Shawn on Technology

The Yagni Principle

2011-09-28T11:59:00.002-03:00

There are a lot of reasons why we do things in software development, not the least of which is that somebody somewhere will find what we're doing somewhat useful which in turn will differentiate us from our competition and earn us money. Too often, I find developers working on features that 'may be useful in the future,' while the truth is, the fancy code will likely rot before it becomes useful. Before you write something, think of the possibility that You Ain't Gonna Need It (YAGNI).

Developers can easily come up with shiny new features, but development takes time and resources, introduces risk and complexity and doesn't necessarily add value. Not always does a re-work of architecture to accommodate some future requirement constitute a good idea. Ideally, a proper architecture would allow us to defer implementation decisions until they are needed without impacting the existing product.

A simple principle of development is to write the simplest thing that could work. I've seen lots of applications and frameworks that do everything imaginable, but usually at the cost of simplicity.

Does this mean that I think we shouldn't plan for future requirements? Absolutely not. In fact, I would say that all developers should architect in a way that allows for future development, just leave the details for later...when someone asks for them...and is willing to pay for them.

A note on craftsmanship

2011-09-09T13:12:00.003-03:00

Considering that the lion's share of software development costs is spent in maintenance, doesn't it make sense that the up-front investment should be spent in making sure that maintenance is as low cost as possible?

Often times we are driven by project timelines and drop-dead dates only to be saddled with a big lump of unmaintainable code. I've been doing some reading on software craftsmanship and admittedly, some things make you wonder if the tedium of 'extract til you drop' and 'test first' are worth the effort...after all, it seems that some things could potentially double the initial development time.

If 75% of software lifecycle is in maintenance, and 25% is in initial development. Suppose I double my initial development; if my maintenance is costs are cut in half, then I've saved about 12.5% of my overall cost of development.

25 * 2 + 75 *.5 = 87.5%

If I can reduce my initial development by half, but it doubles my maintenance costs, then it will eventually cost the organization an additional 62.5% more than it had to and as much as 75% more than it would have if I had just spend some more up front time making code maintainable.

25 * .5 + 75 * 2 = 162.5% + 100 - 87.5 = 175%

Easy math for the brass.

Keep your (over)head down

2011-08-05T09:00:00.162-03:00

One of the most challenging areas to address when working in an agile environment is managing overhead.

Anyone who has actually read the agile manifesto can tell you that agile favors collaboration over process because process is expensive and time consuming, and in the end, nowhere near as valuable as collaboration. This doesn't mean that you don't follow a process in your organization, this simply points out that when one of these two elements has to give, it must always be process.

My preference in scrum is one week iterations, especially when the requirements for a project are vague. The reason for this is because vague requirements equals blurry vision and blurry vision usually equals frequent changes in direction. I was told recently that the problem with iterations that are too short is that the overhead is too high; by the time you get out of all those planning meetings and demos and scrums, you don't have any time left to do actual work.

The jury is in on shorter iterations, and the verdict is widely accepted. The obvious solution is to reduce your overhead...starting with much shorter meetings with fewer attendees. After that, collaboration then becomes a much more intimate, and in my opinion, a more effective experience.

I can tell a team is forming when I frequently see one or more developers standing over the shoulder of another developer looking at his or her screen with two or more sets of index fingers pointing at something on the screen. I like to refer to these sessions as a huddle; it is where the 'how the heck are we going to do this?' get's done.

I like to try and separate the 'what' from the 'how' during the development process. The what involves the whole team. Everybody on the team needs to know what is being done so that they can adjust their actions to best accomplish the goal. The how is best determined by the ones that are actually doing the work...so long as it fits in with the bigger what that the team is working on. Planning meetings that include the whole team should focus on what and stay away from how. In most if not all cases, 80% of the team will not need to know how things are done, and if they do, then they can hook up with the right team members off line to work this out.

Every time I feel like a meeting is dragging on, it is usually because we have gone too deep into the how portion of the topic or worse, complete digression into useless background information.

Aim for:
Daily Scrum - 10 minutes max
Demo - 30 minutes
Sprint planning - 30 minutes
Retrospective - 30 minutes

The tough one here is obviously the 30 minute planning session, some have said that the sprint planning meeting is time-boxed to 4 hours, suit yourself. Keep in mind that this meeting is to basically create the sprint contract, not solve all the problems that the sprint poses. Problem solving meetings are best done in the huddle and only with the team members that are actually implementing the solution. You may have a need to periodically have a more in-depth planning meeting, I suggest every four sprints perhaps do this.

Keep in mind that this is a guide, take as much time as you need, but remember to stick to what and stay away from how.

http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/files/Simple_Sprint_Template.pdf
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/sprint-planning-meeting
http://www.slideshare.net/vickidhiman/what-is-a-sprint-planning-meeting

Keeping out of the weeds

2011-07-29T09:03:00.001-03:00

I had the very proud opportunity this year to attend the grade 9 graduation ceremony of my second daughter and watch her deliver a speech to her class about moving forward and not being afraid to make mistakes. I have to say, it was inspiring to say the least. What really blew me away was that here was this young lady that I used to hold on my lap and rock to sleep that was now quite possibly inspiring more than a couple of her classmates and helping to shape their futures.

