All About Me

URL Shortening

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:59:00 +0000

I’ve been watching the success of Twitter for a number of years now, it’s amazing viral success in communication and great fun if you follow good citizens of the Twittersphere.

However we’ve all watch the problem emerge when sharing a URL. Twitter’s SMS support designed into the conversation means the message can be transmitted over the SMS network but it limited to the 160 characters we come to know and ‘love’. Twitter keeps 20 characters back for the Twitter username.

And, as all Twitters know this limit means sharing a link to a page can result in the link being parsed through a shortening service.

Many people have blogged about the longer term effect this has on the intrinsic hypertext linkage between pages. I posted a few comments on FriendFeed on this, I read a post from Dave Winer, “Enough with shortened URL’s”, Jeff Atwood also discussed this on “URL Shorteners: Destroying the web since 2002”. Dave and Jeff’s posts are good.

Each of these concludes with these broad problem summary:

What happens when the URL shortening service dies?
How do we know we trust the URL shortening service? What if it’s hacked and we are taken to lovely virus ridden pages (wait for this to reach the news, it’s coming someday soon)?
How does short linking affect Google Pagerank longer term?

And come to a similar conclusion; Twitter should have brought this feature into Twitter to solve the problem the platform introduced.

I’d agree here, Twitter introduced this problem, Twitter should solve it. But the problem here is the trend is actually expanding, Facebook is available via the SMS gateway too.

In Jeff’s post, he suggests that the big search engines provide this service:

Personally, I'd prefer to see the big, objective search engines who naturally sit at the centre of the web offer their own URL shortening services. Who better to generate short hashes of every possible URL than the companies who already have cached copies of every URL on the internet, anyway?

I think this is an entirely plausible approach and one which would seem to sit well within their domain.

We should likely all agree there is a trend toward more mobile users with more powerful mobile devices. Typically mobile phones, they have the SMS gateway service built in right there to receive the shortened URL. And with the browser experience improving on mobile phones through the iPhone Safari experience and the Opera mobile browser, we are likely to see this trend continue, more and more usage of SMS.

I see several proposals to solve some of the problem:

Each of the approaches needs a change both on the host pages and a service to resolve the address. I don’t think we can get away from this.

Personally I think the problem can be solve in another slightly more universal way without bias toward company profit or profile. And I think it can be done while maintaining a way to pull in all the legacy shortened URL’s and preserve the historical page linkage over time.

I use OpenDNS’s service to resolve DNS in place of my own ISP’s. It is because OpenDNS is faster, more customisable and slightly more robust in protecting me and my family from bad URL’s.

In OpenDNS exists a feature where a user can enter their own shortened URL and tell OpenDNS what to resolve this to.

Now this strikes me as a great little feature. Using this service, I can setup my own little shortcuts, point my desktops and servers at home to resolve using the OpenDNS service (in fact just via my single router at home), and bingo all the users at home can type ‘mail’ into the browser address bar and have OpenDNS resolve this to http://mail.google.com.

Brilliant.

Now my proposal is simply an extension on this.

Why can’t we have a similar service to OpenDNS where the shortened URL comes from OpenDNS storing the resolution and providing the shortcut. OpenDNS can replicate this shortened URL if you decided to ‘share’ the URL, public voting on the safety of the URL can help to ensure the public URL’s are valid and safe. Enough bad reports and the link can be blacklisted on the service.

DNS supports replication of such resolution data, so why can’t the service be extended to support this feature?

The problems I see with this, which I am fairly sure are solvable are:

Can DNS cope with the increase in traffic? (hint, I think yes, because DNS is cacheable and distributed)
Can blacklisting work? (again, yes. Look how successful public voting is on StackOverflow.com against articles, or PhishTank.com. Can we have public voting on URL’s safety. Enough upvotes and the URL is set in stone)
Will the URL’s decay over time? I think we should be able to look at DNS removing these short URL’s when the domain disappears, so yes they should decay over time
How do we solve incorrectly entered URL’s? I don’t think we have to bother, just generate the correct one again.

I don’t have the network of contacts to make this happen, or the technical background in the guts of DNS, but I certainly think this requires less work and is more Internet friendly than relying on a search provider to maintain this type of service.

If Google takes up this task, we end up in a place where Google holds all the keys to the web. And that’s not good for the long term Internet survival.

The entirely Internet is essentially one click away from a Google search result. The effects of Google failing at this stage are very, very bad.

Imagine how much worse it would be if Google failed and took with it all of the links on all of the pages on the Internet…

At least with this approach we are left with a distributed open network of linkage which we can work with and should outlast any single commercial company.

So, over to the smart folk who can make this stuff work.

What do we need to do to make this happen?

(you should follow me here on Twitter)

Internet Connection Woes

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:30:00 +0000

We've been with the same ISP for a good 8 years because the service has been great, it's an award winning service.

