Simon G's Blog

Book Review–“Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ” by Daniel Goleman

2012-01-21T00:27:00.001+13:00

I found “Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ” by Daniel Goleman to be quite an academic (and at times scientific) view of emotion that includes some good story-telling.

It started very dry but I found it got more engaging about 60 pages in. I found the book to be more focussed on describing emotional intelligence as opposed to providing much guidance about how to improve your emotional intelligence. Despite this, I did however find that it contained a wealth of interesting information.

My key takeaways were:

We have two minds (rational and emotional) that typically operate in tight harmony.
Anger builds upon anger; the emotional brain heats up.
Distraction is a highly powerful mood-altering device. This is due to the fact that it is hard to stay angry when you’re having a pleasant time.
Thoughts are associated in the mind not just by content, but by mood. People have what amounts to a bad-mood thoughts that come to mind more readily when they are down.
While crying can sometimes break a spell of sadness, it can also leave the person obsessing about the reasons for despair. Crying that reinforces rumination only prolongs the misery.
Aerobic exercise is one of the more effective tactics for lifting mild depression. This however does not hold true for habitual exercisers, since the opposite is true whereby they start to feel bad on those days they skip a workout.
Relaxation techniques which put the body into a low-arousal state work well for anxiety, a high-arousal state, but not so well for depression.
A constructive approach to mood-lifting is engineering a small triumph or easy success.
A potent antidote to depression is seeing things differently, or cognitive reframing. i.e. step back and look at the scenario from the perspective of somebody worse off.
A helpful depression-lifter is helping others in need. e.g. volunteering, feeding the homeless.
A strong cultural work ethic translates into a higher motivation, zeal, and persistence – an emotional edge.
Good moods, while they last, enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or interpersonal. Laughing consequently can help people think more broadly.
People with high levels of hope share certain traits such as being able to motivate themselves, reassuring themselves when in a tight spot that things will get better, being flexible enough to find different ways to get to their goals or to switch goals if one becomes impossible, and having the sense to break down a formidable task into smaller, manageable pieces.
People perform at their peak while in flow; they exhibit a masterly control of what they are doing, there responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands of the task.
People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.
Being able to manage emotions in someone else is the core of the art of handling relationships.
Emotions are contagious. We transmit and catch moods from each other.
Coordination of moods is the essence of rapport.
In terms of managing our own career, there may be nothing more essential than recognising our deepest feelings about what we do – and what changes might make us more truly satisfied with our work.
Turning a blind eye to acts of bias allows discrimination to thrive. To do nothing, in this context, is an act of consequence in itself.
While a group can be no “smarter” than the sum total of its strengths, it can be much dumber if its internal workings don’t allow people to share their talents.
Harmony allows a group to take maximum advantage of its most creative and talented members’ abilities.
Cultivating good relationships with people whose services might be needed later can increase your chance of success.
The stars of an organisation are often those who have:
- thick connections on all networks, whether communications (who talks to whom), expertise (which people are turned to for advice), or trust.
- teamwork coordination.
- leadership in building consensus.
- ability to see things from the perspective of others, such as customers or others on a team.
- persuasiveness.
- ability to promote cooperation while avoiding conflicts.
- initiative – being self-motivated enough to take on responsibilities beyond their stated job.
- self-management in the sense of regulating their time and work commitments well.
Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings – anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness – is a form of disease prevention.
Many patients can benefit measurably when their psychological needs are attended to along with their purely medical ones.
The emotional abilities children acquire in later life build on those of the earliest years.

Considerations when responding to an RFI or RFP (a view from the receiving end)

2011-11-27T16:24:00.001+13:00

Having been on the receiving end of Request for Information (RFI) and Request for Proposal (RFP) responses, from an evaluation perspective there are ways respondents can make it easier for the evaluation panel to assess what it is being proposed and ultimately have greater success on getting through to the next round. These considerations are from my experiences with Software package selection and with Delivery partner selection, but should be applicable to many other selections.

1. First impressions count.

Even before the RFI/RFP response is opened, an evaluator can be swayed by the presentation of the response and the level of engagement getting there.
Key considerations:

Ask questions during the response period to validate any areas lacking clarity, but don’t go overboard.
Make sure you meet the response times.
Use good quality paper and colour (if required to present a paper copy).
Binding can make a document look classier.
If the response requests that all questions and communication go through a particular person or channel, then abide by this.

2. Make it easy for an evaluator to find information they are looking for.

When performing an evaluation I will assess the RFI/RFP response against an evaluation template where I score the responses from each vendor. In order to ensure that I am being fair in terms of the evaluation, I assess each line item of the template across all RFI/RFP responses at the same time, as opposed to scoring each vendor separately and then moving on to the next.
Key considerations:

If there is a RFI/RFP response template provided, use it.
Have a table of contents on Page 2 (or thereabouts) of the document, and ensure there are page numbers throughout.
Have your logo on the front page of your response. This makes it easier when the reviewer is looking through documents from multiple vendors.
Be very clear about what is and isn’t included in any pricing. Even if you have the information in a scope section, it is worth highlighting the key inclusions, exclusions and assumptions in the pricing section too so that if an evaluator is looking at each solution in parallel you are not seen to be overly expensive or hiding something.
Don’t have information split across multiple documents, unless explicitly requested to.

3. Consider what an evaluator is likely to be assessing the solution against.

Whilst there are a number of questions asked in an RFI/RFP, there may be other things that an evaluator is wanting to see demonstrated in the response. If the response is silent about something, then the evaluator may rate this lower than it should be.
Key considerations:

Show an understanding of the requirements.
Explain how the proposed solution meets the requirements. Diagrams are good.
Show an understanding of the business / industry sector.
Use case studies that are in the same region / country where possible.
Cover the methodology that is proposed to deliver the solution (if appropriate). This should however not read as if it is a shopping list of methodologies straight from a text book.
Explain your level of flexibility to adapt the methodology and/or solution to better fit the organisation.
Demonstrate thought leadership and best practice guidance. This may be by providing alternative solutions or explaining standards or processes that will be adopted.
Explain different pricing model options you are open to; Fixed, Time and Materials, Monthly, Pay per use, ...
With a software package selection, explain what is possible with configuration, what will entail customisation / development, and if so how this will impact any upgrades.
Explain additional opportunities your solution provides.
Cover whatever else you think is of interest to the evaluation panel.

Book Review: Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono

2011-11-24T22:09:00.001+13:00

Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono is a very easy read and provides a good simple approach for exploring ideas and problems through thinking from different perspectives in a structured manner. There are six hats, each of which have different characteristics:

White Hat: facts, figures, information
Red Hat: emotions and feelings, hunch and intuition
Black Hat: devil's advocate, negative judgement
Yellow Hat: optimism, positivity
Green Hat: creativity
Blue Hat: controlling of the hats and thinking, orchestration

The idea of the hat is that a person will put on or be asked to put on a hat and to express a view from that perspective. This gets people thinking in different ways and since it is play-acting people are more willing to express views from under the security of the hat that otherwise may be left unsaid.

Exporting from OpenOffice Base database to SQL

2011-08-23T23:09:00.001+12:00

I was wanting to export the contents and design of an OpenOffice.org Base database to SQL with the intent of migrating to MySQL. I struggled to find out how to do this, but finally found out how.

To generate an SQL file that contains both the contents and the data of the database I used the following command from the “Tools –> SQL…” menu:

SCRIPT 'C:\temp\file.sql'

When I tried to write it to the C:\ root directory I got a security error, but using another directory worked fine.

Thanks to http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=32333 for pointing me in the right direction.

Incidentally, on my way to the final solution I also came across the following command to generate a CSV file of a table’s contents:

SELECT * INTO TEXT "output_csv_file_name" FROM "table_name"

The version of OpenOffice I was using was OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 – OOO330m20 (Build:9567) and I running this on a Windows 7 machine.

NZSki is making great use of RFID to enhance customer service

2011-08-03T17:55:00.001+12:00

I went skiing yesterday and was impressed with how NZSki is using RFID to enhance customer service.

I started the day by going into the Queenstown Snowcentre to buy a ticket for the bus up to Coronet Peak. Instead I found I could buy my ticket for skiing as well, which was great. The queue was short and when I got to the counter I was asked if I had used NZSki before. I hadn’t, so the person serving me proceeded to ask my name, took my photo, and casually asked me where I was from.

Before I knew it, a plastic re-usable pass for the mountain had been printed for me with my name on it, a reference number and the fact I was an Adult and Male.

NB: Reference number blanked out in picture.

After a 25 minute bus ride, I was at Coronet Peak and then proceeded to the chair lift. What I then found was that at every chairlift and t-bar I went to during the day there was a gate to go through where you needed to hold your pass up to (typically there were 5 gates, one for each seat). This worked fine through my jacket, however for the first gate since I had my cell phone in the same pocket it didn’t work, but the liftie let me through anyway.

I also noticed that as each person went through, the liftie had an iPad that had pictures of who was coming through each gate so they were doing checks to see that people weren’t using other peoples passes.

There were also top-up machines located at both the snowcentre and near the ticket offices up the mountain, where you can use buy your ticket yourself without needing to go to the counter. Similarly, you can also buy your ticket from the comfort of your home through registering and logging in online (more about that later).

The whole process worked well and helped to keep the flow going (not that there was much of a queue today; it was in fact almost non-existent).