As parents, we take responsibility for our children and tend to take ownership of their bigger mistakes and shake our heads at the smaller ones. We puff up with pride at their accomplishments, but in truth, it is our children that step up and make the future happen. My goal as a parent is that one day, my children won't need me, but hopefully will still want me around.

Back in the auditorium, I was hoping that I played some part in inspiring my daughter the way she was inspiring her classmates. We give guidelines and support, we answer their questions, we challenge them, we cheer for them and we correct them.

What we have to remember is that this is their future an their life, we are just the guides for as long as they need or want us around.

So what does this have to do with technology?

I am hesitant to compare folks I work with to my children, but the common thread is in the approach to helping them succeed. As a problem solver, my tendency is to jump in and solve problems. The challenge is to know what types of problems I should be solving. Too often, managers and leaders are quick to come up with solutions and dictate them to their teams. Putting aside how right or wrong our solutions may be, this simply doesn't scale and doesn't give room for other bright people to shine.

As a manager, it is far more productive to lead people that can invent on their own and solve problems on their own and simply look to me for definition of riverbanks instead of needing me to pull them through tough the rapids (so to speak). My job is to watch and listen as they navigate through and make sure that outside perils are kept at bay and not impeding their success.

If you manage people, instead of dictating steps, try setting guidelines. Instead of solving their problems, try listening and supporting them as they solve their own problems. Instead of taking credit, give it away. Instead of pointing fingers, take the responsibility and challenge your team to improve.

Picasa Facial Recognition

2010-07-06T09:31:00.001-03:00

Image via CrunchBase

After getting back from my trip to India, I was uploading photos of my trip where I generally use the Picasa desktop application. What I didn’t know existed was the way that Picasa employs a facial recognition component to crop out faces and tag them, in some cases automatically once it learns the faces of people you know. In about an hour I had added names for over 100 of my contacts to hundreds of photos. Once I had the tags, I can easily see all the photos of my wife or kids with a few short clicks. It also thumbnails all of the headshots giving me tons of poses I didn’t realize I had.

The feature is available in both the desktop and web versions of Picasa, but the interface is a bit different for each.

In Picasa desktop, click on the ‘People’ tab to get started and it will immediately begin to clip faces from all your photos and put them in the ‘unknown’ list. Then you just click to ‘add a name’ and it will search your contact list or allow you to create a new person if one doesn’t exist. The web version works very similar, but you just click the link on the right hand side of the page to get started.

Is this a facebook killer do you think?

Google Calendar Sync

2010-06-11T08:43:00.001-03:00

Image via Wikipedia

Like most people, I have a work schedule to keep as well as a personal schedule. Managing two calendars invariably causes conflicts and over commitment, so lots of people manage their personal schedules in their office scheduling environment. I see lots of problems with this, since I try to keep my personal life and my professional life as separate as possible.

Google to the rescue. I keep my personal calendar in my Gmail account and I sync that to my iPod over the air. Using Google Calendar sync, I can publish my Outlook calendar from work to my Gmail account so I have all my appointments in one spot.

This little app runs in your system tray and pushes your calendar items to your Google calendar on a scheduled basis. This way, my work appointments are in Outlook and my personal appointments aren’t.

Media: You’re not the client, you’re the product…

2010-06-04T14:12:00.001-03:00

Image via Wikipedia

I had a conversation with my wife the other day about the fact that she had recently renewed her subscription to one of the magazines that stack up in our bathroom. What was interesting was that she found that she could go on-line and read the exact same content without paying anything for it. She looked at it and wondered how the magazine could afford to do this…

The answer is simple in my mind…you (the reader) aren’t the client…the subscription fee is something you pay enable the publisher to produce the medium so that they can send you all those ads. The content around the ads…well, that’s the fertilizer for the garden (yes, the reader is the garden) The guys that pay for those ads…that’s the client. Just think, my cost to distribute over the internet is very small, I can now send you ads ALL THE TIME, think of how much I can sell that for to my client.

Makes me think that the message is the medium…not the other way around.

Link to a point in a YouTube Video

2010-06-01T13:48:00.001-03:00

Hey, did you know you can link to a specific point in a YouTube video by simply appending the time to start at the end of the URL? Something like #t=0m00s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEFxX0dfVY8#t=0m08s

Handy!

Instant Two Way Communication

2010-05-31T08:38:00.001-03:00

I love social media…twitter to be exact…the fact that I can take 10 seconds and write a thought about a product and within 48 hours, I open a dialog with a vendor is what is going to replace that glossy ad we’ve seen for years in the dentist office waiting room.