But my award winning service is broken, sort of limps along slowly. I have the IT disease meaning I cannot call another person in IT without trying things myself first, some call it passion, I think it's a disease...

So like a mechanic listening to a finely tuned engine, I set to work playing with the thing, trying to uncover a problem. But to no avail. Tried the whole box of tricks I could think of...

I reluctantly accept defect (only took me 3 months to admit defeat) and call technical support.

If you've ever worked in a helpdesk or support scenario you will know the routine; we all replay this joke over and over:

Caller: Hi there, I have a problem with X. Can you help me?
Support: Sure sir, let me run through a few basic checks.
Caller: OK
Support: Switch it all off, wait 5 mins, then turn it on again.
(5 mins pass)
Caller: OK. The problem is still there
Support: OK, are you connected directly to the modem?
Caller: No, via wireless
Support: OK, can you connect directly to the modem?
Caller: OK, but this is gonna take me 10 minutes to move stuff. Is there something else I can try?
Support: (pauses). Yep, we can try restarting your PC.
Caller: Sure, but I just turned it on before this call.
Support: I understand, but can we try this to make sure?
Caller: OK
(5 mins pass).

You get the idea.

My call went pretty much the same with my Internet Provider, the usual ritual dance of the helpdesk call.

Even although I know more than enough to get by with networks, it's hard to convince anyone with a script in front of you to set the script aside and listen to the customer. 1 hour into this call, I wanted to reach for the fast forward button!

This is where I reach the point that I wish proper customer relationship management software could actually build a profile of what the customer seems to know - i.e. this one actually works in IT, and actually shows he knows what he's doing. But alas no, I'm in with the herd...

Or what about a proper professional body and calling card we could all share declaring "this person isn't too much of a numpty, they know what they are doing so let's cut to the chase and help them!"

Anyway, light at last! A further 30 minutes later I finally reach the real engineers, the ones who actually wrote the helpdesk scripts to protect themselves from the great unwashed. They are the guys in jeans and t-shirt who work outside the call centre and don't have such scripts and are protected from annoying calls, these are my sort of engineers that can actually solve the issue.

They listen first and try to understand what's happening.

You can guess what happened. I provided my MAC address, he took a look and BAM took 3 minutes to pin point the problem. It's at this point I learn there is a poor signal to noise ratio on the line - "dud router mate, we'll get a new one sent to you to solve it".

"Brilliant, thanks!" says me.

So the long point of this is this: shouldn't IT membership carry some sort of benefits in these scenarios? Or at the very least, IT folk agree some secret handshake to help us identify each other in today's society?

Perhaps I'm being naive. They do after all make money from my call...

And to top this off, guess what? Another 3 months on and the Internet connection is back to a crawl... Grr!

(follow me on Twitter)

7 Things

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:05:00 +0000

Thanks Lorna for tagging me! Honestly, I really like it!

Now the idea here is to write up 7 things that people didn't know about you.

My full name is Andrew Mark Aitken. I'm known as Mark because my grandfather was known as Andrew and hollering the same name would have caused confusion. I can't tell you the amount of times I'm asked why I'm called Mark instead of Andrew. And it seems to be a family tradition, my Dad is 'Thomas Russell Aitken', known as Thomas. Weird...
I used to work as a delivery van driver for my Dad's company. I think I spent around a year delivering in Glasgow, and through fate landed my first job in IT delivering to a company. I handed my CV in to the company and was awarded my first job on a helpdesk! Was one of the best times in my career - learning about development as the Internet emerged to what it has now become! Without that chance meeting, I wouldn't have gotten into IT at that stage, might have been later. And only after working for 5 years in IT did I go back to get a degree in Computer Science (which I achieved with Distinction!).
I have two sisters. Laura (32) and Hollie (18). Laura lives in Maybole, Hollie just moved to Glasgow recently. Hollie blames me for her interest in IT, she is an avid game player and has an interest in programming to boot.
I'm a frustrated architect. I discovered technical drawing at the age of 13 and loved it. Only when I went on work experience and saw one guy produce 20 drawings which looked identical that the client rejected did I realise that I didn't want to spend my life pushing a pencil over paper like that.
I have a dreadful memory! In fact it might be an attention thing too. I need to keep lists with me at all times and rely on my organiser more than the air I breathe to get things done! As a result, I'm fanatical about keeping to do lists for things. If it's not written down, I simply can't remember to do it.
I'm the worst kind of geek. I can't stand to not understand something. This is my major downfall when it comes to actually delivering stuff - I just love pulling things apart! My worst accident was with my car, tool the cylinder head off to learn more and couldn't get it put together again. Cost me a few quid to get someone to come help me... Means I have a constant battle to stick to my to do lists and try to avoid delving into interesting things as they appear! On the plus side, it's also the thing that drives me to learn new things!
I used to play guitar avidly but let it slip to the side when my time became more occupied with my 3 kids. I have an absolutely stunning acoustic guitar from my Dad from my 30th birthday which I'm ashamed to admit spends too many evenings in the guitar bag.