I had a superb day on the mountain. The conditions were excellent, beautiful blue sky in the morning (there was a little bit of cloud in the afternoon, although this was minimal and there was still unlimited visibility), no wind, great snow and almost non-existent queues. My legs and feet were a bit shocked by the exercise, but I still managed to do a decent number of runs.

Once I got off the mountain I went to the nzski.com mypass website, entered the reference number on my card and then proceeded to enter a username and password. Some details such as my name and city were already populated. What was also nice was the statistics displayed, showing how many metres I had descended and how many runs I had done (NB: this will be missing my first run, since they just let me through).

There are also leader boards of who has descended the most in the day, season etc. and who has done the most runs.

Today I went back to this site and purchased an afternoon pass for The Remarkables. It was all very simple to do.

I was impressed with how well RFID was used to enrich the customer experience.

<Cross-posted to http://sinnjoy.com>

HTML5 input type does not submit name for images

2011-07-22T23:58:00.001+12:00

I had some very simple code that worked well in the Chrome web browser, but it did not however work with Internet Explorer or Firefox and didn’t generate any errors. The functionality was simply to pass a parameter (in this case ‘auth’) to a PHP page; once on the page I am simply checking that it is set. I was attempting to do this by attaching the parameter to the image input type but was having no joy. Rather than look at alternative options, this made me curious so I went searching.

After a bit of digging, I found that the HTML5 spec requires just the x and y coordinates clicked on for the image to be appended to the form data submitted. After realising this, I changed from using the name/value attributes on on the image input type to using a hidden field and all browsers were happy.

In terms of my very simple HTML code, to make it work.

Before:

After:

For completeness, in terms of how I check the field is being passed through:

if(isset($_POST['auth'])) {…}

Thanks to http://www.onenaught.com/posts/382/firefox-4-change-input-type-image-only-submits-x-and-y-not-name for pointing me in the right direction.

Barcamp Auckland 5

2011-07-17T17:35:00.001+12:00

With 300 attendees registered for this year, there were a lot of Web developers, designers, lawyers, investors and others in one place with several un-conference sessions running in parallel at Barcamp Auckland 5.

A summary of my interpretation of key points from sessions I attended is below.

Write once, run everywhere HTML 5 applications

SmartBiller
- HTML 5 based desktop/iPhoneAndroid app.
- Used jQTouch as a framework; supports Webkit only. jQuery Mobile wasn’t ready at time, but this would be preference if rebuilding (better support).
- Sync driven from server.
- Device detection being done adhoc on client & server side.
- Would use MVC if writing again.
fluidapp.com for Mac wraps any website and makes it appear like an application.
Need to consider how to handle multiple open windows
- Check instancecount then “ping” other instance may be an option.
Screen size, browser quirks / CSS, Interaction and Default focus needs consideration. c.f. Default focus can launch keypad on mobile devices which may not be desirable.
Write once, then optimise.

Node.js & NowJS

NodeJS is server-side Javascript.
- Runs on Google V8 engine.
- Focus is on networking.
- Evented, non-blocking I/O.
NowJS (nowjs.com)
- creates a magic namespace “now” accessible by server and client.
- can easily write a chat client with very little code.
- functions & variables added to now are automatically synced in real-time.
- Call client functions from the server and server functions from the client.
- When you post a message on the server it goes to all attached clients.
- Good for real-time updates.

Designing in Social & Legal norms

Check out Kim Cameron’s 7 laws of identity.
Don’t look at privacy as an after thought. If it’s important, built it into your application up front.
Privacy is about boundary management.
From an identity perspective we all have different personas.
Fireeagle and Google+ are great examples of sites that built in privacy from Day 1.
Interaction design cues such as dragging a person to a circle are very important.
“Owning a customer” = Slavery.
If customers respect your privacy they are more likely to give you more information.
Check out “Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (Wiley Desktop Editions)” book.
Designers should design privacy and security in up front and make it easy for customers.
If you let people be able to take data out they are more likely to give you more data since they know they can get it out.

How to make money from services

Consider not selling to users but to companies.
Email potential buyers. If no reply, phone them.
One of the founders of a start-up must have a passion for the market you’re aiming for.
Hire to support and cover your weaknesses.
Learn by talking to your potential customers.
For pricing, can you show a customer that there is $x of benefit? If so, take a dollar off (or whatever is appropriate for your pricing model) and they are likely to buy it.
CapsuleCRM – check it outa a CRM option.
Identify who in an organisation you need to sell to. It may be multiple groups/people; Sales, IT, Exec, ...
“If You Build It Will They Come: Three Steps to Test and Validate Any Market Opportunity” is a book to check out.
Try selling to customers you don’t care as much about first and learn from the experience.
Rather than build everything yourself, if it’s a feature applicable to only a small subset of customers consider making it available via an API if possible.

Panel session about the Internet

Big things to care about for the Internet in New Zealand:
- Data Caps.
- Content
  - Copyright.
  - Access to Services and Content (e.g. Sky).
- How Internet can help Economic Growth and encourage Innovation.
- Competitive Pricing.
- Rural Divide.
- Social Divide
  - Need to be careful not to leave people behind.
- Productivity
  - So with faster Internet connections, what do people want to do?
- Intellectual Property & Patents.
- Transforming Government to be Open.
- Governments should not regulate things they do not understand.
Rules for Broadcasters (e.g. Sky) and Internet should be the same moving forward.
With Sky people would like to be able to buy one channel vs a bundle (c.f. wanting to only buy an apple from the supermarket, but needing to buy a bundle including chickens and oranges too).
Government should support start-ups; tax credits, innovation centres.

The Open Enterprise & Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) & Red Flag (in China) are the predominant versions of Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat doesn’t sell software or licenses. They do however sell Certification (Ops and Developers), Training and Support and add-ons.
Based around a no Capex model, making $ from Opex. This doesn’t appear to hold for add-ons.
Red Hat supports back several (all?) versions.
Red Hat Network Satellite is a management tool for RHEL.
JBoss ON is a management tool for the Middleware stack.
Commercial vs Open alternatives (from a Red Hat perspective):
- VMWare ==> KVM
- EMC ==> MPIO
- Veritas ==> GFS2
- *nix ==> Enterprise Linux + Security Enhanced Linux
- Middleware ==> JBoss
- ESB ==> JBoss SOA
Moving to also having IAAS and PAAS offerings

Ask a Lawyer (with a focus on start-ups)

NZ tax system doesn’t make it easy to get options vs US system.
Consider takeover code; this kicks in if you have 50 employees
Have hard conversations up front and agree in writing:
- Who owns what?
- Who makes decisions?
- When can shares be sold?
Have a Shareholder Agreement.
For an Employment Agreement, the Department of Labour has one available online.
Keep a copy of your IP, including Contracts. This is particularly important for if you are selling your company.
If you have no Constitution, then the Companies Act covers this; this is “okay” but it doesn’t include pre-emptive rates.
If you need US employees or US bank account, get legal advice.
Privacy Policy should comply with Privacy Act. Non-compliance with Privacy in some countries can have significant penalties.
Cannot have an offer publicly to invest (e.g. Facebook, Twitter); considered to be conditioning the market.

What does the start-up community need?

Mentoring, Direction, Advice.
Help with pitch deck & local/international investors.
Find further funders.
Business Strategy advice.
Investment for start-ups of small to large $.
Education.
To hear Success & failure stories.
Skills –to who who they can talk to about xyz.
Help to open doors (consider using Twitter for this too).
Sales & Marketing advice and assistance through contacts.
To get advice from credible people.
Local & foreign $.
Transparency.

Where do I start?

2011-07-03T18:54:00.001+12:00

A simple approach I have found works well when thrown something to look at and unsure of where to start is to focus on what you are trying to achieve and working back from that.

I first had this approach shown to me using post-it notes (aka sticky notes) and have used this approach (albeit usually with Visio) many times.

The steps to follow are very simple:

Write down on a post-it note what the ultimate outcome is.
Write down on separate post-it notes for each activity or output required what needs to occur before you can get to the ultimate outcome, and stick this to the left of (1).
For each task that is a predecessor of (2), write it down and stick it the left and repeat until you are back far enough that you have a plan of attack.

The beauty of post-it notes is that you can’t write much on them, so write just enough in simple terms so that you know what is required (which may be outputs, tasks, workshops or anything else of value). It is also easy to add missing tasks as you go and to change the ordering if required.

This does not need to be an overly detailed process and I don’t worry about classifying whether something is an output or activity but instead use this as an approach to understand what needs to happen first and to also be able to communicate the plan to others.

Communicating with others is also very valuable in terms of validating and refining what needs to happen (and in what order) and getting their buy-in. One trap I have fallen into is that if you get too detailed then this will scare some people, so sometimes abstracting to a higher level may be more appropriate for some audiences.

TOGAF 9 - dry, but some good content

2011-03-28T09:18:00.001+13:00

The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is a framework - a detailed method and a set of supporting tools - for developing an enterprise architecture, developed by members of The Open Group Architecture Forum.

To say that the TOGAF 9 documentation is dry is an understatement. Some areas are lacking in depth and whilst TOGAF is a process framework I would like to see it evolve to have templates, document samples and checklists. There is however some good content and I will be referring back.

Webstock 2011 Presentation

2011-03-02T17:23:00.000+13:00

I have uploaded a presentation outlining the key points from each session I attended at Webstock to Slideshare. Enjoy!

Webstock 2011

View more presentations from Simon Gianoutsos

This is an accompaniment to the two previous blog posts I have compiled on Webstock 2011:

WebStock 2011 - Conference day two

2011-02-19T12:28:00.000+13:00

Yet another excellent day of thought provoking presentations. Big thanks to the conference organisers, helpers and presenters for such an excellent event.

