oh yes we were slashdotted.

At the same time we received a record day in page views and took tons of ideas on the web site. We were flamed for our terms and conditions and also by those who don't allow Javascript. The JavaScript complaints came from slashdot.org. I've noticed that they tend to attack sites that use anything other than base level technology, in this case a rich text editor, however the site is basically about technology. If I'm to believe that the slashdotters don't want new technologies to be used why do they read a site that basically comments on technology related events. Before I attack my self when reading this back as I am of course the only reader I know the website should degrade correctly to allow non javascript'd people in. I have no real excuse. I'm sorry

Labels: projectredstripe

GO give some

Go anywhere on the web, flickr and amazon work really well then paste this into the URL bar

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Screw this page up

My on time and on target manager book is erm delayed.....

Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you an update on the status of your order.

We are sorry to report that the following items have been delayed.

Kenneth H. Blanchard (Author), Steve Gottry (Author) "The On-time,
On-target Manager (One Minute Manager)" [Hardcover]

We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Labels: reading

Hi,

Yahoo pipes has launched and is an "easy" way to push feeds around and filter them to produce altered output for you. In this simple example I have taken the articles from Economist.com's news analysis section and pushed them through flickr. See my Economist.com thru flickr presentation.
It loses the article detail from Economist.com so if I was to edit this I'd make sure that the flickr pictures get added to each item from Economist.com. I haven't looked or figured out whether that is possible yet or whether pipes is just about tunneling. I suspect it is. I don't know

Labels: rss

Charlie Brooker lit a fire on the commentisfree blog on The Guardian. His post attacked mac users more than macs. It is worth a read. At the time of writing the comment count is 778 with 695 blogs linking to that article. It's a touchy subject. I guess this post will be 696. People have very strong opinions on mac vs pc. I think that they both have a place regardless of how smug users of the respective platforms are. I think the argument is flawed. The argument should be Apple v Microsoft or OSX vs Windows especially as they now run on the same hardware. I love that now a contentious article can get a massive response. This morning on Sunday AM I watched Iain Dale describe his blog and blogging in general as a conversation. I think he's on the right track but Yasmin Alibhai-Brown tore into him saying that she has conversations with people who email her regarding the articles she features in her independent column. I think Iain is closer to being correct as Yasmin may reply to her commenter's emails, but they are not in the public eye. Iain's commenter's post publicly and Iain can reply publicly. That is a debate. I think he should have described blogging as a debate rather than a discussion. The Economist does , even if only in the red fly title linking to one of it's three blogs from the homepage and the URL. See the inbox, freeexchange and democracy in america blogs on economist.com

Labels: blogging

We've started.....
I hope to make many mistakes. However I'll call them learnings which I'm sure is common corporate speak for "don't know what I'm doing". We are debating the style of blog to adopt on the public blog. So my "Hello World" post is a bit naff. The biggest thing for me yesterday about the start of ProjectRedStripe.com is that we only have six months. I never thought it was a long time but now I think it's a very short time.... My first day felt more like a course than a job. Or perhaps a corporate away day. One thing that occurred to me was how long it took for us to simply get sorted. It took me five minutes to find a suitable spoon to stir my tea. My laptop took a while to set-up and the printer longer. Essentially you forget, when you're used to the corporate IT team fixing everything, how hard PC's are to basically get running smooth. Economist Group IT support are actually pretty damn good. I just never thought about it. We all had problems with stupid password e.t.c and getting access. My mistake, pictured, is actually a post I wasn't sure would succeed.

Labels: IT, starting

..Before I start as generic member of projectredstripe.
It's interesting. I am being sidelined here through design to watch
the things that depend on me fall correctly into someone else hand.
They aren't replacing me with another manager as it's only a secondment.
They have the money to, but they are spending it on a developer for
Economist.com instead. All of my permanent staff and one contractor are
taking more responsibility. Should be fine here. I've left lots of
documentation and I've had Mick, my newest permanent hire shadowing me
for two weeks to catch opportunities and ask questions.

I went to the new office yesterday. It was in a nice building near
Marylebone station, London. It is the office of AMV BBDO. We have a
3rd floor area that used to be a flat. It has a bathroom with shower
and toilet. I'm not sure I'd like to use the toilet with everyone so
close. I think we may need to make a rule there. Perhaps I'm being too
anal.

The room itself has a spiral staircase in and a huge projector, I'm not
sure what will stay and what will go. I'm sure the staircase will stay.
However right now there is a light blue sofa in there and no chairs or
tables e.t.c.

It will be interesting to see what happens there. Bring on Monday. I
am ineffective now in my old job as I planned the handover correctly so
I am not really doing anything of use.

Today already after reading only one chapter of the book Sticky wisdom I felt myself looking at the design of the Economist.com, CFO.com and CFOEurope.com common web platform in a different light. That book can screw with your head. I had an idea today just from one chapter that I wouldn't have had without it.