So now the tricky part. I have to tag seven people, but can only think of 5 who might actually respond. They are:

Simon Davies, Vince Naylor, Chris Reid, Douglas Lindsay, Justin Atkins.

The unlinked guy don't have blogs.

For these people, they need to follow these rules:

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Happy writing!

(follow me on Twitter)

The New Interview Platform

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:17:00 +0000

I've written in the past about interviewing, on how to present yourself well to others in these situations.

What might not be obvious though, and something I entirely bypassed in my discussion, is that you are always being interviewed.

Think for a moment. How many of us take part in social networks in some way be it Flickr, Facebook, Google searching (trust me, this feature is coming someday), IM chats via Google Talk or MSN Messenger. We all project a digital personality which search engines find and present to those who want to find out more information.

I've done a search for a few friends, and the engines turn up more and more detail on older and older material from them. Not all of it is what I'd tend to call 'interview material', some is just plain filler and crap but thankfully so far none of it is damaging to their reputation.

Even the questions they are asking are part of the search result fabric with sites such as Stack Overflow presenting itself to Google for indexing.

But I think this is all great stuff for a few reasons!

If you are good and use the tools as you should us them, i.e. the web, then you leave a digital trail showing how you used the web asking questions and hopefully too how you contributed to the web.
If you are bad, you either won't have an online presence, or what you do have online will show you haven't really scratched the surface of the thing you are being interviewed to do.

Someone wrote 'try to be an expert in your field'. This makes sense since the footprint you leave will be more impressive and deeper.

I'd say this works for a large percentage of programmers and professionals out there, only a few are awkward like me and refuse to focus on just one field.

However my advice overall is simple - Live by your values - if you believe in something, tell it from the heart, always. This way, you won't even have to write a resume...

(follow me on Twitter)

Google Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:51:00 +0000

I've been sort of roped slightly into doing a site for someone and have been looking at several options.

Only recently started playing with Google Sites expecting it would be fairly good, but on reflection I'm quite impressed at what you can do with it.

Immediately, I should mention that I expect to shape the site, deliver it and handover the day to day publishing since I don't much fancy being a glorified typist.

So the Google offering allows me to:

Create a site in moments. Really, it is that simple.
Create forms to capture input. This works pretty well, data is captured to a Google spreadsheet
Create a photo slideshow from a Picasa album
Setup page links and hierarchical structures
Secure the site
Host comments and attachments
Other things, go Google for yourself.

I'm no stranger to web development. I recognise that Google have limited the features more advanced users may want. So I can't for example use iFrame's, JavaScript and a bunch of other things. This makes site mashups tricky if not impossible, a shame in the 2.0 world... It's a tradeoff though.

But the elegance of the product really leaves me wondering if it's not just perfect for my needs. It's just so darned quick to throw up posts and alter basic content, and after all content is king right?

What do you think?

Would you use it?

Have you created a site for someone else less technical than you to then take over and publish to?

What did you use?

(follow me on Twitter)

Back It Up

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:11:00 +0000

So the home Windows computer now has over a 1TB of storage. How did that happen? Perhaps less important is how, more important how to back up all this data safely!

We have around 8 years of pictures, 10 years of my music collection, 15 years of files I've scanned or documents I've typed up, all my contacts I know, all my emails, licence details for software I own (you get the idea, lots of digital stuff).

Backups are traditionally very painful to do. People either think they are too complicated, think they take too long to run, or think they are too expensive to do.

I wanted the least pain to make sure backups happen, so here's what I use. Hope this helps convince you to do similar.

Buy an external hard drive and install this making sure both it and your PC use USB2.0 for speed. I picked up some 750Gb for around £50. Just make sure this is big enough for all the things you want to backup.
Download and install a copy of Microsoft's SyncToy 2.0, it's free
Create a folder pair. There are options when creating the pairs, but essentially you are telling SyncToy "I want you to copy this source folder (left folder in the screenshot) to the destination folder (right folder in the screenshot).
Run the sync.

What's pretty smart here is SyncToy takes care of the delta process. That is, if a file changes in the left folder, the right is updated by SyncToy. If a file is deleted on the left folder, the right can (optionally) remove it too.

The initial sync can take ages depending on the size of the left folder and the speed of the drive and connection between your PC and drive.

Within the Help menu is a helpful (odd that) description of how to schedule this process so your folder pairs are automatically synchronised. Means you don't have to concern yourself with remembering to run backups.

You have no excuses now. Don't come crying to me when it all hits the fan...