For my notes from yesterday check out “WebStock 2011 - Conference day one”. The collaborative note taking effort was also in action again today at http://webstock.waveadept.com/ .

Marco Arment

@marcoarment

Do your own thing

Co-founder of Tumblr, Founder of Instapaper
It’s never too late to edit for the good of your product
What to build

o You don’t need to cater to geeks

§ We’re not loyal and will jump to new products

§ We’re unnecessary as an audience; we’re very small

o Be useful to non-geeks

You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) rely on another service

o Don’t give your power away.

§ E.g. using Facebook for login

o You need them for everything and they use you for nothing

o No service is universal

o You can take advantage of services without requiring them

§ E.g. send to Flickr

Be useful to the first user

o “A wonderful nonstick frying pan is useful even if you’re the only person who ever buys one” Bill Gates

Your product should be remarkable
Remarkable products don’t need to advertise

o Word of mouth is important

o If your product isn’t good it won’t work (with either advertising or word of mouth)

o Bloggers need content for their blogs. If you make something remarkable, there are people who will make positive remarks about it.

o Your product can help by advertising itself

You should think about revenue from day one
You don’t need to publish ads

o Ads should be your last priority (or a secondary stream).

o Try to make money by other options first.

People will pay money if you let them
You don’t need (and won’t get) every customer
You don’t need to listen to every feature request

o Let others guide you but not direct you.

o Product design is not a democracy

o E.g. nobody would ever have asked for a glass phone with no buttons, looking at predecessor phones

Managing feature requests

o Everyone wants your product to do “one more thing”. But it’s a different thing for everybody.

o “Pick the few features most….”

Features requests are one input of many

o Stand up for your own vision

You are going to need a good technology foundation

o There will never be a good time to change

o Use technology conservatively

§ There’s always something new

Buggier, Lack Replication, Less ability for problem resolution etc.

§ Boring == stable

§ Don’t be the biggest deployment of anything.

Let the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Facebook fix the problems first

§ You don’t need “cloud” hosting

LAMMP,R,oP

Instapaper

o Linux, Apache, MySQL

o webservers: 60+ request/sec

o MySQL with SSDs:

o Memcache

o HA Proxy

Be orthogonal where possible

o Design things so they are isolated from other things as much as possible.

o Language: Nearly impossible

o Data store: Usually hard

o Cache: Easy

o Proxy: Easy

o Large-file storage: Easy

o Host: Easy

o Cloud host: Hard

o Amazon S3 is great for storage and easy to move off. Amazon EC2 is a lot harder to move off. Google App Engine is almost impossible to move from.

o Write wrappers around almost everything to allow things to be swapped (more) easily.

Minimise overhead

o You can start in your spare time.

§ You do have free time

So: A great product + Revenue from the start + Low Overhead = You may not need funding
Everyone will tell you to do what they did

o Do your own thing.

David McCandless

@mccandelish

Information is Beautiful

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
Designing information visually so we can see connections we didn’t see before or discover things that were not obvious initially
Visualising information is about bringing it into focus.
Video showing visualization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US4_jFpwJPo
Numbers are hard to get; it is also hard to identify relationships in the data
Data is the new soil
Infotography
Infographics is the new photo journalism
Tools

o Uses Adobe Illustrator for designs; lots of manual work.

o Stores data publically in Google Docs

What goes wrong

o When you visualize data without a story it doesn’t help the situation.

o Circular isn’t good. Looks complex.

o Design should be about taking things out. Optimise.

o Ugly cartograms

o Fear of whitespace

o Info that isn’t interesting

Information design must also uncover a story
Data: You should be able to play with it, mix it up and have fun with it.

Main auditorium

Josh Clark

@globalmoxie

Buttons Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch

Touch screen interactions feel more personal, intimate, natural, intuitive
Content should define the app, not the machinery.
Graphics need to direct the interaction with content.
Don’t underestimate the power of “hum-drum”; they have been tries and tested.
“Why does an e-book reader need a page-turn effect? Like having a fake needle on a CD player. Or horse-shit coming from the back of a car.” @blprnt

o Animation provides feedback to your design metaphor.

Familiarity & intimacy invite touch
Don’t have metaphor clutter.

o Choose one and stick to it.

If it looks like a physical object people will attempt to interact with it like that object.
Think about the purpose of the app and whether buttons are needed
Gestures are the keyboard shortcuts of touch interfaces (instead of clicking or buttons)

o Big screens invite big gestures.

Twitter app for iPad encourages exploration, thereby removing the need for a back button.
The more features you have the more controls you need

o Clarity should trump density. Just enough is more.

Touch can help create fluid applications that manage complexity
Use content as the controls

o Was “The medium is the message”, now “The message is the medium”

Explore multi-touch gestures

o It does however require two hands (in most cases)

Treat the entire screen as the control
We can learn a lot from Game developers, they show us new rules
You won’t get things right the first time, don’t give up,

Jason Cohen

@asmartbear

A Geek Sifts Through the Bullshit

There are rules and they are made to be broken
How to decide what advice to follow, choose your own path
Tech support is sales
Blogging can consume your life if you follow the rules

o None of the rules matter; do what works for you.

Lesson

o 1. You set the rules

o 2. Advice has context

o 3. “I’m not a _______ person” is twaddle

o 4. Trust your inexperienced gut

o 5. “That’s how it’s done” is bull5h1t

Features are like sex: one mistake and you have to support it forever
Dimensions of advice:

o Rich/King

o B2B/B2C

o Bootstrapped/Funded

o Lifestyle/Growth

o Pleasure/Pain

o Confident/Introspective

Peter Sunde

@brokep

The Pirate Bay of Penzance

I copy therefore I am
Pirate Bay

o >100k tracker connections/second

o Responses to US legal threats:

§ 1. Photo of a polar bear; We’re being eaten by polar bears

§ 2. Circled Sweden on map of world “we’re not part of the US yet”

§ 3. Reply to cease and desist font distribution with letter reformatted with fonts they were told to stop using.

o See http://thepiratebay.org/legal.php for Legal threats against The Pirate Bay

o No one dares to censor in Sweden anymore after an ISP CEO was sacked for blocking Pirate Bay and other sites

o A private investigator following Peter registered his car to a company called “private investigators”

Flattr - http://flattr.com/

o Social Micropayments

o This is Flattr: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrMlEEWBgY

§ Many small streams will form a large river

o Pay a monthly rate (set by you) and each month it is divided among the people you’ve “Flattr-ed”

Michael Lopp

@rands

The Engineer, Designer and the Dictator

Formally from Apple
Why are you at Webstock?

o Webstock is about the message

o “You are awesome” on a pencil

o Build & ship for human beings

o Your job has an expiration date

You are (at most) three years away from building something new.
At the (metaphoric) table are:

o Engineer

§ Needed so that you don’t end up with chaos

§ Engineers believe in a perfect system

§ Strives to reduce chaos because its inefficient

§ There is a right and a wrong answer

§ Willing to take the time to go deep and understand

§ Predisposed problem solvers

§ They are paranoid, prepare for the unexpected, architect to protect their work

§ Love signal, hate noise

§ An urge to build a thing

o Designer

§ Without a designer you end up with Gmail (wildly successful but could do with a designer’s input)

§ Needed because the engineer can’t make things look good

§ Understand what the user wants

§ Prioritising, focusing and expertly describing the want.

§ Using the knowledge to surprise and delight users.

§ Responsible for the user experience.

§ Describe the “want” perfectly

o Dictator

§ You don’t get anything without a dictator.

§ “I’m the one telling you how it is”

§ They know what they want

§ This is the enforcer; the person you can go to for confirmation.

§ Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are dictators; Bill is nerd dictator. Steve Balmer is not (he’s part of the MBA crowd).

§ Consistency

Team members have the fear of deviating from the awesome

§ Death to Ambiguity

§ Velocity

Getting things moving

Makes decisions

Says no

Quora, Facebook and Google are examples of companies run by Engineers.
The challenge with engineers is that we think if we can build it we can also design it.
Apple stores are designed after museums, because it’s a good way to look at art…. Lickable hardware.
There is no evident file system on iPad

o Would an engineer or a designer have made that decision? No, only a dictator would say “All I want is for people to be able to email a picture of their cat!”

Tom Coates

@tomcoates

Everything the Network Touches

Helps make people’s lives more interesting, productive and fun.
1.62GB presentation, 162 transitions on one slide in 32 seconds
Networks of the web - changing, evolving, breaking free from the browser
The Persian Royal Road wa so effective that armies 30 days march away could get their orders from the heart of the empire the same day.

o Moved materials, trade and armies.

o World’s first great communication network

Transformative Infrastructures

o A new infrastructure like this can be totally transformative.

o An infrastructure like this is not an end unto itself, each upgrade massively increases the possibilities of what we can do.

The world has changed dramatically; road, sea, rail, air
The history of any object the room around us is a long chain made possible by the connected network of trade.
But what about the web?

o In the last 10-15years there has been huge progress.

o We have collectively transformed the world.

o We started off with silos

o APIs are the roads between services along which data can travel to be assembled and reassembled. This means every open site or service is another component we can build on and extend

Lanyrd (http://lanyrd.com/ ) is a collaborative conference directory.

o Built totally on other products

Upgrades to the web of data

o Social Software

o Social Networks

o Geolocation

o Real-time data

o Data Visualisation

As cost drops we will see more and more connectivity in all objects.
Objects as Services

o Why bother owning something at all?