Last week, TweetDeck launched its newest version of its desktop twitter application. As usual, I gave it a try since I had switched from TweetDeck to YooNo a little while back. I use a number of Twitter clients including the plain old twitter web page when I need to and some for my iPod…truth is, I’m not religious about any of them, I swap them pretty much at will seeing as how most configuration for Twitter is in the cloud anyway. Anyway, long story short, on Monday morning, I get a reply from someone at TweetDeck (image below) BTW, the screen cap is from TweetDeck 0.34.2 since @RichardBarley was kind enough to engage me and my feature gripe…

Since there are a few things that I think are missing from TweetDeck, I thought it would be better to respond to Richard here on my blog instead of in a series of 140 character tweets. Welcome Richard!.

I like TweetDeck alot, I have it installed on both my desktop (home and work) and on my iPod as well. I like the fact that you can display multiple columns from different accounts, I like that you can reply all (although finding the reply all option is not intuitive), I like that it keeps a list of recent hashtags (although I’m not sure why a handy typedown feature for this isn’t available) and I like that it stores my searches and settings in an account that I can synchronize with my iPod.

What I think is missing, aside from the points that I mentioned already, is:

An easy way to insert an @contact from list of friends.
In-line image display from twitpic, yfrog, etc rather than having to click the image url.
Facebook status updates are weird, sometimes they change my status, other times they just post to my wall…I would like it to always update my status or at least have some way to configure it that I can understand.
I’d like to be able to combine multiple accounts into a single stream, facebook, LinkedIn, twitter all in one column if I like, or one at a time if the need arises…
Conversations should be easier to view…this does an ugly column popup in TweetDeck that I’m not fond of, much better to just expand below the tweet.
Automatic typedowns for contacts and hashtags. I have this in EchoFon on my iPod, but nobody else seems to have this.

There’s no question that TweetDeck is feature rich and robust, but some of the features appear more ‘tech’ focused than they are ‘user’ focused. I like apps like YooNo because they are very intuitive and focus on the user experience. I don’t get the same feeling from TweetDeck (IMHO).

Social Media in a Nutshell…

2010-05-04T16:12:00.001-03:00

I thought I would write a quick word about this new service for keeping up on all these social media channels that are such a big part of everyone’s world these days. Like many, I’ve grown fond of checking my twitter, facebook and LinkedIn status updates throughout the day. I have accounts in all of these for different reasons and I spend lots of time searching through timelines to see where I left off and then scanning everyone’s update. The downside to this is twofold; first it’s time consuming and secondly, it’s extremely addictive. A combination that will no doubt catch up with you at some point and leave you scrambling to finish all the other things that you have to deal with.

I’ve found this little site called NutshellMail which you can sign up for and have it monitor your social media accounts and send you an update a couple times per day. It lays out the report in a really nice format that allows you to see the latest status updates, events like birthdays in facebook and LinkedIn updates.

Aside from this, you get added features of getting a list of your ‘latest followers’ and your ‘latest quitters’ which is information that is hard to get through normal channels.

If you have some social media sites to keep up on, I recommend setting up an account in NutshellMail right now.

Driving Election Participation

2010-01-29T14:01:00.001-04:00

Recently I was following coverage of a symposium on electronic voting in Canada “What can Canada Learn?” was the question. Let me start by saying that I am far from impartial on this topic; I work for an electronic voting company that provides and Internet and Telephone voting system. That said, these are my thoughts and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or any of their partners, employees or affiliates. (//end disclaimer)

In my world, I see lots of these types of discussions, and what seems to be the common expectation is that somehow electronic voting will improve voter participation and be the savior of democracy. I’d like to think that were true, but I think it may be overstating the potential of Internet voting by saying that it has such power.

Voting participation at all levels of government is horrible. On average, I think most elections get somewhere around 30% participation on a municipal level and up near 50% at a federal level. When I talk to friends and family about voting, it is quite common to hear that they have no intention of EVER voting in an election…electronic or otherwise. Why is this? Certainly this doesn’t indicate a question of convenience, it seems more like a question of engagement. People feel that they have nothing to gain by voting and moreover, they feel that voting is almost akin to being played the fool by a corrupt and manipulative system.

In some cases, maybe I’m a bit old school. I believe strongly that it is more than just my right to vote, I think that it is my responsibility or even my duty to vote at every opportunity as a citizen of a free and democratic society. Other societies have decisions made other, more violent ways, but I want to make sure that I do my part to keep the idea of government by the people from becoming an extinct notion made irrelevant by an apathetic society.

There are some cynics that believe that a corrupt political process doesn’t really want to have increased engagement in the the political process; that the voter apathy that exists is actually engineered by incumbent politicians because as the voting population grows it becomes more difficult to control and manipulate. I think there may be some vague truth to this, but not to the point where a small group of people can manipulate two thirds of the population to just not care. Politicians are interested in influencing those who are likely to vote to vote for them, there is very little to be gained by attempting to influence anyone else to do anything from their perspective.

So what role does technology play?

I’m a software developer, and as developers we are constantly reminded that technology does not drive anything. People do what people do; if they can find an easier way, then they may or may not adopt it. Technology will never be more than an enabler because it makes it easier for those who drive processes and drive change to do so. I think that electronic voting does two things: 1) it allows for choice by giving people the opportunity to perform the task of voting using their preferred method, and 2) it logistically provides the ability to engage a larger population.