I'm interested to know, does anyone do anything else from this? Anyone backing up to the Internet, how and at what cost / speed?

(In fact, small lies above. I have a second internal drive and an external drive. I prefer to schedule the backup to the internal drive to happen weekly, and run the backup to the external drive every month storing the drive out of the house for safe keeping).

Old Acquaintances

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:20:00 +0000

Feeling a tad misty-eyed today. It would have been the 40th birthday of an ex-colleague and friend, Michael Roser. Mike was unfortunately in a fatal road accident earlier this year.

Just wanted to mark the event by writing a few short things about him and my memory of him, hope you don't mind reading them.

He was a slightly quiet, slightly grumpy bugger, but certainly a smart one. Very warm natured and close friend to those who stuck around long enough to see past his occasional scowl.

Always pushing himself, always challenging things, always learning, always sharing, always amazing. This shone through in his physical training he took part in, his technical work, his conversation about software and other things, his diverse interests (making wrist watches being one!), in fact nearly everywhere.

I always left with the impression that Mike's life was a huge training exercise to prepare him for something immense. And when it came, boy would he be prepared!

Sorry you left so soon mate. Far too soon for my liking.

Like A Hole In The Head

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:41:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I had a lot of time on my hands, most kids do. I chose to spend a fair whack of it playing games on the Commodore 64, the Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga, Megadrive, Saturn, etc...

i.e. I played a hell of a lot of games.

One of my friends who I played games with in those days recently said he didn't think he'd be alive when a game as good as GT4 came out (yes, GT5 looks better).

However, I've just finished looking at footage for GRID for the PC.

Take a look at this video if you can
http://uk.gamespot.com/video/939158/6191707/grid-crash-damage-engine-demonstration

For me, I was always aware the graphics side would reach these levels, and clearly will continue to improve. But the physics engine that demo shows just looks utterly stunning.

So, do I need another game on my list of things to play? No more than a hole in the head.

But it's still utterly stunning what developers can achieve these days.

(yes, probably will end up getting this, looks far too nice to miss out on).

Delicious shared items

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:34:00 +0000

For anyone who follows my del.icio.us links via the RSS feed from this blog, I've decided to move these off of the RSS feed here onto a separate feed.

Subscribe to my shared items (including del.icio.us shares) on http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarkAitkensSharedItems

Will splice in more shared items in there when I get time.

iPhone 3G - worth it?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 23:25:00 +0000

I'm a sucker for gadgets, and the new iPhone is very tempting...

Look at the features at a glance
- 3G connection
- Stunning touch screen UI
- Google maps
- Unlimited data (with reasonable usage of course)
- TV Out support
- iPod feature
- etc...

I won't even try to replicate the list, Apple already did that.

There are obviously a few niggles, but most I think people could live with.

So I'm again debating do I need these features?

The answer is a definite yes, of course I do. That's precisely what Apple marketing makes me feel, and there is no doubt that Apple's marketing is first rate. We all live in a connected world and all want access to information when we need it at our convenience.

It's the lifestyle thing, isn't it? Don't you just want to be the person to be seen using the most up to date phone with all that connectivity to the world?

I thought I did...

After the 18 month contract, with the 16gb model and the £35 per month package, it's a cost of £789.00. That's without taking out insurance, or itemised billing, or anything else I've not included.

That's a hell of a lot of money for anything, isn't it?

My car probably costs me around that per year in depreciation, and I'd consider that to be a reasonably big expense. Hell, I could buy a superb new computer for that, or an amazing flat screen, or a holiday for crying out loud!

So my reluctant conclusion at the moment has to be that I'd need to be off my rocker to think I REALLY needed that sort of device at that particular cost. I just can't see past the cost at the moment but fawn over the thought of the features you can have!

What do you think? Is the iPhone worth the cost? If you are considering it, how are you justifying the cost to yourself?

Todo Lists for the web

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:12:00 +0000

I've been playing around with the Vitalist service. It offers an on-line todo set of pages.

My first impressions were poorer. I wasn't impressed with the garish colours and without really studying it sort of dismissed it out of hand.

However, taking another look at it, they offer:

- Mail / SMS you your reminders
- Integrate with Google calendar / RSS readers
- Simple UI
- i.e. basics for GTD

The only fly in the ointment for me? I can't get the todo list onto my copy of Outlook.

Perhaps it's time to leave the notion of sync everything behind and start down the 3G route with on-line access to my data / integration with SMS etc...

However worth a look if you are into stuff like this.

OpenID

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:57:00 +0000

I never realised this, but blogger, or blogspot, support OpenID.

If you also have a Blogspot account, you also have an OpenID. It's the URL of your homepage.

i.e. mine is http://markaitken.blogspot.com

See http://openid.net/get/ for a list of supported services.

Very smart!