§ e.g. a washing machine. Why bother buying one, just rent one and pay per usage. It could report back via a network that it needs servicing etc.

MUJI (http://www.muji.eu/index.asp ) is a Japanese company that specialises in ultra simple, clean design products for the home.
Consider how to integrate the network into objects to makes them more useful.

o E.g. Electronic scales (http://withings.com) that post info to website where it can be analysed.

§ Costly now, but will reduce over time

Could link weight data to Nike, Health sites, and other places.
Towards the networked city

o Layer our network over existing infrastructure

o IBM Smarter City initiative

o London cycle hire

o San Francisco Parking Meters

§ People can use phone app to see parks that are free

§ Pricing changes based on time of day etc.

o Reactive buildings that change

o Our environment is being network aware and reacting …

Where do we go from here?

o Sites talking to each other

o Instrumented planet, connected planet, responsive planet.

o A new network of sites and services built on top of the world that lets data flow through the world like an animated spark making everything more efficient.

What happens when Ideas, Building, Objects, Media, Environments, Appliances, Vehicles and Information have Sex?

o Bloody amazing things happen.

o This environment of conceptual sex is what is so inspiring.

“We want a web of data by any means necessary”
Problems

o Different languages and cultures

§ We need standards for open data

o Privacy

§ It is not dead, but we need to decide what is reasonable for people to know about us and have that encoded in law. We could be entering a golden age of privacy, because we are having meaningful debate over what is important.

o Inequality

§ Not everyone has benefited equally.

§ We want to try to stop companies/ people dominating the web of data.

Connecting things transforms the world and we are building more and more things every day
The planet and everything on it are our canvas and our brush.
Everything the network touches is our playground.

Scott McCloud

@scottmccloud

Comics: A Medium in Transition

In any 8” box of air in front of you there is information; until it is decoded it is just an empty box
We are animals and it is in our nature to see ourselves in everything.
http://picmoticon.com is a great place to go for things and places that look like faces
Visual communication is a two way street; it takes collaboration between the artist and the audience.
Powerpoint can be a powerful presentation tool
Simple imagery can be combined in a modular way to make complex data more understandable
Visualisation + Synchronisation males it easier to remember
“If I don’t need to THINK it, I don’t need to SEE it.”
Static pictures are brilliant as memory anchors
Comics have a special syntax.

o There is a column response; something within the panels and then something to imagine between the columns

§ It comes down to the imagination of the audience

Everybody has a need to find meaning; even if there is nothing there.

o Any two images together will suggest some sort of narrative or story

Single panel stuff is not comics because it is not a sequence.

o Anything tells a story with a sequence

Strips and Books are different

o Strips are very friendly for the web

§ they work within a node of short attention spans (e.g. http://www.xkcd.com/ )

o A comic book is harder - the overriding goal is that the reader loses themselves in the story

Comics are not just cartoons, but even hieroglyphics can be seen as comics due to the space time relationship
For graphic novels, print is still where the best stuff is currently happening.
It is a terrible mistake to take content designed for one medium and then just use it on another medium without transforming it.

o Repurposing is evil

Why have suitcases only recently been built with wheels?

o We’ve had suitcases for ages

o Wheels have been around even longer

o Why?

o Lack of imagination

Escape is a powerful instinct.
Comics are a legitimate window back into the world.
They need to play to their unique strengths

Merlin Mann

@hotdogsladies

Scared Shitless: How I (Mostly) Learned to Love Being Afraid of Pretty Much Everything

You’re never going to be ready
Even heroes are scared shitless
Everybody is scared.
What’s the worst that can happen?
If you're going to run through the shit storm, let yourself get covered in shit, but KEEP RUNNING. Keep moving, keep making cool stuff.

WebStock 2011 - Conference day one

2011-02-17T18:42:00.000+13:00

The Webstock 2011 conference kicked off today at the Wellington Town Hall. This is the second time I have attended this superbly designed and organised conference. The description on the Webstock site sums up nicely what Webstock is all about:

“Webstock is a range of web-related events with the aim of improving how websites are built through inspiration, education, insightful analysis and practical application. It features industry leaders and kick-ass speakers talking on topics such as accessibility, web standards, usability and other best practices.”

Here is my synopsis of Day One. There was also an excellent collaborative note taking effort that can be found at http://webstock.waveadept.com/ .

Mike Brown

@maupuia

Opening and welcome

It’s the small things that make us connect and share.
Having somebody on stage signing for the deaf is nice to see.

Frank Chimero

@fchimero

The Digital Campfire

We’re going from less robotic to more human.
Universal theory of stuff:

o The Message

o The Tone

o The Format

All these work together and without one, it doesn’t work
“How do we make things that people want to love?”
Cold/Warm

o Cold = inhuman

o Warm = takes human person into consideration

The issue with word Content is that it captures what it is, but not the relationship we have with it.
“The Person you love is 72.8% water” – Cold
How can we warm up content?

o Using stories

o Story = change over time

Stories help you make sense of reality
Stories teach us to empathise
Camp fire conversations are at the “really happy” end of the spectrum.
At Campfire conversations, one is removed from one’s normal environment. Perhaps that changes the way in which we converse.
How you get people to tell stories of the web?

o You ask

Every form is a question
Worst web form question in the world: “About me:”
“About Me:” drives shallowness vs asking questions such as “What’s happening?”.
Robot + story = person, person - story = robot; this is why a story is important
Ask questions to get good stories back.
Every hashtag is a framework for improv. Most are about stories.
Great questions

o What did you care about when you were nine?

o What’s the last thing you changed your mind about?

Curation

o One or two curators can really make a story

Making a person happy is a desirable interaction
Sympathy is medicine
We tell stories to understand and be understood

Michael Koziarski

@nzkoz

That's all well and good, but how does it help me?

It’s not just the technology that people work on. It’s where they work.
Google = cool, funky; Apple, Facebook similar etc. This is different to “the normal world” (office pods, bland, “soul destroying”)
Planet Webstock

o Small teams

§ “The 15-person team working on the new system was the largest engineering team Facebook has ever had for a single product or feature”

o Hire the top talent

§ Google would rather leave a job unfilled than hire a sub-optimal candidate.

o Iterate

§ Ship something small, something simple, then make it better.

Illot theatre

David Recordon

@daveman692

The promise of HTML5

What is HTML5?
1. Shipping stuff today

o See “Using HTML5 today” blog post

o History API

§ Enables state info to be abstracted from a page fragment.

§ Stack based model

o Web Video

§ Still not resolved in HTML5 (H.264 vs WebM)

Not clear yet what developers should use.

Safari is clearly in H.264,

Chrome, Firefox, Opera are WebM

IE is somewhere inbetween

§ Mainly using Flash currently

§ Digital Right Management (DRM) is clearly needed.

§ Opensource Lib video.js (http://videojs.com/) takes pain out of codec loading.

§ Storage for double (or even triple) encoding can become quite costly.

2. High Performance games

o 10fps limited interaction

o 20fps min for building games

o 30fps you’re cooking with gas

o jsgamebench (https://github.com/facebook/jsgamebench) exercise browsers under game-like conditions to measure how many sprites can moved around on the screen at once

3. Developing for mobile

o Focus of HTML5 has been largely around desktop browsers (so far), not mobiles.

o Looking at how to make the whole mobile experience social.

o Most people don’t typically support more than 1 device, less for more than 2 and so on.

o Wurfl (http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/) is opensource project adding user agents to features on mobile devices.

§ Could build site to adapt to different device features.

o Phonegap (http://phonegap.com/) supports 6 platforms on an HTML5 app platform.

Standards

o Mobile is likely to be driving a lot of the web standards over the next 10 years.

Facebook is built of Pagelets that are loaded independently

Mark Pilgrim

@diveintomark

The Future of the Web: where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?

Author of “Dive into HTML5” book (http://diveintohtml5.org/)
“If you want to be a guy that does a thing, you just go out and do the thing. You can’t just do any thing; it has to be the right thing. HTML5 is now a thing.”
Feature detection is really easy in HTML5; use moderinzr (http://www.modernizr.com/ )
Not just humans look at web pages. Bots and other tools can get more structure out of your site if your use proper semantic elements.
Html5 boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com/ ) provides a base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site.
ARIA accessibility (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php ) defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities.
font squirrel generator (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator ) enables is an excellent source for getting custom fonts onto the web, it's already supported by all major browsers
CSS3 Please! (http://css3please.com/ ) generates CSS3 rules.
Many of the best Canvas examples today are at Chrome Experiments (http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ ) ; it works in more than just Chrome.
Local Storage

o Survives shutdown of web browser. c.f. uber cookies

o Works pretty much everywhere

o http://diveintohtml5.org/storage.html

Offline

o Easy via cache manifest file

o Already used wth http://mail.google.com

HTML5 Games

o https://gaming.mozillalabs.com/

Illot theatre

Nicole Sullivan

@stubbornella

CSS Tools for Massive Websites

Facebook Blue 261
Should have only about 7 font sizes on a site
Best Practice Myths

o Don’t add any extra element

o Don’t add classes

o Use descendent sectors exclusively

Specificity

o Determining whether a particular rule will win or not

o Developers end up coding by Firebug

3 problems

o duplication of property value pairs

o duplicating elements

o growing specificity

Best practices

o Add non-semantic elements judiciously

o Keep specificity as low as possible

o Abstract repeating visual patterns

o Use specifity to define your architecture

Separate structure from chrome
Can reuse flexible object in many classes (c.f. Media Block on Facebook page with image on left, text on right)
“Due to these efforts, we cut our average CSS bytes per page by 19%(after gzip) and HTML bytes per page by 44% before gzip).” Jason Sobel : http://facebook.com/note_id=307069903919
Pre-processors

o E.g. Sass (http://sass-lang.com/ ), Less (http://lesscss.org/ )

o don’t solve everything but are a really good tool to start thinking about the architecture of the site.