Labels: innovation

This is Ludwig, one of the people I will work with.

Labels: team

This is the reading material I need to get through before the 29th. I have to bring back one key message from each text to tell to the team.

1. Sticky Wisdom (?What If! ISBN, ISBN-10: 1841120219)

What you should take away from reading the (whole) book:

Behaviours that nurture creativity

?If at first an idea is not absurd then there is no hope for it? Einstein (quoted on P.114)

The story of courage on P. 175

2. Innovation ? The classic Traps (Rosabeth Moss Kanter)

What you should take away from reading the article:

How we can avoid mistakes that others have made

3. The Innovators Dilemma (Clayton M. Christensen, ISBN-10: 0875845851)

What you should take away from reading the abstract:

How listening to existing customers can inhibit innovation

4. The Power of the Tale ? Chapter 2 (Julie Allan, Gerard Fairtlough, Barbara Heinzen,ISBN-10: 047084227X)

What you should take away from reading the chapter:

The value of storytelling to a project; this video carries the same message

5. Outside Innovation (Patricia B Seybold, ISBN-10: 006111135909)

What you should take away from reading the (whole) book:

The precedents for involving customers in the innovation process

Labels: infrastructure, innovation, reading, starting, team

I want to blog for the next six months heavily. Remembering that I will be the only person to ever read this I feel I need to blog to take note of the amazing journey I will be on. I'll be starting a company or at least trying with someone else's money.

Maybe I'll turn it into a book if we become a google.

Labels: starting, team

The team is finally complete. Here is Mike's note of names. We start on 29th of Jan in the AMV offices.

• Steven Chiu
• Stewart Robinson
• Mike Seery
• Tom Shelley
• Ludwig Siegele
• Joanna Slykerman

Everyone has a name that starts with an S.

Labels: infrastructure, team

The time to start the new project is nearly here. We've ordered laptops and mobile phones, an ADSL line from BT and a NetGear 54g router (dg834g) On Monday 22nd I'll go to check out the office. The laptops are pretty large but we are not getting desktops. The mobiles will not be complimented with landlines. I'll probably get a bluetooth thingy for mine Mike, the boss, has started us a section on http://www.centraldesktop.com/ I'm impressed with it so far. Apart from reading material to check before we start we need to plan a half day outing for the team each. My initial thoughts are all about corporate law breaking and tequila drinking competitions but that won't work. I've just purchased two cans of coke a minute apart from each other. I'd simply forgotten I'd bought the first one.

Labels: "empty cans", infrastructure, starting

Maturing the Economist Groups's web IT infrastructure will have to wait for me at least.

I've been accepted to an elite super group of corporate paratroopers. We will be incubating our very own digital divide skipping child. It will have 6 parents. Arnie and Danny had 7, I think, in Twins (the movie)

We will be planting seeds for The Economist's newest venture. M&A's aren't easy money so every so often I guess you have to try doing something yourself. I wonder whether our competitor to myspace/youtube/google/breathing/talking/communicating will work. Why am I picturing the baby from Charmed who scares off dates for Mommy with a white light in his mouth?

I have to say my application to join was terrible, really terrible. I wrote about software instead of innovation. It's because I'm crap, and a little because I was in the middle of the JoelOnSoftware book. However I did muck about and make my blog inaccessible and break the up and down arrow keys in the process. The css is nice, the first time you load it and you get your posts in a viewport. I basically think I got in because I lent a playstation 2 eyetoy to Mike Seery for the web cast. Mum, I told you gaming would get me somewhere.

Forget the application however, the interview was a joke. I interview a few people in my existing role. I sat with Mike in a Pret and proceeded to answer "Yes I can do that" and "That won't be a problem" without any justification. To be fair to me a little bit, as I already work for Mike albeit through the onion of management I didn't realise I would be interviewed in such a real way. It clearly must be the eyetoy, or perhaps it was the eyetoy drivers that make it work so well on a pc

I join a cast of superstars from the Economist. We are redstripe. Tom, a superstar, has a blog at http://fedoralreserve.wordpress.com/

Labels: innovation, IT, team

I'm practically married to Andie anyway so he is basically my nephew. This is Callum. He is ace.

Labels: life

I kept a blog from 2001 to 2005 on Blogger.com which I accidentally/stupidly/purposefully deleted. It was very personal and I wrote it to put my feelings out there rather than for people to read. I suppose it falls into my belief that there are millions of blogs with just one reader. I got rid of it thinking I wanted to move on and be a happier more secure person. To be clear I am. I don't highlight my hair anymore for god's sake. That was a dark or erm...peroxide time. Now I wish I hadn't deleted it as I'd love to read it. It's gone. I can't get it back.