Why Is It Hard To Work In Large Companies?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:04:00 +0000

I've noticed that lately my motivation for work has dropped away a little. We've recently had a new bundle of joy, Emily, who being the 3rd kiddo means home life is very much about keeping on top of the cleaning, playing with the kids, etc. I'd previously wondered if this is partly the cause.

But Emily is now 8 months old, and I still feel a degree of apathy, so what is the cause?

I've come to suspect the more likely candidate is work.

You see, I used to work in a small(ish) software house with around 130 staff, I think I knew around 80 of these guys at the time I left. Since leaving this, I've started in a company with 40'000 staff. That's a lot of people, a lot of voices and opinions.

Now that I have perspective, I see that there was a really good community there. People talked from time to time, people challenged things, we worked toward a common set of goals, delivery of a package to our customers and potential customers.

I think that now in such a large environment, these voices may be too small to be heard. That means you don't get to meet others with the same goals as you or the same problems. I put my apathy down to a lack of community in my workplace.

I think a lot of the best IT staff do their best work when they have a community to participate in because they are engaged with others and challenges at an ability level without fear of recrimination or career damage. Simply put, you need to swim with the same fish to be part of the school.

What do I mean by a community?

I believe a community is a group of like minded people with common goals who want to help each other achieve their group goals for mutual benefit. Sometimes it can be knowledge shared, contacts shared. Sometimes it can be shared problem solving.

Now, work in a big company and that horrible factor of politics starts to play up. It's hard to be sure if someone is trying to prove themselves to others, trying to shift out of the way of a bullet, and so on. Too many people are in it for the money.

I think the community is one of the unspoken requirements for the best development to exist. Without it, people's views are not challenged or questioned and people find it harder to seek to learn.

And that's quite sad I think...

I'm left pondering how you create a community when,

a) you don't have a project or budget or authority to create one

b) creating such a community would assume you all have clear goals, rarely the case in very large groups of people

c) the community needs members to take a small risk and offer help to their detriment (perhaps they need to use some of their own time to do something).

So my challenge is to understand how to create such a community in a larger organisation when the focus is only on projects, delivery and milestones.

I'm inspired by the material out there on agile methods. It is clear to me that this approach works best for software development.

I feel at the moment that I have to sort out the community I work in before I can really get my learning back on track properly.

Does this strike a chord with you, and if so what do you think the right way is to tackle the problem?

Hardy Heron

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:16:00 +0000

Downloaded Ubuntu tonight, the latest build Hardy Heron.

Installation was so very simple you could knock me down with a feather... Wireless connection was up and running first time round. Left me feeling quite amazed to be honest at how straightforward setup could be.

When did Linux get this simple, and so complete?

Gonna make a point of trying to use Linux day to day at home and see if I can swap over to it. The commercial games aspect is the only real reason I can see at the moment to keep on Windows...

Otherwise it's all in there off the bat with no hard work :-)

Try saying that with Vista...

Far and wide

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:05:00 +0000

Make sure that if you work in IT you don't focus on just one aspect of your skills.

Strive for a balance of the following:

Can code in at least 3 languages
Knows about OO concepts, or other similar design abstracts
Knows how to write SQL (the main language for data)
Knows how to write and manage requirements (suggests a good understanding of English and communication)
Knows something about how networks work (nobody creates islands anymore)
Can present their material one on one or to a crowd without belittling them

Covering these general bases makes you stand out from the crowd.

Google = Smart, but a little too subtle...

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0000

I've started using Google's mail service lately to aggregate all my mail.

I'm past the debate of whether I trust Google with my data or not simply because if something is important to me I'll store it offline and online. A key challenge for Google is earning and keeping your trust, I reckon the millions they spend trying to retain my trust will be more investment than I'm ever likely to make against my personal data. However that's another debate...

The aggregation feature is very useful to me. One site, all my mail, any PC. Very smart.. However I missed some of the useful features within Outlook that I used to quickly manage mail.

In Outlook from the main view you can select a mail item with the mouse, then hold down SHIFT, select a mail somewhere below it and release SHIFT. This selects the two mails you selected and all the mails inbetween. Very useful in clearing out dead mails I know I don't want.

Google employs a tickbox against the mail.
The subtle part I just stumbled upon... Google has implemented a client side script to mock this behaviour. Select a mail with the tickbox, hold down SHIFT and select another mail far below it. All the mails inbetween are selected!

Very smart, very useful, but a shame that it's not more obvious. Well done Google!

Now, the only problem left to solve is that age old chestnut of having passwords. Need to get rid of them, they are a fantastic security hole for the Google strategy.

FriendFeed

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:47:00 +0000

Some of you I've noticed are using Twitter with some success. I've noticed a few other sites push toward FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a social aggregation tool, does a very good job of pulling together all of the social feeds from quite a few sources (Picasa, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Facebook, YouTube, BlogSpot and more).