I think the choice part is obvious. Electronic voting allows people to vote in the comfort of their living room, on a bus or even in the supermarket if they want. There are a ton of arguments that usually stem from coercion or vote buying, but the reality is, at least here in Canada, this isn’t really at issue. The last thing a politician ever wants is for their mandate to come into question.

On the logistical side of things, you have to think about what higher participation percentages would do to a paper based voting system. Election staff are usually pretty busy people. It takes a great deal of planning to perform a high volume event that will take place over what is usually measured in hours and not days. Longer lineups, slower results and increased human error is what is waiting for increased voter participation in a paper based voting process. These are things that kill participation in the elections that follow. People and the media tend to remember things that don’t run smoothly for a very long time.

The truth is, in every election where on-line voting was used (at least in my experience) participation has increased to some degree. I can’t say that the mere presence of Internet Voting was responsible for this increase, in fact, I would say that candidates, media and election officials used electronic voting as a tool to drive participation. Democracy is not something that just happens. If you put a ballot box in the middle of the street and expect people to do something with it without engaging people by telling them what they are voting for, then NOTHING will happen.

Electronic voting is the tool, democracy is driven by people.

Comodo Personal Email Security

2009-11-20T13:35:00.001-04:00

Until this month, I have used Thawte freemail certificates for years to secure my personal email. This month, Thawte stopped providing certificates for personal email and have basically handed over their subscribers to Verisign as consolation. I think they offered me a free year, but then it would be $20 or so beyond that.

I started to look around for a replacement and decided to check out Comodo since I recently switched from Verisign to Comodo for one of my application servers and I’m reasonably happy with them for service.

I was pleased to find out that Comodo (http://www.instantssl.com) offers a free certificate signed by their CA. This last part is the important part because certificates form the basis of something called ‘trust’ on the internet.

A certificate in itself is basically just the result of a calculation performed on a big random number that is then used to encode information that cannot be modified without someone knowing about it. The calculation is performed in such a way that only the owner of the certificate can possibly come up with the result because the owner holds on to a separate ‘secret’ that allows this to happen. This secret is really big, very random and not likely to be guessed. So if someone signs an email, a text message, a file or even another certificate, you can be reasonably sure that it is legitimate.

All that has to happen is that people you send stuff to have to establish some kind of comfort with what your signature looks like. Think of it like an endorsement; you get a letter from your mom that says “I got bob to sign this” and you see your mom’s signature right underneath Bob’s signature. Since you know what your mom’s signature looks like, you now have a good reason to believe you know what Bob’s signature looks like. Now when Bob sends you a message and signs it, you know it is from Bob, because your mom endorsed Bob through a separate channel and you know Bob’s signature.

The Comodo certificate is trusted by everyone by virtue of the fact that the people that provide your web browser already trust them; so when they sign a certificate for you, you can then sign stuff and people can trust that it was signed by you, (or at least someone who has access to your email account).

If you want your own secure email certificate, check out:

http://www.instantssl.com/ssl-certificate-products/free-email-certificate.html

Once you have your certificate, you should be good to go, but in Outlook, you can check it out by clicking on your email options.

If your Certificate is selected in outlook you can then just choose to sign email by clicking the signature button on the toolbar. (it is likely hidden at first, you will probably have to click the little arrow button for ‘add/remove buttons’ on the toolbar).

If you want to encrypt email (make it hard for other people to read), you first have to get a copy of the persons certificate that you want to send encrypted email to. I usually just get them to send me an email that they’ve signed (yes, they have to set up their own certificate first) and then I just reply to them and click the ‘encrypt’ button on my reply.

Cool SideWiki posts by Google

2009-10-21T19:13:00.001-03:00

I think Microsoft tried to do this with 'discussions' that required a huge back end and nobody used it. This seems seamless and useful. Its like annotating web pages.

in reference to: Sidewiki - Toolbar Help (view on Google Sidewiki)

Google Street View

2009-10-08T12:49:00.001-03:00

I was on my way to Halifax heading up Robie Street one day a few months back and I saw the “Google” car passing me Dartmouth bound. So now that street view is up and running, I thought I would go back to the spot I saw them and see what they saw.

Yes, that’s my car…

View Larger Map

Billing for your time

2009-09-21T09:07:00.001-03:00

Does anybody else hate doing timesheets? Before I started in the IT field, my life was that of a bookkeeper. I lasted all of 2 years before the monotony got to me and thought that I had better get into something else before someone had to talk me off of a ledge somewhere. Keeping records was never something that held my attention for very long.

The trouble is, without some kind of record keeping, nobody will pay you to do what you do. Somebody, somewhere is going to ask where their investment dollars are being spent, and when they do, you had better have some documentation to back up your story.

I came across this little web application recently and so far, I’m pretty impressed with it. I had an idea that I would build something, but being busy (catching up on my timesheets for one) I decided to see if there was something available at a reasonable price. Free is always an eye-catcher for me.