Illot theatre

Steve Souders

@souders

Web Performance Optimisation: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

http://stevesouders.com/docs/webstock-20110217.pptx
Speed: “First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature” Fred Wilson (VC)

o http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/fred-wilsons-10-golden-principles-of-successful-web-apps/

Improving performance: Gzip
Quick Win: Caching
WPO

o Drives traffic

o Improves UZ

o Increases revenue

o Reduces costs

What makes sites feel slow?

o (lack of) Progressive Rendering

o http://webpagetest.org is good performance tool

Speed matters. Google is the fastest search engine, a lot due to how fast it is.
Progressive downloads

o Deliver HTML

o Defer Javascript downloading

o Parallel downloading and rendering

o Use non-blocking approaches

§ Loading via dom using Javascript.

ControlJS (http://stevesouders.com/controljs/ ) is a JavaScript module for making scripts load faster.
Blaze (http://www.blaze.io ) does mobile performance results, in addition to wed
Pcapperf (http://pcapperf.appspot.com/ ) - Pcap Web Perforamance analyzer
Jdrop (http://jdrop.org/ ) provides a place to store JSON data in the cloud. The initial application is for storing performance data gathered from mobile devices. It's hard to analyze large amounts of information (HTTP waterfall charts, HTTP headers, document source, etc.) on a mobile device. Jdrop lets you gather this data on the mobile device but analyze it remotely on a larger screen.

Kristina Halvorson

@halvorson

Content/Communication

There is so much crap on the web. We’ve piled trashy content on trashy content to make a WALL-E world of junk on the web.
Content is the last thing the web team talks about when planning a site.
“Content Strategy”

o “Content strategy helps figure out how content will meet your business objectives”

o Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content.

§ Strategy is a plan for attaining a specific goal or result.

Ask: What? Why? For whom? How? For whom? With what? By whom? When? How often? What next?
Core Strategy:

o Substance

o Workflow

o Governance

o Structure

Content is like a fragile plant and once you plant it you need to take care of it (feed it, water it, ecosystem etc.)

John Gruber

@gruber

The Gap Theory of UI Design

GUI was about the interface, not a interface
G now dropped
GUI: for real people, API: for programmers
13 years of mac and the buttons stayed the same. Driven by a concern for the user, drive this conservative approach.
Uniformity

o Every app needed to be like it was wearing the uniform or “Team Mac”

o This is now dead.

Good book

o “No country for old men” Cormac McCarthy

o http://www.amazon.com/Country-Old-Men-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0375406778

TV Shows vs Movies

o Increased flexibility with movies

o With tv shows, consistency is more expected

You have to be aware of the rules in order to know how to break them for artistic effect
Design: How it works. Style: How it looks
User Interfaces are clothing for the mind

o If you’re a designer and don’t want to conform, you’re in luck

o Fashion designers don’t take your old clothes out and replace them with an update

o Fashion never ends. Brace your users “things will change”.

Doug Bowman

@stop

Delivering Delight

We need to delight our users. We’re not doing it enough.
We should be building design into our products or services.
Delightful experiences are memorable experiences.
Deliver delight:

o Capture attention

o Increase engagement

o Create desire for more

People have a strong desire to return to a delightful place
The tipping point between positive and negative experiences depends of expectations and other variables.
6 tips to deliver delight:

o Exceed expectations

§ Under promise, over deliver

§ Don’t create hype too early

o Deliver value early

§ Reduce steps a user has to go through

o Sweat the small details

o Embrace serendipity

§ Don’t force all users down the same path

§ Taking an unexpected path delights users

§ e.g. keyboard shortcuts on twitter, who to follow

o Package it nicely

§ Be it physical or digital products

§ There is no faster way to cheapen an experience

o Listen, respond & act

§ Identify when you’re not delighting

§ Monitor what your customers are saying by doing a search and adding ‘hate’ to it.

§ Search for sentences like “wish twitter would”, “wish twitter had” to get the pulse of what people are thinking

§ Showing people that you are listening and responding, even if you can’t fix it, helps to delight users.

Dribble (http://dribbble.com/ ) is a place where designers can share shots of what they’re working on, without sharing everything.
“Good design isn’t about making decisions for your users, it’s about making those decisions irrelevant” @rands

Amanda Palmer

@amandapalmer

Amanda Palmer talks new music paradigm, blogging, Twitter and life

There is an intersection happening between creatives and technical people. There is however not a lot of direct interaction between artists and technical people.
Being open on web (blog, twitter, …) helps interconnect her personal and professional life. Making connections with fans builds loyalty.
Amanda does ninja gigs: advertises gig on twitter and sees who turns up. e.g. at Byron Bay beach.
Twitter is like living in a room above a fantastic bar; you can at any time go downstairs and connect with all these different people.
“Good will and free content on the behalf of an artist breeds success that may not be immediately visible or measurable”

Sagemcom RM50 Internet Radio Review

2011-01-18T21:52:00.001+13:00

I have been trialling the Sagemcom RM50 Internet Radio since Friday and had mixed success.

Functionality overview

The RM50 enables you to listen to more than 13,000 Internet radio stations around the world, conventional FM stations and audio within your home network via Wifi (in theory). The “Smart Random” function gives the listener the possibility of random access to other radio stations of the same genre as those most frequently listened to. There’s also an alarm clock.

Installation

Getting basic Internet connectivity

The theory is that you turn it on, enter your Wifi information and you’re away. Well that may work for many people, however I found it not to be as simple, possibly due to:

having a hidden SSID, and
having mixed case in the name of my SSID.

I tried entering in the Wifi SSID and password manually twice with no success (although did note that I could not get lowercase when entering the SSID, it was however there for the password). I even double checked my TKIP/AES and WPA Personal/WPA2 Personal Wifi setup and tried a few other configurations.

WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) was also an option so I gave that a go, both with and without a PIN and also had no joy with either.

I then published my SSID and found I was able to connect and it all worked fine with lovely crisp sound.

Accessing music on the home network

In theory you should be able to easily access music on your home network. Well, I haven’t found this to be the case at all. As a UpnP player I expected that it would just pickup content from Windows Media Player or iTunes running on the network. I did manage to get it to find an XP-based machine running TVersity media server however it didn’t find any of the other media servers we have running on Windows 7, XP or Vista-based machines.

Upgrading the firmware

Having had mixed results with accessing music on the home network I decided to upgrade the firmware on the device to the latest version. This was available from the Sagemcom UK website (RM50 wasn’t there for all countries).

A USB to mini-USB cable is required to do a firmware upgrade (not included). The upgrade would not run on Vista, but on XP was easy enough (although the user interface could be friendlier).

The upgrade enabled mixed case SSID names to be entered but I found Internet Stations were unavailable when I went to use them! I was wondering if I had broken the device by doing the firmware upgrade, but when I tried the Internet radio several hours later (and having changed nothing else) it was working fine. Phew!

Accessing music on the home network cont….

I’m still however having challenges trying to access music on the home network. It sometimes finds content on the Windows 7 pc (which has Windows Media Player and iTunes), but it is inconsistent and doesn’t always find the pc at all. I have also had no joy connecting up with another pc running TVersity.

User Interface, General feel & Missing features

Putting the installation and accessing music woes on the home network aside, the device does look nice and has great sound quality, has RCA outputs for connecting to a stereo, the buttons are quite sturdy and it has a nice finish.

Almost all the buttons however require quite a bit of pressure and due to the shape and size of the device I often find myself holding the radio down as I push a button.

Cycling through the numerous Internet radio stations with the wheel is okay, however not ideal.

When I power on the radio (with the huge button on the back), it does take a while to connect to the network and the first screen that is then presented is the screen to choose a network. I’m not sure if this happens due to our setup or is normal; regardless I would prefer to go to the “Mode” screen or to continue from where it was when it was powered off.

The device runs on 5V power. As an alarm clock I would like to have battery backup.

Whilst there is a remote control, it would be nice to able to control the Internet radio from a pc or mobile device.

Conclusion

I’m in mixed minds at the moment whether I would buy this device. It is nice to stream music from the Internet without requiring a pc to be turned on, but I would prefer a more mature user experience.

What I learnt writing my first Android application

2010-12-24T14:33:00.001+13:00

I have recently released my first Android application to the Android market. Even with a basic application, there are a number of things that needed consideration I hadn’t thought about (particularly graphical design considerations).

Application functionality overview

One night at home, Jane asked me what temperature we should be cooking chicken to. We had a meat thermometer, but each time we wanted to know whether a meat was cooked enough we resorted to an Internet search to find the appropriate temperature. To make it easier I decided to write a basic application for her Nexus One Android device called Meat Temperature Guide that allowed her to select a type of meat from a dropdown list and to then display the details of the temperature to cook the meat to for rare, medium-rare, well etc. I later embellished the application to allow a user to select whether they want to see Celsius or Fahrenheit temperatures displayed and default this and the meat chosen to whatever they last had selected.