The very nice part about it is you are subscribing to me without actually knowing what services I use. However FriendFeed aggregates the things I do and puts them into an RSS feed / page you can keep up to date with.

I've used it to tag a few services I use and have created a profile for you to also tag and watch if you want. From that, you can separately drill into the social sites I use.

Well worth a look if you want to follow someone or be followed.

Orb Streaming

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:13:00 +0000

I found TVersity was lacking in terms of it's ability to keep running. The service crashed on my PC and seemed to take longer than I'd expect to stream films.

The actual quality of the films wasn't too hot either, but certainly considering the software was free I had zero expectation so wasn't really disappointed.

I stumbled upon another package name Orb. Their site does a good job of explaining what the software does, but in a nutshell:

Your PC securely broadcasts it's presence to the Orb site.
Via the Orb site, you can browse music, photos, videos located on your home PC
Supports the Wii, iPhone, Smartphones, etc.. Most UPMP's
Allows you to access ALL your files on your PC
Allows you to upload to your PC

Pretty good features for free software.

I found the media streaming quality to be really good and the features suitable to my need.

One really neat feature. There are a bunch of links to Flash games suitable for playing on the Wii. All the games are free, so basically I just found a bunch of free games. Most are poor, but a few are pretty good.

I realised while playing with this stuff that my home PC is woefully underpowered. It's time to upgrade... Maybe TVersity will run better with new kit?

Maybe? I? Could? get a TV card too to watch streaming Internet television stations on my regular TV in the front room?

Clever Brain Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:04:00 +0000

Clever Brain Stuff from Cambridge University .

O lny srmat poelpe can raed this.
I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdr nig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the rgh it pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?! Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! If you can raed th is psas it on !!

Appealed to me...

TVersity - Wii Streaming

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:39:00 +0000

I mentioned that I had started to look at streaming video from my PC to the Nintendo Wii in an earlier post.

Well I downloaded TVersity, installed and played around a bit with it. I also needed to download the Opera browser for the Wii, cost around £3.50 from the Wii Shopping channel.

After around an hour of installing and faffing around, I managed to get select media on my PC showing on the Wii. I had an AVI file of the short series Hogfather on the PC, selecting it on the Wii was a simply matter of browsing a web server running on the PC.

The web server hides behind it the TVersity magic which is a flash encoder. This software reads a file on your PC, uses DirectShow (I think) to then re-encode the file into a flash based stream (like YouTube). The result is the ability to open any file from the PC for which you have a codec and set it up suitable for viewing in a simple open format.

TVersity is free, so really this all seemed to be too good to be true... and I found out it might be.

There are a few problems which prevent me actually using this to watch movies.

1. Something is causing the videos to stutter around 5/10 minutes into them. It may simply be that my PC is too slow or is running something which soaks up the bandwidth.
2. It's a real pain not to be able to fast forward a film. I tend to shut down the PC at night which means the encode process needs to start again. You can't fast forward into non-encoded video.
3. The actual frame rate is very similar to YouTube quality video. I'm finding it very painful to try to watch at 15 frames per second with all the real detail knocked out of the videos.

I probably have very unrealistic expectations of the setup given TVersity costs zilch.

The answer I think will be to upgrade the home PC. It's a lowly Athlon64 3Ghz wit 1Gb memory. Quad core seems the way to go here or really fast dual core.

So my adventures have paused for the moment until we get around to that job.

Meantime the setup does have a few nice tricks which I'll still make good use of.

- I can listen to my music in the living room by streaming it to the Wii. The sound quality is very good.
- Using the Wii browser I get a good experience browsing the web. Handy if the main PC is in use.
- The setup seems to cope OK with using TVersity to recode some of the videocasts I watch. Seeing these on the television from the sofa instead of a smaller monitor at the PC is a delight. Particularly for the ones which last a good hour (i.e. PodTech and Channel9 videos).

I'm also not abandoning hope that there is another method to do this. Maybe Nintendo will support AVI's and USB storage devices? Time to go Google...

Wii Stream

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:48:00 +0000

We were lucky enough to receive a Nintendo Wii this Christmas. Suffice to say Boxing day clocked up around 9 hours of gaming when my family got together on Boxing day.

I'm a terrible geek when it comes to new things. When I first got my PSP, within a week I'd managed to get an emulator on there running megadrive games, custom web browers, SNES games and more. I cannot help myself!

And now that I'm back home and the holidays are done, I turn my attention to the Wii. It may not be the most powerful new kid on the block, but there is a fair bit of oomph in there.

My interest is in playing movies through it.

A friend at work pointed me toward http://www.tversity.com/. There is a media encoder which encodes videos to flash on the fly and streams them to a web browser. Since you can download Opera for the Wii (500 points I believe), it is possible to use this combo to pull movies, music, pictures, etc all through this package.