SlimTimer is a little REST application that you can sign up for a free account which allows you to create and share tasks and then use a lightweight client to use as a stopwatch while you work at your desktop. This is perfect for a developer that does most of their billable time on a computer, not so much for a field engineer who travels around all day long. That said, I’m already feeling more billable every minute.

Having a web browser open all day long sounds good, but in practice, being a developer, the crashing browser is part of my day. Not really an issue though for SlimTimer if you use Bubbles which is a free little web platform that allows you to run simple we applications from your system tray in Windows. Using bubbles allows you to open the client with a single click without running your browser…neat.

Lastly, the reporting capability is very flexible and allows you to query your tasks by date, tag, user (if you are sharing tasks) and task. You can print timesheet reports or invoices right from the application.

As I mentioned, the basic account is free, however, you can name your price and pay for premium services such as weekly backups and exporting.

If you are a developer, the service has a documented API that will allow you to interact with the service from your own applications.

Cover your …um… PIN

2009-09-06T08:58:00.001-03:00

I was disturbed the other day on my way home from work, to listen to a radio interview on CBC that depicted one lady’s experience with debit card fraud. The fact that somebody illegally copied this person’s debit card is one thing, but the fact that she didn’t have a clue about how the technology works is frightening.

The annual re-imbursement for debit card fraud is somewhere in the range of $100 million dollars each year, and growing. The corporate response is to replace the traditional magnetic strip with chip technology. Chip technology is harder to copy then magnetic strips and provides an embedded encryption technology to allow for secure communication of the card data to your bank.

I did a little Googleing on the technology and found lots of corporate propaganda about how it is ‘virtually impossible’ to copy and ‘more secure’ but was unable to find out any of the specifics on how it works. Presumably, the chip works like your web browser and does some kind of point to point encryption to send the card data to the card reader. Then your PIN is entered into the card reader to validate the transaction.

This lady on the radio had it in her mind that the mere presence of the chip on her new card made her transactions more secure. This may be true to a point, but ‘virtually impossible’ to copy and ‘impossible’ to copy are not the same.

For starters, the use of the magnetic strip isn’t going away completely. It won’t be until 2015 that the chip will be fully implemented in Canada. Even once that happens, if you use a card reader that takes a Magnetic strip, it can be copied at that time…not the chip mind you (yet) but the same information that technology today allows to be copied. A transaction can still be made from this if your PIN is compromised. Many countries have no plans to move to chip technology and have access to the interac network.

The only real protection you have is to protect your PIN. This means that you need to make sure that nobody ever gets access to both your PIN and your card. Since you can’t guarantee that nobody will get access to your card information, it’s up to you to protect your PIN. Here are some suggestions:

Don’t use and easy to guess PIN. Your birthday, your anniversary, kids birthdays, etc. are a mistake and can be easily guessed by bad guys. Use something random.
Don’t write down your PIN…anywhere. There are only so many things that a 4 or 5 digit number written on a discarded post-it note can be.
Don’t tell anyone your PIN. Your wife, your kids, anyone. You may be able to control how you protect your PIN, but if anyone else knows, you have no control over what they do with it…don’t fool yourself.
Cover the PIN-pad when you enter your PIN. This may look a little silly at times, but be paranoid about it. Pin hole cameras and shoulder surfing is the norm for this type of crime.
Change your PIN often. Go to the bank and they will let you change your PIN. Do this at least twice a year, then if someone gets your PIN and card info, you cut them off at the knees as soon as you change the information.
Get a new card periodically. If you get a new card, the old one is no good anymore, if someone has stolen it, they get nothing.
Watch your statements and question every transaction that you don’t recognize. Use common sense.

Are you Tweeting Yet?

2009-08-04T13:38:00.001-03:00

I have to admit, when I first heard about Twitter, I immediately conjured the image of hundreds of my new ‘friends’ bombarding me with notifications about how bored they are or how much housework they managed to accomplish that day before droning onto the Internet.

For those that don’t know, Twitter is referred to as a micro-blogging utility that is part of the new social media craze that was made popular by sites like MySpace and FaceBook (to name only a couple). The difference with Twitter is that you are limited to a very brief (140 characters or less) post but the idea is that you post more frequently and since messages are short, it favors mobile use via SMS.

Since I have been guilty (once or twice) in the past of driving my head in the sand when it comes to the evolution of the Web, I decided to take a closer look into this new micro-blog service and see what the point was. What I found was a bit surprising.

The Timeline

Basically, the timeline shows all of your updates, and those updates which you have chosen to ‘follow’ in the order that they were posted to the twitter servers. If you are keeping up with lots of people and have a lot to say yourself, this could be a very long list. Not to worry though, you’ve only got 140 characters per friend to read through.

