Bradley Wright

killorn: Here is a picture of legendary comic book writer Stan...

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:54:52 +0100

Here is a picture of legendary comic book writer Stan Lee at the exact moment he regretted ever picking up a pen in the first place.

Sharing files with virtual machines using NFS

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 22:34:00 +0100

In a previous post, I sang the virtues of VMWare Fusion’s shared folders feature, and the way it lets one share files from the host OS to the guest OS.

Folder sharing is a bit of a pain to install, especially because OS upgrades on the guest seem to break the guest tools installation. The solution is one of the oldest file sharing technologies there is: NFS. It’s easy to set up, works on basically everything, and is solid as a rock. It also supports symlinks, which means you can sidestep VirtualBox’s issues with shared folders and symlinks.

The best bit is that once it’s set up and works you can switch between any virtualisation technology you like (for example: I’m now using VirtualBox at work so we can make better future use of Vagrant, but I use VMWare for Windows)—this works at the OS level so it’ll just keep working.

Configuration time

This is the easy bit. First we export whichever folder we want to share from the host OS. In my case it’s ~/Projects. Edit /etc/exports as sudo (this won’t exist by default on OS X), and add the following line to it:

/Users/bradleyw/Projects -mapall=501:20 -network 192.168.56.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

The first part is obviously the directory you want to share, and the -network flag tells us which IP range to share with. In my case my VM listens on 192.168.56.101, hence 192.168.56.0. The rest of the flags you can ignore.

Now we need to run a few commands in the OS X terminal to complete this side of the configuration:

sudo nfsd checkexports
showmount -e

If everything went well no errors should be reported and your exported directory should be printed to stdout.

Now on the guest OS, you first need to install the NFS software. On Debian and Ubuntu this is:

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

If you’re on another distribution this is an exercise for the reader.

We can now configure fstab so mount knows what to do. As a super user, edit /etc/fstab, and add the following line at the bottom:

192.168.56.1:/Users/bradleyw/Projects /mnt/nfs nfs soft,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0

The important bits to change are 192.168.56.1, which should be the IP your guest can see your host at (so the IP address your virtual machine uses to hit OS X), the path to your export, and the /mnt/nfs, which can be anything you want. I use /mnt/nfs as it seemed the right thing to do.

Note that you need to create /mnt/nfs before proceeding: sudo mkdir -p /mnt/nfs.

Now we can attempt to mount the shared filesystem: sudo mount /mnt/nfs. If no errors are reported, it’s all good!

You should now be able to read and write from /mnt/nfs.

My own workflow

My own workflow with this is to have a case-insensitive disc image that’s password protected automount on login (this is exported as /Volumes/Smarkets). Then the Linux machine starts in headless mode, and because of NFS it’s already mounted. So I’m up and running very quickly after logging in, and the case-insensitive disc image gets around all the issues Python has when exporting from OS X to case-sensitive file systems.

Hunter helped me a lot with some of the details here.

git whatchanged

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:43:09 +0100

git whatchanged:

Good tip this. Also, documentation on git whatchanged.

Now paying for GitHub

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:21:04 +0000

As I indicated much earlier, I stopped paying for GitHub because I have the server and know-how to host my own repos.

However, my general policy is that I’m always happy to pay a small fee to services I don’t use in a way I should to justify their value, but merely to reward them for doing good work.

So that brings me to the point of my post: with GitHub’s new image view modes, they’re doing amazing things for version control and collaboration, and I wanted to support that. So I’m now a paid up member of GitHub again.

Keep up the good work!

Posterous's idea of customer service, and where I differ

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:30:00 +0000

I’ve been dabbling with Posterous as a potential way of mitigating Tumblr’s recent downtime issues.

The tl;dr version is that I didn’t like their service, and suggest some improvements.

My experience with Posterous

After importing my Tumblr blog into their system (which was all very smooth), I tried to edit a post and remove it, using one of their combo buttons:

Unfortunately, in both Safari and Chrome (so WebKit, basically), their Javascript is broken. It fails, and then fails to clobber the event propagation, so the page reloads (as obviously, not being progressively enhanced, all their links are empty).

A cursory look in my console shows really basic errors like:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'addClassName' of null

or:

Uncaught TypeError: Property '$' of object [object DOMWindow] is not a function

Now, being the responsible developer I am, I write into them with a bug report (this is on January 29, almost 2 months ago):

Every time I click the “Edit | [down arrow]” button (the down arrow specifically), the page goes to a blank page. I assume this is because the JS is broken so you’re not cancelling the click event on the link. I’m using Safari 5.0.3 on Snow Leopard.

Not the most gracious email, I’m sure we can all agree, but then again this also seems like the kind of basic error that shouldn’t happen in the first place.

Yesterday, on March 20th (almost 2 months after submitting the error report), I get the following response from Posterous:

Hello Brad,

Should you still be experience the issue you emailed us about, try clearing safari’s cache and cookies and trying again, or using another browser.

Sorry for the delayed response,

Theodore

I mean, what? This is a fundamentally broken part of the site, and the best they can tell is is:

They haven’t tried verifying that the bug still exists (or even existed in the first place);
They certainly haven’t tried to fix it; and
Their solution is to clear everything or use another browser.