Best of all TVersity is free (they accept donations).

So guess what I'm doing this weekend in any spare time I can find...

Any advice appreciated from other Wii Streamers out there ;-)

What they say and what they mean

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:40:00 +0000

Long Long Ago, I Made A Promise. I said that I'd get around to writing down what I thought interviewers said and what they actually mean.

Since that post, we've had a new baby. Getting ready for that took a lot of focus off the blog and consequently this post was not written...

... until now!

Now I know you can pick up a book and read lots of this stuff already, and I absolutely implore you to do that if you have time. For those of you who don't have time, here is my quick summary of what I think interviewers might be angling toward.

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Recognise that if you are unprepared for this, then there is no limit to how much rope you have in hand to hang yourself with. Don't adlib this one.

The question seeks to find out how you see yourself, how you think others see you, how you handle critisism and also importantly what your goals are (if indeed you have any).

To prepare for this consider your goal. Why are you taking the interview? What is the role you want.

With this in mind, think about what you have to get you there and what holds you back. Then think about how you and your employer can close those gaps holding you back (training, mentoring, University, experience).

Explain how these then fit into the job description on offer and make sure to use some of the terms in their job ad. It will help it ring true in their minds.

Mostly, keep this concise and well polished. It shows a massive commitment toward the company and demonstrates you are willing to put some effort into the interview (which shows respect of the organisation).

When have you done more of you than is required?

There are two types of employees in most places. The 9-5 guys (go home, switch off, do something else), and the rest of them (toss problems in their head, etc).

The key point here is to demonstrate that you did something not expected by your employer. For example, did a degree on my own part-time, solved a problem at home on my own time, championed an initiative while preparing in my own time.

The employer isn't so interested that you give 50 hours and are paid for 35, they ARE interested in hearing you are passionate about your profession.

The girl who goes home and thinks about the problem in the back of their mind and comes to work with the answer will feature higher in the interviewers mental scorecard. Companies love to have energetic staff who motivate others around them.

So in short, the interviewer looks to hear that you are in it for more than just the money and want to hear you demonstrate it.

How would you handle poorly performing staff?

Only really applies to those in team lead or management positions.

Mostly this is a question of ettiquite and social skills. Are you able to talk to people in a non-confrontational way? Do you need daddy (management) to bail you out?

You might be given this question in a behavioural context. For example 'You have found a member of staff browsing the Internet for illegal music during work hours instead of working on their project. How do you approach this situation?'. It's the same question in different clothes.

How you answer this depends on the type of person you are. Remember that employers want staff to value their policies and respect them, they want you to help nip problems in the bud early, and they want you to be able to communicate and listen to others.

Do your research on the company. Find out a little about their culture. And don't be afraid to ask at the end of the interview for more detail on the company culture to learn what is expected of staff.

What is your worst experience and what did you learn from it?

Straight to the point question. The interviewer is asking two direct questions.

1. Have you experience and in what areas?

2. Do you identify and learn from your mistakes?

Cover those two angles to give them interviewers the details they need. You won't really be able to bluff this as the interviewer will often ask you to explain more detail on the experience.

Keep this answer short, a few minutes at most. The better you can tell this story, the more punch your answer will have.

What have been your most and least productive times?

The short answer is they want to know that you will get enjoyment from the role on offer.

Interviewers want to hear you describing the experiences you have had that fired your motivation and use this to determine if they think you will be equally or more fired up in their workplace. Was your motivation financial, challenge, technical, fear?

They are also interested to hear about the lower points. If you were less productive, what did you do about it? The interview should be able to accept and recognise that we don't always make the best career choices. It's OK to admit you tried something and hated it.

It is likely they want to understand that you are happy to be out of your comfort zone and try new things, and clearly want to know if things interest you so they can determine if you are a good fit into the organisation.

Most companies want a higher workforce skills mobility, staff who are multiskilled and can flex into roles as needed. If you happen to be one of these types of people, be sure to highlight it here.

How would others describe you?

Exactly as it says on the tin. How do others see you?

Keep your answer to this short and use simply words like 'honest', 'reliable', 'trustworthy', 'competent'.

Don't worry about embelishing the answer more than this, but do prepare examples for each point.

What skills do you bring to a team? / What skills do you think this role demands? / What will the challenges be in this role?

If you have read the role descriptions, the answers they want are all in there. They just want to know you have thought about the role.

Your only job is to highlight the tie between your CV and their job description.

I'd suggest a simple excercise here.

Print your CV and the job description out.
Sit them side by side and number the items across the two which support each other (e.g. the job asks for Oracle skills, circle this in both papers).

Just doing this will focus your mind on how good a match your CV is to their job description. This should be enough to get through the interview.

Try hard to avoid taking paper into the interview and reading from it. Have a few small bullet points, but don't read line by line.