Following and Followers

I guess the main point of Twitter is to collect as many followers as possible. I had heard about the battle between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to be the first twitter user to reach 1,000,000 followers. I guess this was where I first got the feeling that twitter wasn’t really for me…I mean, after all, what the hell do I care what the Punk’d artist is doing right now. CNN tweets might be interesting, but I envisioned a barrage of messages about OJ Simpson and Barack Obama news that isn’t all that relevant to me.

The long and short is, when you start to follow another Twitter user, you are then notified every time that they post something to twitter. If you follow 100 people and they all post something every day, you will see what all 100 people are doing every day. The flip side of this is that if they follow you, and you post something every day, 100 people will see what you are doing ‘right now’.

Sounding a Re-tweet

Unlike the ‘head for the hills’ call that you may be thinking of right now, a re-tweet is like the quintessential ‘grape-vine’ of the twitter world. Very simply, if one of those 100 people who are following you decided that you posted something useful, they can simply re-tweet your message so that people who follow them will get your message too. If you assume that each of your followers has 100 followers and 5 of your 100 followers re-tweet your post, then you can reach 600 people with your short 140 character message in very short order.

Usually when someone re-tweets one of your messages they will give you a ‘mention’ so that their followers can decide if they want to follow you directly or not.

Di – @Mentions

Think of a mention as an introduction of sorts. Twitter’ers (or is it tweeters) will often include the username of someone they are somehow linked to when they are basically inviting their followers to check someone out. If you see a tweet with @shawncrosbys in there somewhere, in most cases you will get linked to my profile where you can then choose to follow me.

Essentially when a tweeter puts a @mention in a tweet, they are basically saying, “meet my friend @shawncrosbys, perhaps you might like to follow him too”.

Saved Searches

I finally ‘got’ what twitter was all about when I started using TweetDeck as a front end for twitter. It wasn’t the program itself that made the difference, but what it did do was allow me to arrange a number of searches on one screen and keep updating the results in near-real-time.

You see, when you’ve only got 140 characters to put out a thought, people tend to be very specific and clear with the words they use, this ‘frankish’ manner of posting makes for surprisingly relevant searches. Try searching for your company name or your industry, there’s some tricks to searching, but since these updates are frequent, you can get the latest information on your search term by searching the public timeline and saving the search to refer back to later.

The flip side of all this is that other people use these saved searches to keep track of keywords that they want to keep up with. Any time you tweet with a keyword they may be watching they may see your tweet (so long as you leave your profile public) even if they aren’t following you. Chances are good that if you tweet something useful, you will pick up a new follower. There are some special types of keywords that you can use that are basically ‘accepted’ as keywords throughout the twitter-sphere (does this ism exist yet?).

Hash Tags

These are special ‘keywords’ that may or may not show up in saved searches with other twitter users. They are intended as a way to group tweets informally so that if people typically keep up with a particular hashtag (as opposed to specific people) then you can add these hash tags to your tweet and people will see them when they search. If you check out wefollow or similar websites, you will see a listing of #hashtags that people say they are keeping up with.

Say for instance, I want to tweet that I will be attending the ITANS meeting in Halifax this thursday night, I may tweet something like:

I’m heading to #ITANS in #Halifax this thursday, anyone else?

The idea is that if people are following the #ITANS or #Halifax hash tags in a saved search, they will see you message even if they aren’t following you specifically.

Address Shortening

Something you will see quite often in twitter is little, basically un-readable internet addresses. When you click on them, you get redirected to another longer URL. Supposedly the idea is to conserve the number of characters it takes to post an internet address and there are a number of free services that allow you to do this.

An added side benefit to this is that there is some tracking put into some of these services so that you can then go back and track how many people actually clicked your link. For instance, if you click http://bit.ly/NWMmT you will get to my blog and I can log into bit.ly and see that someone clicked this link from this blog post.

For someone like me that publishes a blog, this is a neat way of promoting my blog and then seeing how useful twitter is for getting my blog promoted.

Putting it all Together

So there you have the basics, I’m sure there is a whole mess of other Twitter-isms that I haven’t covered here, but the basics are simple. You can use these little 140 character posts to reach lots of people very quickly.

I’m sure that many a teenie-bopper may find ways of keeping in touch with all their peeps or the latest actor/actress gossip, but there are many benefits that allow businesses and professionals to reach many people very quickly.

Beware of Registry Cleaners…

2009-06-26T08:37:00.001-03:00

I recently helped my parents with their slow computer by running a registry cleaner I found on the internet on their computer. As it turned out, it seemed to fix their problem and sped things up remarkably on their system.

Thinking I could make my home computer work better, I downloaded it and ran it on my system as well…bad idea. I didn’t make it any faster and to top it off, my network connections went haywire and ended up killing my Remote Access Server that I used to connect to my home PC when I’m at the office.

Luckily I found this which fixed the problem.

Maybe not so Cut and Dry…

2009-05-06T10:40:00.001-03:00

In a recent post, I weighed in about my views on not paying for media that someone else holds the copyright on. Essentially, I take issue with somebody using technology to make a copy of something that is intended to be sold so that they don’t have to buy it.