Getting Started

To get started I downloaded Eclipse, installed the Android SDK and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (using the SDK for Android 2.1) and ran through a basic tutorial on how to write an application. Java is the language for writing Android applications and even though my development skills are not currently strong, I found that this wasn’t a problem and could get by without too much trouble (expect for some graphical design challenges articulated below). The official Android development site is magnificent and has a wealth of useful information from getting you started to how to publish an application.

The Skeleton

I roughly sketched out on a piece of paper what I wanted the application to look like and then got into it. The first task was finding out what options were available for having a list and then selecting an item from it to get further information (the Android development site has this information). The Spinner is what I ended up using, and this aligned with my sketch. I used a strings.xml file file to populate the contents of the Spinner and then coded what to do depending on what was selected. Getting this working for one item selected (including everything in the “Getting Started” selection above) took me about 2 hours, which was a lot faster than I expected.

Making it pretty

Taking the data presented back from the Spinner and then making it look nice took me a long time to work out. If you have played around with Tables, Rows and Spans in HTML then doing Layouts in Android should be easy for you. I spent ages trying to get a layout working that had the meat doneness on one side and the temperature to cook it to on the other and couldn’t get it to line up properly. I showed it to Jane and in a few seconds she said; “If I was doing this in HTML I would add a span = 3 command here”. I looked up the equivalent to span in the Android layout syntax and found that there is a colspan attribute. I added this, recompiled and then stood back in amazement that it was now all looking brilliant.

Unit Testing

I mainly used the emulator for unit testing. This takes a long time to start up and on my old pc took about 5 minutes. Once started however you can install applications to it a lot faster; typically it was about 40 seconds to compile and then load.

I also occasionally emailed a copy of the Android Package (.apk) file to Jane to install on her phone; the .apk file is the file generated as part of compiling your application that brings it all together into one file and is typically in the “bin” directory. Emailing to Jane’s gmail account enabled her to simply click on an Install icon from within gmail. After she had then changed a setting to allow apps to be installed not from the market (the installation process told her what to do) she was away. Incidentally I did not observe any differences between using the emulator and using a real phone, other than occasionally needing to uninstall the application on the phone until I started incrementing version numbers (more about that later), and the phone being significantly faster (almost instantaneous) to install an application.

Options / Menu

When a user presses the preferences / options button on their Android device, the application displays options for the user to select. The Meat Temperature Guide has two options; Change between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and Credits.

Credits is just a simple dialog, and as simple as the concept of changing between Celsius and Fahrenheit sounds, it took me a while to work out how to display the correct meat temperature information for the meat that was on screen when changing the temperature type. I initially tried telling the Spinner to select the current item, but that didn’t work, so I made a call to repopulate the individual rows and this worked nicely. When repopulating the rows I have a very simple “if statement” that first gets the type of meat selected and then checks to see whether to display temperatures as Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Storing Preferences

Until I started using the application I hadn’t thought about storing preferences. As I used it however I found there were two preferences that I wanted to save whatever was last selected and then to then use this as the default for when the application was next started (even after the phone being turned off); the selection of Celsius or Fahrenheit and what meat was last selected. This is easily done using SharedPreferences which stores the information in a name value pair format. I then update it whenever the value changes and retrieve it when the application starts and set variables as required.

Icons & the Logo

When I started writing the application I didn’t think about what logo would be appropriate or what the icons would look like to get Credits information or to change from Celsius to Fahrenheit. There are User Interface Guidelines on the Android Development site about how these should look; have depth, lighting from above, size for icons vs menus vs … etc. I spent a lot of time trying to produce nice logos but decided after several hours that this was not my strong point; Jane however came to the rescue and produced the Android chef with a thermometer and the Celsius/Fahrenheit icon.

EULA & Credits

Having an End User License Agreement (EULA) accepted by users prior to using the application was mentioned on the Android Development site and also suggested as prudent on other forums. I followed the instructions for adding a EULA at http://bees4honey.com/blog/tutorial/adding-eula-to-android-app/ . In terms of the EULA text, I used the EULA from another Android application as a template; most are very similar.

I also added Credits to show attribution to where I got the Meat Temperature information from, and to thank Jane for her work on the logo and icon.

Revenue

Admob (owned by Google) makes it very easy to have advertising on an Android application. Sample code is provided and then it is just a matter of deciding where to put the ad, and then adjusting the layout. I ended up having a layout embedded within another type of layout to get the page looking how I wanted.

I made US$0.33 within the first 8 hours of the solution being on the market, and very little thereafter (so far!), but I can imagine that a popular application could be quite lucrative.

I am also not charging the user for the application.

Publishing

In order to release an application to the Android market and make it available to anybody, you need to have version information in the manifest file (this needs to be incremented for each release of the application), including information pertaining to what version of Android the application is for.

The application must also be signed. Eclipse makes this very easy to do.

There is a one time cost to Google to be able to put Android applications into the market of US$25. Once paid, and confirmation was received of payment and being accepted into the market it was possible to publish the application; this took ~1 day. In theory you’re supposed to be able to load all information about your application to the market (including a larger picture of the logo) prior to the acceptance to the market, but I didn’t find this to be case. I also found I needed to log out and then back in again to click Accept of everything required.

When uploading an application, you also include information about what is new in the current release. Once published, the application was instantly available in the market to download. The application can be found in the market at market://search?q=pname:gianouts.android.meattemperature or via the QR code displayed here.

Application Usage

Whilst the market does provide information such as how many times your application has been downloaded, and how many active installs (i.e. they haven’t removed it already), this information is not updated in real-time, and appears to be hours old; daily maybe.

Admob also provides some statistics, the most interesting part from which country adverts are being clicked on; most of my clicks have been from Europe.

Conclusion

In conclusion, writing the basic application is often the easy part, the more tedious part is the graphical design factor. The Android developer site is invaluable.

Are you making assumptions about how web-savvy your customers/users are? Two examples for consideration.

2010-10-24T19:48:00.001+13:00

We were in Europcar the other day to rent a car and a gentleman who was probably in his late 40’s was being explained the options of how to pay for road tolls. The first option mentioned was that he could simply go to the tolls website to pay. He threw his hands in the air and expressed that he knows nothing about websites. The option presented next was thankfully a lot more palatable, paying via entering credit card information over the phone.

Just over a year ago I was involved in putting a site together for a closed group of invitees and we thought it was reasonably intuitive to use. What we didn’t consider though was that some of our invitees were not used to signing up to websites and consequently they had never had to think about what their username would be or what picture they would use for an avatar (not to mention the process for how to get it onto their computer and then onto the website). For a subsequent event, we took this onboard and generated usernames and passwords up front and provided these to the attendees, and cut down the amount of information we collected, with additional information such as avatars being on a more detailed profile page. We also tested the process this time, and consequently had a lot more success.

It is very easy to make assumptions, so force yourself to step back and look at your product/service from a different perspective. Even better, test it a wide variety of people.

Is Social Media reducing the likelihood of serendipitously meeting people you know when travelling?

2010-10-20T20:23:00.001+13:00

I was pondering earlier today while over 2000km from home whether there is less likelihood now of serendipitously meeting people when travelling, since friends and family now have a greater awareness through social media and location-based sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tripit, Foursquare…) of where you are and where you are going (and vice versa).

About two hours after Jane & I had this discussion, whilst sitting down for lunch, a work colleague that sits a few desks away from me wandered past and said hi; she was in the area for a conference and both of us had no idea that the other would be in the area.

So rest assured, there are still lots of opportunities to randomly run into people while travelling. I wander who I’ll see next.

"Have 2-3 wins each week" and a few other pearls of wisdom

2010-09-20T20:48:00.002+12:00

Photo credit: Jane Gianoutsos

A contractor recently gave me some simple pearls of wisdom that are relevant beyond a contracting role and can apply to working on any project:

Have 2-3 wins each week.
Don't overstay your welcome.
Deliver what you say you are going to deliver.
Manage your stakeholders.

I like the simplicity of these and the focus they drive.

NZ Google Barcamp 2010 #nzgbc

2010-08-21T22:10:00.001+12:00

Arranged by Mike Riversdale, the NZ Google Barcamp 2010 brought together a bunch of people from throughout New Zealand to engage in discussions with a focus on Google. Here's a synopsis of my notes from some of the sessions I attended.

Location Based Services

There was a good discussion re GPS / Location apps that would be great for Primary School kids. Some of the key areas discussed (which are definitely not limited to only being suitable for kids) were:
- Museum tours (such as My Tours).
- Scribble maps enables you to easily scribble on Google Maps.
- Augmented reality and being able to visualise what a street looked like in 1910.
  - History Pin has already collected some good content from the past.
  - This is adding a time dimension to location.

Simile (MIT) is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets.
There is a lot of excellent information available in Layar for augmenting the real world with what you can’t see.
A location-based augmented reality example is being able to wander down a street, point your phone at a building and get information about the architect and what else they've created.
- DBpedia is doing some excellent work in this space. As per there website it is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.
Scavenger hunts, Geocaching and Virtual reality gaming such as grabbing objects in a virtual environment are examples of fun that can be had with location.
With services such as “Fix my street” that collect location based information, getting this information to the right party, getting them to action it, following up on it and the entire feedback loop is a key consideration.
There is a lot of data on the web, and if it has an open license it will drive additional services to be built based on the data.
- c.f. Base data vs adding value added services on top of the data.