Why do you want this role? / Why should you get this role?

There isn't a hidden question here, they want to hear your summary of what makes this a good fit.

They are interested in seeing if you listen and if you can summarise well.

If you were paying attention in the interview, you should try to put in a few comments about the things your learned at the interview today. This is clearly trickier, but shows you are an active listener.

What will you do if you don’t get this role?

Bit of a nasty question, but can be fairly asked.

I'd recommend you make clear that you will want to understand why you didn't get the role, therefore will look for feedback from the interview panel if possible.

I'd also mention that you will continue to look for a role similar to the one on offer as it appears to be a very good fit.

All of this said and done only really works if you are committed to the role.

Do your research, think about the role and your skills / experience match, and bring your experiences to the fore of your mind so you can tell them to others.

Are We Nearly There Yet?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:09:00 +0000

I bought a book around 6 months ago called Software Estimation: The Black Art Demystified. It's one of those types of book along with Code Complete which should be on every developers reading list, and by reading list, I mean read it once per year, every just a refresher.

So the book was parked after around 80 pages shortly before Emily arrived (our new baby), and now she's here the book is gathering dust.

Two articles appeared on my aggregator recently. One from Joel Spolsky on Evidence Based Scheduling and one from Jeff Atwood on Planning Poker, partially responding to Joel's post.

Both posts are very well written and are worth a read. They rekindled my interest in this topic, sort of the point of them I suspect!

As the Black Art book explains, everyone thinks they can estimate. While influencing people's decisions can prove hard, actually changing their approach to estimating I find is even harder.

A few techniques I wonder about using:

Planning Poker. I love the idea of this, it seems a smart and tidy approach to reach a good consensus. However the flaw here is you need a set of equally able and open minded people who actually listen, otherwise failure is on the cards. I feel a slightly diluted version of this will work well to turn the tide.
Track estimate against actual. I think of all of the suggestions, this is the easiest to deliver and shows exactly how good your estimates are. The FogBuzz product from Joel's company uses this to good effect.

I've set myself a target to read this book cover to cover within the next 2 months and hope to reflect on it here.

What do you think? How do you approach estimating in your workplace?

Clarifying Requirements

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:13:00 +0000

As software developers, we have a job to push back on unclear requirements and to help achieve a clearer, and importantly a shared understanding of the system.

Most users will not be versed in creating contracts. As a result, ambiguous terms will creep in without the user realising. Phrases such as 'The interface must be intuitive' don't make our jobs any easier.

When I receive these types of requirements I used to spend time reading and marking the documents by hand. This can be quite a laborious process and is very dependent on the experience of the reviewer.

I've been using a technique to help me become more consistent at giving feedback on requirements and to help establish a shared vocabulary of ambiguous terms.

The idea is simple. Create a document with all of the terms you know of which lead to ambiguity, then create an index showing where each of these terms appear in the requirements document.

I'm afraid I'm a Microsoft Word man, so the technique will need to be adapted to your personal tool of choice.

Grab a copy of the text in this list of ambiguous terms. Pop it into a new word document and save the document somewhere.
Take a copy of the document to be reviewed (the target document). You will be altering this document and don't want to change the original.
Make ALL of the text lower case within the target document (explained in a moment)
Use the 'automark' feature to highlight the terms in your 'requirements' document. This feature asks you to select a source document for the automark entries. (In Office 2007 this is found under the references tab, 'insert index', then select the 'Automark' option.)
At this point, Word has marked each phrase in the target document where the phrase in the 'ambiguous terms' appears.
Now, to create an index showing the user where the terms are:
Insert an index using the index feature within Word. In Office 2007, this is in the 'references' tab under the index section.
Finally, review the usage of the terms in context and send appropriate comments back to the user.

The automark feature of Microsoft Word is not the greatest for this usage, but if you are prepared to follow these steps and develop your own version of the ambiguous terms document (and share it with others in your team), this will help contribute toward better quality requirements.

In particular, I dislike the requirement for the ambiguous terms document to need two columns, both containing the same text. I haven't looked to solve this, let me know if you do!

In itself, the process is not fantastic. But if you share a master copy of the ambiguous terms document, then the whole team can contribute their experienced view to improved requirements.

(The concept here was unabashedly taken from Code Complete by Steve McConnell. Grab a copy and read it, highly recommended).

Update: I've pushed the 'Acceptable Terms' doc into a published Google Doc here
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgdfgwms_5cp9v8k
and have updated the URL's above

A few baby pictures / videos

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Aitken) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:57:00 +0000

If you have no interest in babies, please stop now. I won't be offended!

End of notice!

I've put some more pictures up here.

I also took a moment to upload some videos. One where little happens, and another with hiccups.

Also, if you haven't seen it and can bare it enough to not cringe, here's a video of Euan on safari...