I’ve been a guitar player now for a few decades on and off. I would hardly call myself an artist, but I enjoy playing from time to time and recently, some friends and I have spent some time banging away together and enjoying each others company while playing a few songs that we’ve each learned.

I think the majority of the songs that I’ve learned have come from playing the old jam sessions with much better players than I who have taken the time to show me some chord progressions and fingerings and I pick up a small percentage of it that makes it sound reasonably good. In some cases, I’ve looked at what is called a ‘guitar tab’ to figure out a song.

A guitar tab is when someone who has some good talent with a guitar listens to a song and writes down what they hear in a format that other guitar players can easily read and mimic to be able to learn to play a song. Very similar to my experience with my more gifted friends, I initially saw nothing wrong with the practice, when my wife asked me how my beliefs on copyright protection impacted my used of these Guitar Tabs.

Its easy to just ignore the issue and keep on going. There are plenty of sites on the Internet which publish these tabs and if my friends have them all printed off, I’m not really doing anything wrong by reading them and playing them…am I?

Surely I am not infringing on someone’s rights by interpreting one of these tabs and playing the music. Wouldn’t that mean that by singing along while driving my car and listening to the radio I’m doing the same thing?

Apparently, some music industry lawyers believe that guitar tabs are infringing on the rights of their clients. The Online Guitar Archive (www.olga.net) has a notice on their website that they are essentially the ‘Offline’ Guitar Archive while they duke it out and others have followed suite in an effort to save their litigated bacon.

I came across a very good article that examines US copyright law and its relation to guitar tabs specifically. This 32 page document looks at copyrights and debates whether or not a guitar tab site constitutes ‘fair use’ of copy written material since a) the purpose and character of the reproduced work is different. b) the tab is intended as an educational tool as described in the preamble to the description of ‘fair use’ in the act. c) Using a tab does not impact or impede the copyright holders ability to profit from their work and d) the copyright holder would (and have in some cases) reasonably not object to the particular use.

In my opinion, I think that the existence and distribution of guitar tabs is fundamentally different than making a duplicate of digital media and using it instead of the original, but I have to stop short of saying that one is right and the other is wrong because to date, I don’t think anyone has successfully challenged the letter and intent of the law in this regard. If it is wrong, is it then wrong for me to sing along with the radio?

A Word on the Free Market Economy…

2009-04-28T16:40:00.001-03:00

I recently commented on a friends blog about the ‘merits’ of piracy and their potential role in the marketplace. Granted, my comments were a bit tongue in cheek and I don’t begrudge the views of my esteemed colleague, but I thought I would take some of my own space in the blogosphere to weigh in on the topic.

It’s not uncommon for moderately techno-savvy people I know to shake their heads and squint when I take the position that I refuse to download and distribute media that I don’t have a legitimate right to do any such thing with. I can remember vividly some discussions with my kids about why I wasn’t going to allow them to install lime-wire or other media sharing applications on our home computer. I also have been known to take a hard line about them even ‘borrowing’ media that has been ‘burnt’ so that they can play it on our equipment at home.

In our home, we use digital media quite frequently. Every single song we own has been purchased legitimately from an on-line store like iTunes or puretracks. We buy DVDs from either Wal-Mart or Best Buy. We have ripped some of the CDs that we’ve bought over the years so that we can load them on our MP3 players, but I flatly refuse when someone asks me for a copy. It is common for us to loan or give books away after we have read them, but lending of written texts is not a right that is typically reserved by these copyright holders…copy, reproduction and redistribution is.

We don’t do this because we feel the need to fritter away our money on big corporations that are ‘just in it for the money’ or because we are afraid of getting virus or even because we want to make sure that the money goes to the artists. We do this for the same reasons that we vote, pay taxes and write our politicians…because it is how our society is supposed to work.

I am troubled when I hear an argument that it is ok to copy music and media (illegally) because anyone can do it easily. To be honest, when someone gives me that argument, I don’t even continue the conversation because there is actually no thought being put into the repercussions of such things.

Don’t misunderstand me, at one point in my life, I saw nothing wrong with downloading software off the internet with ‘patches’ and key generators. I can remember being slightly enamored with ‘Napster’ and ‘Morpheus’ when it first came out. These have all gone the way of the dodo by now, but it never really entered my head that I was doing anything really wrong.

At one point, one of my kids became the quintessential computer addict for chat programs, email, and whatever else they do on the internet; and at one point was getting frustrated that the restrictions I had placed on her home computer account didn’t allow her to connect to a file sharing service on the internet. Knowing that I was the key to solving this problem, she came to me and asked me to ‘fix it’ for her.

Somewhat hypocritically, as I listened to what she was trying to do, I decided that what she wanted was just not right. I didn’t think that she should be able to swap around whatever she wanted on the Internet (perhaps do to some control issues on my part, but more on that another time) and I flatly refused to help her. During the ensuing battle, I came to realize that what I was doing was really no different, and I argued my way into what has now become a principle that our family now follows…to the letter. I can list many arguments for why its only right to buy what is not yours to own, but I don’t think there is as much grey area there as others would like to believe.