And I waited two months for that? As a professional developer it’s my educated opinion that the errors I describe above are easy to notice and probably easy to fix. And they can’t even be bothered checking them.

No thanks Posterous, I’ll be sticking where I am for now.

What I would have done

At Smarkets customer service is a part of our business that we take very seriously. I would have responded roughly as follows:

Reply within a day, telling the customer we’ll look into it, and apologise for the inconvenience they’re experiencing (note that this is mostly a form letter, and thus is very easy to reply with);
Work out if there’s actually a bug:
- If there is, file it, and schedule a fix; or
- If not, work out why the user is experiencing it anyway.
Reply to the user with either your explanation for what they might be doing wrong, and find out if they can give you more information; or
Tell them when they can expect a fix, as you’ve found the bug. Give them some kudos in the email for finding the bug for them.

At a startup, every customer is valuable and should be treated like they’re important and that their opinion matters. These are trivial things to get right, and prevent long-winded disgruntled blog posts like this.

czottmann: Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson enjoying the view:...

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:11:32 +0000

czottmann:

Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson enjoying the view: APOD: 2010 November 15 - Home from Above

It’s like something from a sci-fi movie. Absolutely amazing.

Generating an SSL certificate for testing

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:10:50 +0100

Generating an SSL certificate for testing:

As pointed out to me by Russ. He also points out that step 3 can be skipped completely by using -nodes instead of -des3 in step 1.

Issues mounting shared folders in VMWare Fusion 3

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 09:34:44 +0100

I recently took advantage of the VMWare 3 upgrade for only $9.99 USD, which has all gone well, except for one issue with /etc/fstab: it turns out that VMWare Fusion 3 tools doesn’t actually respect your mount settings, which means you lose all the permissions information contained therein.

There’s a solution to the mount problem here, which works perfectly after a reboot. I hope VMWare fixes this soon, though: it’s a pretty nasty bug.

Follow up to previous UX and Ryan Carson post

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:10:00 +0100

My previous post seems to have gotten the attention of Ryan himself. As Ryan mentions, I’m on Tumblr, which means no comments.

I invite Ryan to email me at brad at this domain with his comments (I also did on Twitter, but last time I checked he had blocked me) and I will publish them.

I’d also like to note that at the time of writing he has additionally blocked Tom Muller and Ben Darlow on Think Vitamin, so I wonder if he’s genuinely interested in dialogue at all.

See below for what I currently see when visiting Ryan’s most recent Tweet (or should I say “dialogue”?):

UX professional is a real role, and an important one

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:45:00 +0100

Over at ThinkVitamin, Ryan Carson has boldly declared that ‘UX Professional’ isn’t a Real Job. He lists a (relatively small) number of reasons for this, the primary being:

A web site or app should be the product of a Web Designer and a Web Developer…(a)nyone else who is added into this equation is a waste of money and time.

This seems a fairly limiting argument on the face of it, as his argument is clearly confined to small (perhaps 2 person, if we take his example literally) teams. He further clarifies his position in the comments:

Why would someone hire web designers [who are awesome at making a site look good…but horrible at making an interface usable]? That’s the point of the post. UX shouldn’t be an optional skill for web designers.

which would probably confirm to most people that this article is merely a linkbait article with a controversial title.

Now, I could leave it at that, but someone is wrong on the Internet, so I am compelled by duty to continue.

As someone who has certainly worked with many good user experience designers (my fiancée being one of them), I feel the need to weigh in with my own opinion. Be warned that this response may be condescending.

Much like the recent flame war over SEO specialists being “snake oil salesmen” etc., I can see how a small team, like Ryan’s, would not feel the need to hire in specialists. After all, when you’re building “web apps” (most of us professionals still call them “websites”, since that’s what they are) with the size and audience Carsonified’s sites usually get, you don’t really need to specialise, as a small team can, on the surface of things, achieve all that’s required for a four day buildout.

However, this is the same boneheaded planning that leads developers who have installed Rails for a personal blog to believe they won’t need a sysadmin, or the same developers to believe they won’t need a backend specialist to actually make their system scale (Twitter circa 2008 being a fantastic example of the latter). At some point and level of success, you’ll want people who are the best at their individual piece of the puzzle, be it: administering servers; optimising your site for discoverability (a nice way of saying SEO); keeping your RAM usage low; or designing a complex multi-form flow in a way that doesn’t haemorrage users through sheer boredom and depression. The latter is just one way a good user experience designer can help (for the others you want people of the beards and sandal variety).

Again, when working on simple sites, like a conference site, or an agency site (basically just structured content), you probably don’t need to get in a specialist. And whilst most of the UX professionals I know have come from a design background (the “web designer” Ryan mentions in his post), and they certainly fit his mould of “do-it-all designers”, I don’t think there’s room in a single person’s head to stay on top of all current research on user experience, much like there’s not really enough room in my head to understand 7 browsers with their quirks, and also understand how to optimise a message queue for high throughput. This is a simple human limitation, and I’m okay with that. I’d rather have a team of 7 specialists doing their piece than 5 generalists doing an 80% job.

