“Oh, that’s not my job,” is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed. It’s the magic inflection point when a company becomes too big (even if only psychologically) for any single employee to give a rat’s ass about job numero uno: Making shit work.

The sentiment expressed in the blog post rings true to me, but obviously not to many of the commentators on the blog who are way off base. This is more about attitude rather than an expectation that the accountant will pitch in and write code if development is behind schedule. Accountants, as a general rule, don’t know how to code. But they can probably do testing or assist the actual coders in some other way that helps speed things up. It’s about a willingness to contribute your efforts, outside of your domain, if necessary, for the greater good of the company — rather than building a little fort around yourself and doing your utmost to ignore anything that you don’t think is your job.

Default Page setting in Google Analytics

After a little digging we discovered that a few years ago when all URLs on our site used the .html extension we had elected to use the ‘Default page’ option in Google Analytics (your domain > Profile Settings > Default page). Here we had specified index.html as that was the default page at the time. Since then we’ve moved on to using WordPress as a CMS for our site and so the default page is now index.php.

This setting is entirely optional. It’s purpose is to remove duplicate entries in Google Analytics for pages that can be shown from URLs that do and don’t include the trailing index.html or index.php. For example, http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.php point to the same content, but when linked to, will show up as different links in Google Analytics unless you have specified that index.php is the default page.

More information from Google here:

‘/’ and ‘/index.html’ Tracked Separately

Microsoft’s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group (SMSG) may be putting in place a policy to prevent employees from using corporate funds to buy Macs and iPads.

Based on an alleged internal e-mail passed on to me by one of my contacts, this edict just came down last week. SMSG encompasses 46,000 Microsoft employees worldwide, according to a Microsoft Careers page about the group, and includes Microsoft’s front-line consumer and business sales, service and support people.

Policies like this aren’t great for several reasons.

1. Your own employees aren’t voluntarily using your products, why not? Banning them from using non-company products for company work just masks the issue and doesn’t give you an answer to the why question and thus doesn’t give you a chance to improve your offerings.
2. If employees don’t like company products enough to use them over a competitors similar products, maybe they aren’t the best people to have working in your sales and marketing departments. Can you imagine an Apple employee using a ThinkPad with Windows 7 installed over a Macbook Pro with OS X Lion because they thought it was better? No, me neither. They’d be chased out of the building with pitch forks before they had time to enter in their login details.
3. It is bad for internal morale and makes you look like a loser to the outside world. Companies that effectively have to ban employees from using a competitors products are doing something wrong.

I get the shakes when I think about going back to using an email client like Outlook instead of Google Apps. Connecting to the mail server wasn’t fun even when the mail server was located in the same room, but when you were travelling overseas and connecting to the mail server via a VPN it was simply an awful experience and frequently unusable.

Now with Google Apps I can connect to my email from whichever device I’m using with an Internet or 3G/4G connection. It’s seamless and I have 15 GB of emails within a few seconds reach. It’s hard to beat that.

SaaS products aren’t for everyone and they don’t work for every product, but in 2011 you really shouldn’t need the *benefits* of SaaS products explained to you. You can decide that they aren’t for you because of the lack of control and privacy concerns, but the actual benefits of these products to people who are more relaxed about the loss of control and privacy should be pretty clear.

URL ‘https://example.com/development’ of existing directory ‘c:\example\development’ does not match expected URL ‘https://example.com/development’

This error was the result of some playing around I did with setting up SVN on a different machine and using uppercase letters instead of all lowercase when I was importing the repository onto my new machine.

Windows does not let you have two folders in the same directory with the same name even if they do not use the same case letter case, but Linux does and because SVN is cross-platform compatible it needs to keep this in mind.

So if you somehow get into a situation where you have two URLs, one which includes uppercase characters and one that does not, then you could run into the above issue.

The way to fix this is to right-click on your repository and select “TortoiseSVN > Repo-browser” navigate to the problem folder and ensure that there is not two duplicate folders there. If there is a duplicate folder then you will need to remove once of them from your repository.

I’m using VirtualBox to create multiple virtual machines that I can use on my computer. All of these VM’s will be quite similar, but used for different purposes. One might be for web development, the other might be for games and the other might be for smart phone apps development. It’s one way of ensuring that my primary machine does not get cluttered and slowed down by a gazillion different applications and services running in the background.

One minor issue that I can into was cloning a VDI in VirtualBox. Simply copying and pasting the relevant files in Windows Explorer does not work, as each hard disk must have a unique UUID — copy/paste duplicates the unique UUID and so you can’t add the duplicated HD into the VirtualBox Manager as it conflicts with the original HD.

So you need to power up the Command Prompt and use the VBoxManage command with the clonevdi command option.

1. Open the Command Prompt
2. Move to the directory which contains the VBoxManage.exe file, possibly at this location: C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox
3. Type in this command and press Enter: VBoxManage clonevdi “<path>\original.vdi” “<path>\cloned.vdi”

That’s it. The cloning process should begin. Now go get yourself a coffee, if the VDI is large it’ll take a little while to clone.

I was about to build my own comment blocker extension for Chrome, but luckily I cam across an existing extension, CommentBlocker, which does everything I need it to.

There is a version for Firefox too.

Ahhhh, that feels better.

If this seems like a lot of jibba-jabba, well, that’s because remote development is hard. It takes discipline to make it all work, certainly more discipline than piling a bunch of programmers into the same cubicle farm. But when you imagine what this kind of intellectual work — not just programming, but anything where you’re working in mostly thought-stuff — will be like in ten, twenty, even thirty years … don’t you think it will look a lot like what happens every day right now on Stack Overflow? That is, a programmer in Brazil helping a programmer in New Jersey solve a problem?

The house sold for $1 million at auction on Saturday, almost double the $533,000 its owners paid just five years ago and more than four times the $218,000 it sold for in 1996.

The housing market in Australia escaped the worst of the Global Financial Crisis, but it is hard to imagine that we’ll be that lucky forever — with such inflated housing prices, how can mere mortals possibly expect to be able to pay back such huge loans within 30 odd years?

In Stack Exchange 1.0 you could pay them a monthly fee to setup your own Stack Exchange site, on your own domain, and you were free to use it for whatever you liked.

In Stack Exchange 2.0 you no longer have to pay them a monthly fee (hurrah!) but you can’t use it for whatever you like (doh!). SE 2.0 will follow the StackOverflow.com, ServerFault.com and SuperUser.com path of being owned, maintained and monetized by the Stack Overflow crew. Oh sure, all of the content is licensed under Creative Commons, but the actual platform will no longer be licensed to or administered by third parties.

So, what’s free about this? Well, the content is free I suppose — in that, it’s licensed under Creative Commons, and the Stack Overflow team will not claim ownership of it. And you’re free to suggest new Stack Exchange sites, but you’ll need to go through a rigorous and drawn out vetting process — at the end of which, even if you’re successful, you won’t own anything.

So in short: Stack Exchange 2.0 is not free. Sure, you have the freedom to participate in sites that use the platform, and you have the freedom to suggest new ideas for sites, but you do not have the freedom to create your own site and determine its direction, like you did in Stack Exchange 1.0.