Labels: loss, personal

First of all.  You shouldn't have to.  Your management should help you get source control.  It's not always possible.  You might be under funded, you might be overworked, you might just have too much to do.  What you do now might work for you.  I work for a company that is only now after five years adopting source control.  That sounds crazy but it has worked in the main.  We have lost six or seven files in my five years there and we got them straight back, albeit without the new changes, from the live servers.

The biggest problem with not having source control believe it or not is not the actual the source code, you can keep that safe with backups, it's the developers.  Why should a developer work in such a precious environment where he/she can't make fundamental changes without worrying about restoring a good state.  Why should a developer work for a company that doesn't at least try to hit some of the twelve goals that Joel sets out as important for software development.  Source control being the first on the list.

Let's assume you'll get to implement source control at some point, you can't just install it and start.  It doesn't work like that.  The biggest thing you need to think about it process.  Should you sandbox, should you directly check out from the trunk to the live servers, should you make releases.  How do you do it now?

We currently have a shared development environment which is crucial if you have no source control, once again I am not abdicating having none, this should help you figure out how to work without it and how to move forward.

Anyway, we have a shared dev environment that people either use mapped drives, FTP, rds e.t.c to connect to.  Let your developers choose how they connect, let them choose how to work, it's more productive to give control out.  You as the manager or work coordinator will need to be aware of how work pieces affect each other and you should figure out a system of giving out work such that you won't get people over writing each others code.  It won't work perfectly but we have generally had people who work on parts of front end and people who work on core system code as our split.  The only overwrites we have had were on the front end stuff so we didn't lose business logic. 

Set up

You basically need three environments to run code, be it database, be it web code, be it server components.  At it's cheapest they can be on the same server, but they can't be literally the same files that run, perhaps you virtualize, perhaps your application runs on different ports from different locations.  Whatever your set-up, that's up to you, but you need to be able to completely separate a development, test and live environment.

The three environments

Development should be the box where everything happens to move the product(s) forward.

Test, this is essentially where you gain approval for your changes and projects before you make them live.  Your customers should not approve changes on the live or development servers.  You need sign off for everything you ever do.  Everything you ever do is for a customer, even if the customer is another programmer, IT manager, you e.t.c.  Even changes you make for yourself.  When doing this you'll still need someone else to approve your actual code but it's too early to talk about code approvals.  If you don't currently have a test server, you need to somehow provision one, in it's smallest form, it can be another instance on your development server, but ideally it will be a new box.  When you initially build it, you need to basically follow your instructions for building your live servers, as the test server should mimic as much as possible the live sites.  Never copy your development server to create a test server, if you do you will increase your problem/bug count over time.

The live environment

The live environment should be set-up as best you can set it up, everything you do to build it should be as scriptable as possible.  If the build is automated it will be repeatable, if not you need a process.  Just getting it running is not an option if you want your servers to respond in a predictable fashion.  You should never directly edit on the live servers, you should release via some sort of package, the most simple a zip file of the changed files in your package from test.  It will be tricky to try to get your DBA's to only do scripted releases to a database but you need to aim for it.  If all your releases are dated you should be able to get back to a particular date where you know the code/database structure is good.

Distinguishing between changes

You should go get a bug tracking system, but I'm assuming absolute minimum sign off from management/budget.  So go start a spreadsheet, each line having a unique number which becomes your change number and package number for releasing.  This should detail the change requested, the priority (1-5), the files modified, the action completed, the original estimate, the actual time taken and a column that figures out the difference between the two so your developers can get better at estimates, which in turn will make you better at telling customers when they'll get something.

Moving from Dev to a test server then live server

When you're done developing you will need to be able to package your individual changes/projects into file lists and db changes, these need to be moved from the dev server to the test server upon which they are to be tested.  I won't cover how to test them here, that's separate.  This same list should be the list you use to upload from test to the live servers.  It can't change, it shouldn't change unless you change it on dev and re promote to test.  If it does change testing needs to start again.  Try to package the files up in a zip or something similar in it's most basic form, this could also be used later to roll out to live.

Roundup

This is no real replacement for the gains that source control and release management can give you.  In reality you need to move to source control and release management so you can focus on developing systems.  When you get there you won't lose your dev environment or test environment, they'll just change function.  Dev will be come system integration and unit testing, and test becomes user acceptance and further unit testing, but we don't need to detail those yet.  For now just realise that your current throughput might slowdown when you get source control, people don't tell you that, but it's worth it.  You need it.  Generally you can get away without it but when you have a failure the time to get back to a working system can be massive.  With so many companies adopting disaster recovery, business continuity plans perhaps you can tell them source control is DR in a box.

The road ahead is not a pretty one. Not only am I setting out to completely change an international company's web operation without a budget, I am also going to try to write about it in a sensible way. If you're looking for a quick fix to help your development team then I'll see you in about two years, which is roughly the timescale I've set to get "mature". If you want to follow my progress, or more likely lack of, then get the RSS feed into bloglines and laugh at my failure and eventual redundancy.