Why? Because user experience is simply too important to not take into account, and to not have the best people working on it. Being a methodical, precise person who is happy to dig through reams of research and multi-variate testing doesn’t necessarily make for a good creative, so I’m perfectly happy to see them as separate people and roles. Yes, it’s nice to have people who are superstars at everything, but in real life this just doesn’t happen. As managers of teams we need to be realistic about this. And utimately that’s my problem—his idea simply isn’t realistic (leaving aside the fact that it’s an incredibly rude post to begin with).

Writing a post like this has simply shown up Ryan to be vastly less experienced in sizable and cutting edge web teams than he pretends, and should be a valuable lesson for any aspirants reading his blog: successful teams are made up of many people, and the bigger the team, the more specialised they need to be.

Update: Ben Darlow has also written up his opinion of the matter.

Update 2: Ryan has responded to me on Twitter, and I followed up.

Update 3 (yay, more): Andy Budd has written an excellent rebuttal to Ryan which includes a brief foray into the history of job titles on the web, and how UX fits into that scheme. I agree with pretty much everything he’s said.

Tom Watson MP, giving the Met some grief over the Coulson scandal

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:49:08 +0100

Tom Watson MP, giving the Met some grief over the Coulson scandal

Compromising Twitter's OAuth security system

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:05:35 +0100

Compromising Twitter's OAuth security system:

Well written and insightful Ars Technica article into OAuth, Twitter, and the issues Twitter is presenting to application developers via its OAuth implementation.

The Problem with Facebook's "Places"

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:50:32 +0100

The Problem with Facebook's "Places":

Here’s the thing about Facebook that really gets under my skin: They are slowly incorporating the features from every other independent web application on the internet. This is not inherently a problem—companies get bigger and they begin to have the resources to widen their feature set—the issue is that Facebook doesn’t do these features any better.

A few advanced Git tips

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:35:06 +0100

A few advanced Git tips:

Given the, shall we say, “quirks” of the Git documentation and interface, tips like these are pure gold.

I particularly like git checkout -t origin/feature and git push -u origin master, as feature branching is a large part of my work day.

An excellent Watchmen side story, by scans_daily.

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:35:48 +0100

An excellent Watchmen side story, by scans_daily.

marco: Given how well Jeff Bezos usually prioritizes reading...

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:13:02 +0100

marco:

Given how well Jeff Bezos usually prioritizes reading and legibility, why are his announcements on the Amazon frontpage always images of poorly rendered text?

In other news, I kind of want a new Kindle.

The story of "MVP Caribe", a baseball game mod for Latin America

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:20:17 +0100

The story of "MVP Caribe", a baseball game mod for Latin America:

I really love this story. It shows how good things can get on the Internet, with fans working together to provide a good product for a niche that big publishers ignore.

New York Jews modernising their religion and self expression.

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 11:06:21 +0100

New York Jews modernising their religion and self expression.

Pretty sure Tumblr’s directory listing isn’t supposed to look...

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:47:07 +0100

Pretty sure Tumblr’s directory listing isn’t supposed to look like this (Safari 5).

Web–based services I pay for

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:04:00 +0100

Inspired by Josh’s post, I’ve decided to list (and give a shout out to) the services on the web that I pay for.

MobileMe (£59/year) for computer, address book, and calendar synchronisation. I pay for MobileMe because I have 2 Macs (work, home) and an iPhone, and it’s by far the easiest way to keep them all synchronised. It’s a shame it costs so much, as I don’t use the email or website publishing aspects of it at all.
Tuffmail (about £5/month) for IMAP email. I was put onto Tuffmail by Drew. It’s a great service with fantastic spam protection, and since it’s a well–behaved IMAP service it functions much better with desktop apps than Gmail. I’m currently on the fence as to whether I’m going to go back to Google Apps for your domain for email and calendar. For the moment Tuffmail is great, though.
PRGMR ($48/year) for VPS hosting. I moved away from Slicehost a few months back because I wanted to downscale my hosting costs. PRGMR have been great so far, really solid, and the price is certainly right.
Amazon Web Services (about £0.03/month) for S3 and CloudFront. I host static assets and some other backup type things there. It’s clearly the cheapest thing on my expenses list.
Flickr ($25/year) for photo hosting. I’m sure everyone knows what Flickr is by now.
Last.fm ($36/year). I like Last.fm and what they do, as well as using their service a lot, so I think it’s worth paying for.

Things I used to pay for

GitHub. I stopped this because I now host my own private Git repos.
Slicehost for VPS hosting. See above.

Finally, I’d like to mention Dropbox. As a service I think Dropbox is absolutely best of breed—it’s hands down the smoothest, slickest, and most tightly integrated web/desktop hybrid I’ve ever used. I don’t actually pay for it as I don’t have a requirement for their lowest plan yet, but if I did I’d pay it without thinking. Fantastic service (I have a referral link, too), cannot recommend it highly enough. I wish MobileMe was as slick as Dropbox.