Google Earth

Watched a very cool Google Earth video that http://planetinaction.com have done. Wow.
- Followed by an A-team van driving around San Francisco.
- Excellent for showcasing cruises, locations etc.
- There are a number of demos available at the website above.
Google SketchUp is excellent for creating 3d models.
You can create your own Google 3d fly-through tour with http://planetinaction.com/places.htm

Building Maker is a 3D modelling tool for adding buildings to Google Earth.
Google is really wanting to make a model of our real world over time (for Google Earth at least).
- This then raised a data ownership concern. If individuals are able to add information to Google Earth and Google owns the data then should we be concerned? It will be interesting to see whether OpenStreetMap ventures into this space.
Imagine using Google Street view for seeing what's on sale in a store. If the data was up-to-date the quality is there.
A Google Earth Application framework can be found at http://planetinaction.com/gearthframework/

Android development (the Sprite Software story)

Online backup/restore for Android.
- Spritebackup
- Backs up SMS, Contacts, Call Logs, Photos, Videos, Settings, …
- Box.net and Dropbox releases
If you can get your software adopted as part of an OEM this is typically significantly more lucrative than selling it via an app store.
Android 2.2 backup is system settings and apps bought from store restored. That is all currently, but APIs available for apps to backup.
Sprite Software also have products to locate and protect your phone if it is stolen.

Education

I was probably 1 of about 2 people in the room that weren't teachers.
Google Apps is being used by a number of schools for both students and staff (with several others very interested in it).
- Keep teacher account separate from admin account.
- The key Google Apps components that appear to be being used are Email, Chat, Sites and Docs.
Can decide what you want students to have access to (inc. Enabling offline Gmail).
A key consideration is enabling access to additional applications as students advance in Years.
When students leave, being able to terminate their accounts easily is good without needing to do each student individually (e.g. by Year).
Allowing students to archive their information or move it to another Google account prior to losing their account is also ideal. These features are available.
Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook works well.
The Google Apps Updates site / RSS feed is an excellent resource for finding out about new features and changes.
Google Surveys are a great way to survey students.
Flexibility of permissions is important. Teachers would like to see all, ability for students to share with class etc.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Google Web Toolkit appears to essentially be an alternative to jQuery for building application-intensive websites. It is very powerful once you get your head around it.
Biggest problems with GWT were with Chrome (of all browsers); initially at least.
Inner classes are good to use; typically better optimised.
The event model GWT uses is like nothing else so takes a bit to get used to.
Components and Widgets are really easy to write.
Fast and stable.
Make it clear to people you are building an application, not a webpage. (c.f. state etc.)
GWT RPC can't be cancelled. Needs to be considered.
For any Java class you can say to use a Java GWT class instead.

Pros and Cons of Software as a Service (SaaS) with a focus on the cons

2010-08-17T20:45:00.001+12:00

There is a lot about Software as a Service (SaaS) that I love, but it is important to ensure that if you are looking at a SaaS solution to also consider what some of the cons are.

I recently posted these as a comment over on Ben's "Software Delivery Approaches – Debunking the Myths" post and thought it worthy to reiterate the key points.

The key Pros (from my perspective) Ben articulated with SaaS were as follows:

Ability to provision almost instantly.
Pushes infrastructure, service, and support costs to the vendor.
Upgrades are automatically applied to all users – all customers work with the same application.

Cons of ASP and SaaS options (which will have differing levels of risk based on who the vendor is):

If the vendor goes out of business, then you may have a significant problem with little or no warning.
Depending on where the data is hosted you may be subject to different laws.
From an information/data security perspective you are placing trust in another organisation. On the flip-side for many organisations, this may however be better than what they would have anyway.
With SaaS you are moreso at the mercy of the vendor’s roadmap changing with little or no notice. Whilst this can be a positive in terms of functionality delivered, I’ve seen this one go the other way whereby a vendor “changed the rules” and as a result this raised a number of audit/risk challenges.
Depending on your timezone, scheduled downtime (if required) may not be at an optimal time.
Potential for increased latency depending on the location of the service. This may however end up being closer to your customers so may in fact be a positive.
Integration may be confined to API limits that are not suitable.

Product Development: The value of asking "Why?"

2010-08-05T19:42:00.000+12:00

I attended an excellent presentation from Daniel Szuc last night at the UX Auckland meetup. There was lots of excellent content and one of the slides he presented was a good reminder about asking the simple questions when embarking on the delivery of a new product:

What does this product do?
What do you love about the product? (Would you buy it?)
What does the product team love about the product? (Passionate?)
Could you sell the product? (if asked to)

By asking these questions up front you may avoid progressing with delivering a product that provides no or little value. Up front it is easier and cheaper to either redesign or abandon as required.

Barcamp Auckland 4 Summary

2010-07-17T20:03:00.001+12:00

I had yet another excellent time at Barcamp Auckland 4 #bcak4. This is an unconference run each year that brings together developers, designers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others for discussion about topics of interest.

The sessions are always thought provoking and there are lots of super knowledgeable people and hence great discussions. My notes from the sessions are below.

Building client side libraries in the enterprise

Simon Lieschke, @slieschke

Build on top of Yahoo! User Interface library
- YUI doc tool for generating source code notes

Developer declares dependencies and this will then determine what libraies to use
Have generated tag library docs
When building javacript libraries, use a functional test page (e.g. if change CSS then show all different buttons) #regressiontesting
- currently build page manually
Selenium mentioned as a tool to consider. It looks quite good.
Unit Testing
- JsUnit
- YUI test is a bit nicer than JsUnit. It provides better tools for simulating browser behaviour.
- Google JS Test Driver may be another option

Doing Less. Using SaaS and API's to automate your workflow

Glen Barnes, @barnaclebarnes

Repetitive work sucks
Whenever you do a task think “Can I automate this or make this more efficient?”
MailChimp is good for small Mailing Lists. WYSIWYG editor abut can also upload.
Keep organised and focus on your tasks and opportunities. e.g. CapsuleCRM
Check out Capsule API
Capistrano is a good for automated deployment of websites.
TextMate bundles
Use context aware snippets (where available). Consider reuse of text you often write (e.g. an email signatures)
Hoptoad collects errors generated by other web applications, and aggregates the results for developer review.
Dropbox is awesome
Tripit is great
Quicksilver, Instapaper, Quicklauncher
Tools good for problem tickets for CSRs are not necessarily good for developers and bug tracking.
Automated testing (e.g. Selenium)
Run a source code checker (e.g. lint) across your code before you can check in to source code control system

Raising venture capital how to develop funding relationships

Yvonne McLaren @bucketree

Venture Capital is like an “Entrepeneur/Innovator, Investor, Creation of future capital” triangle with the Venture Capitalist in the middle.
Show where clear profit is
Look for partnerships. You usually can't compete straight with big, but you could possibly sell to them.
If you're getting paid in shares, make it a convertible note so you get bought out when the company gets larger investment
Have a shareholders agreement
NZTE's Escalator is investment service for small-to-medium enterprise
Will the VC make your idea work?
Don't treat Mum & Dad investment any different than investment from a stranger

Open Data in NZ - where we're at, and where to next

Rob, Glen, @amatix @barnaclebarnes

Lots of good stuff happening in NZ
Open Government, Open Data and Open Source are different things.
Government does not work quickly
There is sometimes a worry about releasing data that is not 100% correct, and how updates should be fed back
data.govt.nz is an excellent resource for NZ government data.
Using a proper data catalogue is a good idea
Why open data? To sell, show use cases of what can be done with the data.
OpenStreetMap has been enriched with Open Government data (for the Chatham Islands so far). Aiming for whole of NZ in 6 months. Includes cattle stops and trees.
Crowdsource the improvement of data. This requires thought as to how the process will work.
The new MapQuest is using OpenStreetMap for all data other than the US at the moment. This should also aid in improving the data.
Start with low hanging fruit. Don't try and do everything at once.
http://cat.open.org.nz/ has lots of great info.
Access to local council data (that is cost effective) would be good. There is a wealth of excellent data there.

What do you want from your Telco / Service provider?

Simon, Rob, @gianouts, @nzrob

Rob & I ran this session and threw up what was discussed on the whiteboard. I may not necessarily with some of the points and this group is not necessarily representative of the mass market but there is definitely some good food for thought. I have transcribed the whiteboard information below.
Reliable
- 111 everywhere
- Data access everywhere
  - Something is better than nothing
More flexibility in rural areas to access more fibre in a cost-effective way
Use of shared physical pipes/ducts
APIs
- Rationale for why a Telco should do this: Reduce costs to build things themselves
- Read & Write access to Billing data
  - Use Case: Right-planning
  - Use Case: Integration into customers’ billing system
  - Use Case: Buy flat white and put on Telco bill
- Access Voicemail
- MMS/SMS
- Any data friendly format is okay (i.e. not PDF)
Reasonable data charges
- Fixed & Mobile
- Roaming too
Don’t do content
Tivo (or similar) – why?
‘Powershop’ type of model
- Use case: This weekend I’ll use company xyz
Fast to/from everywhere
- content from wherever
Why have Yahoo! (or similar)? Audience wants to chose whatever.
- prefer reduced cost instead
Don’t want email or hosting
Upload vs Download
- appropriate plans
- encourage people to generate and upload content
- Don’t care whether info is stored in NZ or not (privacy is not a concern)
- Want fast access to data
“Don’t make me think”
Quality of video/YouTube/Hulu/…
A Google/YouTube/Gaming comparison across sites would be good to aid consumers to choose appropriate plan and provider
- This needs to be independent of a Telco
Well priced mobile plans and phones
Unlocked phones
Simple plans
Easy billing

7x5 minute slots

Pacific Fibre, Lance Wiggs

Nobody else has data caps as much as NZ

University of Maryland No Media experiement, Mike Dickson

University of Maryland ran a no media (email/fb/twitter) day with 200 students withoutmedia.wordpress.com .
Many of the students couldn't do it. Felt literally sick (a real addiction)
The only email messages are school related
The only mail I have ever received is email
I haven't used a landline telephone in over a year
I don't answer my phone until after 12 noon
I watch tv online
I haven't turned my machine on in 3 years

Is EVAL evil?

Sandboxed it can be very useful.

Interclue, Seth Wagoner

We often make assumptions about what people know. c.f. What is a browser?
Interclue is a browser add-on
Lazerus for auto-save of forms to your hard drive
Each browser is different
Prefetching icons can dramatically improve performance
Making money: fremium model

Judson Steel, Scott Judson

Job Dispatch app for Hines security.
Ipad-based
Integrates with Timesheets, Stock etc.

Augmented Reality

Definition on AR "combines real and virtual, is interactive in real time, true 3d"
Check out how a logo model looks when it's built
Try on clothes.
Face recognition to get info from FB/Linked In etc. and then overlay
Face recognition site: http://tat.se

Ragtag Leadership: how organisations need more Captain Mal and less Captain Kirk

Simon Young, @audaciousgloop

Writing a book. A lot of leadership books are really boring.
A lot of management models can be be found around us. Science fiction can teach us a lot.
The Star Trek management model... everybody knows the mission, same uniform, embodies the values
Doctor Who management model... not tribal like Star Trek, but sees things differently (e.g.. consultant) or have special tools
Firefly management model is akin to startups... small, need to earn money, ragtag. People sign up for their own reasons.
Improv – make the most of every situation
Win-win
Entrepeneurial
Creating a culture is a key part
Humour can be useful in times of stress
Choose what to be disciplined about and what to let go.

Getting the most out of Home Tech - Bring your Gadget stories and connectivity nightmares

Rob Inskeep, @NZRob

You can put motion sensors in a room and turn lights on/off, but different people react differently to this. Where's the switch?
A big consideration when buying devices for the home; they should last longer than the 18 month cycle of an iPhone.
With a Linksys WRT modem you can load Tomato on it and get a mesh
WAF (Wife Approval Factor) is a key part of purchasing decisions.
Use your tv as a photo frame when it's not in use. In addition to family pics, pics from Nasa etc are great for discussions.
Use the likes of Google Powermeter to understand your data consumption
If building a house it is a good idea to put network cabling in up front. It is much harder later.
Run ducting instead of just cabling. This provides for additional future proofing.

Challenges of App development (and web development) for mobile (android / iphone / Symbian / J2ME / Blackberry / etc)

@burngreg

iPhone established early on how much you can put on a screen
Lots of different devices makes it harder for developers; different screen sizes, memory size etc. This is however reality so needs consideration
With a soft keyboard on many newer devices there's not a lot of the screen left anymore.
Web pages don't currently stand up to the performance of a native app on a mobile device.
In the Apple world there is a worry that Apple will come out with an app and revoke your app from their marketplace.
Know and understand the rules before starting an app for a closed marketplace. When doing dev for another company cover yourself and get their lawyers to check all is okay. Also rules may change along the way so monitor rules changes (& likely ones).
Identifying if a user is using Wifi or a more costly data connection is not easy on all devices.
Some apps have sensors, some have compasses; need to know what they have for some apps.

Why is my Powerpoint 2002/2003 file so big? How big (MB) is each slide? A solution...

2010-07-13T18:29:00.001+12:00

I had an oversized Powerpoint 2003 presentation even after doing the tips and tricks I was aware of. After a bit of searching I came across two excellent resources:

The first link contains myriad information that is useful. Bill's SizeMe Add-in (works with PowerPoint 2002 (XP) and PowerPoint 2003) is easy to install with the excellent documentation on the website and the amount of information generated about each slide surprised me.

It does take a while to churn through the slides (and it's a good idea to use a copy of your original presentation), however it does result it a break down of each component on a slide. The information can be viewed from within the Powerpoint itself or within Excel where it is easy to see where the bloat is coming from through the sorted raw data and graphs.

Online calendaring tools: Google vs Yahoo vs Microsoft

2010-07-07T23:51:00.002+12:00

I tend to always use my calendar at work (MS Outlook with Exchange at the backend) as my core calendar and then synchronise this with my mobile phone. This works well for me but I thought I should check out the Online calendar scene.

My requirements for an Online Calendar are pretty simple, but the caliber of the different tools was quite significant:

Has a nice look and feel and is fast enough
Works!
Can handle recurring appointments
Can synchronise with iPhone, Android and ideally Symbian OS
Can synchronise / provide data to other calendar based mashups
The company is highly likely to still be around in five years
Reasonable availability, stability, data integrity and security

Online Calendars
Google Calendar

None of the other Online calendar came close to matching the slick usability of Google Calendar. The look & feel of this calendar is excellent. Nice stand out features also include having both public and private URLS (supporting XML, iCal and HTML), support for multiple calendars, quick add by typing natural text such as "Dinner with Jane at Clooney 7pm tomorrow", delegated administration and additional lab features that could be enabled. In terms of Mobile phone integration, support is provided for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Mobile and Other.

This was my preference of the calendars that I looked at.
Yahoo! Calendar

I quite like the Yahoo! web mail client which has a really nice and modern feel. The Yahoo! Calendar on the other hand feels like an application that was built 10 years ago. There are some good delegated administration sharing capabilities provided, but Google Calendar leaves this in the dust as an online calendar. In terms of Mobile phone integration, there is an excellent looking iPhone application, and Blackberry and Android applications too.

Windows Live Calendar

I was actually quite surprised with Windows Live Calendar; I had very low expectation of this. It's look and feel is however very similar to that of the Google Calendar. Support delegated administration and sharing, multiple calendars, public and private URLS (supporting XML, ics and HTML). In terms of Mobile Phone integration this seems to be a bit vague, with Wikipedia noting "Windows Live Calendar does not support Microsoft's own Exchange ActiveSync protocol which is found in many of the major Smartphone operating systems (including iPhone, BlackBerry and Android). As such, users of Windows Live Calendar are unable to synchronise their appointments with the diary on their mobile phone".

Calendar mashups and what their requirements are of tools / sites providing data

Tungle.me
Tungle.me is a scheduling application with synchronises with your existing calendar:

Eliminate double-bookings, time zone mishaps and the back-and-forth of finding a time to meet
Easily schedule meetings, inside or outside your organization
Invite others to schedule with you, without having to sign up

This is a good example of a calendar mashup solution, so I was interested to see what they supported.

Supporting iCal gives Tungle.me quite a bit of flexibility, but in terms of the main online calendars it came down to Google, Windows Live or Yahoo!. It was interesting to see that TripIt and Plancast were also explictly listed as calendars to synchronise with.

30 Boxed
30 Boxes's 30 Boxed is another example of a calendar mashup tool. 30 Boxed lets you build calendars out of all sorts of information like photos and blogs, including your personal calendar data. This solution is quite flexible and supports link(s) to any blog, flickr photos page, or any ical/rss/xml data feed.

Calendar Mashup Summary
Assuming the above two mashups are reasonably representative of the calendar mashup space, this should not be a limiting factor in choosing any online calendar offering since iCal should be widely supported anyway.

Overall Conclusion
If you are after an Online Calendar, then Google Calendar would be my current pick of the bunch.

Exporting from Excel to a CSV with a delimiter other than a comma. It is possible!

2010-06-21T20:58:00.000+12:00

I was surprised today to find that when I had a need to export an Excel file out to a CSV file that there wasn't anywhere within Excel (that I could find at least) to change the delimiter from a comma to something else.

The reason I needed to change the delimiter was that the text had commas in some of the fields, and although the text was put into double quotes by Excel this wasn't suitable for me importing easily via PHP into a MySQL database. I was initially wanting to import the xls file via PHP into MySQL but there was a lack of code available to support this, so I decided to stick with the CSV option.

After a bit of searching I came across a blog post from 2005 that had the answers, and I thought it worthy to replicate it here for when I or others need it:

To change the default on your PC to a pipe rather than a comma bring up your default options window by clicking Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Regional Settings.
Click the “Number” tab and in the “List Separator” field, replace the current default separator with the one you want to use (let’s say a pipe symbol | ).
Click “OK” to save the change and close the window. You can now save Excel files as pipe delimited files by simply choosing to 'Save As' CSV.

In Windows XP there is an extra step involved:
When you open the Regional settings window, you have to click customize next to the language choice drop down. That will bring up another window with “Numbers” as the first tab item. Change the “List separator” to whatever you want to use as a delimiter.

Big thanks to the "Astrochimp: Export CSV with Any Delimiter" post.

Issues, Risks, Assumptions, Questions and Decisions Register Template

2010-06-13T19:27:00.001+12:00

I have been using a spreadsheet that I have been slowly extending over the years for recording and monitoring Issues, Risks, Assumptions, Questions and Decisions. I tend to store this in a central repository and encourage team members to add and update entries. I also encourage the recording of entries to be in terms that somebody in another team (business or technically-oriented) could read and understand. We then review this regularly, particularly with how we are tracking with closing out issues. Below is a link to the template that you are welcome to use and customise as you need.

The template can be downloaded at http://www.scribd.com/doc/32966336/Issues-Risks-Assumptions-Questions-Decisions-template

<p>&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;Issues, Risks, Assumptions, Questions and Decisions Register Template&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;</p>