Perhaps you could call it dogmatic, perhaps rigid, perhaps some may call it naive. But the principle is quite simply this: you stand by what you believe, no matter how easy it is not to.

SPAM – An environmental concern

2009-04-16T12:45:00.001-03:00

Yes, you read it right. Spam, otherwise known as UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) is partially responsible for polluting our atmosphere. According to ABC News, spammers generated over 62 trillion junk messages last year which from an energy point of view is far from trivial.

Instead of sending messages asking for money or marketing Viagra, the electricity used sending the e-mails could have powered 2.4 million homes for a year or driven a car around the planet 1.6 times, according to the report.

I did my part today by installing Exchange server 2003 service pack 2 which includes a handy little thing called Intelligent Message Filter or IMF. This is a tool by Microsoft which assigns a spam rating to every email that comes in and then you can set a filter to delete, archive or reject email based on the rating without the intended user (victim) ever even knowing about it.

Some good points on Page Design

2009-04-06T09:47:00.001-03:00

This is actually a very informative video…I love it! Daryl sent me this.

Mikogo: Free Online Meetings

2009-03-11T10:22:00.001-03:00

I love free software…especially when it works well. I got a ping from my boss today to check out this mikogo product that he heard about. Imagine my surprise when I tried it and it worked.

Mikogo is very similar to Webex from a user perspective. Essentially, you set up an account and share your desktop or specific applications. You can whiteboard, send files, record the meeting, switch control, presenters, etc.

To use it, you go to the website: http://www.mikogo.com and download the little application. Once you have an account set up, you can start a meeting and then send the meeting ID to people you want to have join the meeting. It would be a great feature to have a button that would create a direct link that I could copy and paste into an email or instant message rather than email instructions to people on how to connect…I favor the ‘click here’ method of starting a meeting.

At this point, I’m not sure what spam I’ve invited into my mailbox, so I used my gmail account that does a pretty good job of filtering crap out of my inbox.

Nice catch bill…

Internet Voting Success…

2009-03-09T07:43:00.001-03:00

Over the past two weeks, over 11,000 Ontario NDP party members voted for their leader using the Intelivote platform for Internet and Telephone voting. The event was reported by officials to be ‘an unqualified success’ using a combination of mail in ballots, Internet voting, telephone voting and kiosk voting from the convention floor.

The Intelivote platform has been used internationally to deliver electronic elections successfully. Voters are issued a Personal Identification Number that they can use to participate in any one of the voting channels, there is no need to declare how you intend to vote in advance, no need to pre-register for voting, and no need to leave your living room if that’s what you choose to do.

Once again Intelivote has proven itself as the world leader in electronic democracy.

Download details: Business Contact Manager Database Admin Tool

2009-02-13T15:15:00.001-04:00

A while back I wrote about using Business Contact Manager in office 2007. A few people in our office wanted to use it and wanted to be able to share their contacts as a workgroup.

Initially, we looked at it using the standard setup where one person basically has the ‘Master’ copy of the database, and the rest just share it. Since our group is a small group, this looked like a good fit at first, but quickly we realized that if the master guy was out, there were problems sharing data and we lost our major advantage we had gained.

I then found this tool that allows you to create a database on a machine that doesn’t have office 2007 installed. So I ran it on my file server and it worked perfectly. Now people connect to the central database and keep in sync at all times.

The only thing is, that the database needs to be backed up properly. I created this script and set it to run through the scheduler:

backup.cmd

   1: @echo off

2:

   3: set SQLCMD="c:\program files\microsoft sql server\90\tools\binn\sqlcmd.exe"

   4: set DBSERVER=MYSERVER

   5: set DBINSTANCE=MSSQLSERVER

   6: set DBPORT=1433

   7: set DBCONNECT=tcp:%DBSERVER%\%DBINSTANCE%,%DBPORT%

8:

   9: set DBNAME=%1

  10: set BACKUPPATH=E:\backup\bcm

  11: set BKFILE=%BACKUPPATH%\%DBNAME%.bak

  12: set BKRESULT=%BACKUPPATH%\%DBNAME%_BackupResult.txt

  13: set ZIPCMD=e:\software\util\7za.exe a -tzip

14:

  15: DEL %BKFILE%.zip

16:

  17: %SQLCMD% -E -S %DBCONNECT% -Q"SET NOCOUNT ON; SELECT '%DBNAME% Backup started at - ' + CONVERT(varchar, GETDATE());" > "%BKRESULT%"

18:

  19: %SQLCMD% -E -S %DBCONNECT% -Q"BACKUP DATABASE %DBNAME% TO  DISK = N'%BKFILE%' WITH FORMAT, INIT,  NAME = N'Full Database Backup', SKIP, STATS = 10" >> "%BKRESULT%"

20:

  21: %SQLCMD% -E -S %DBCONNECT% -Q"SET NOCOUNT ON; SELECT 'Backup completed at - ' + CONVERT(varchar, GETDATE());" >> "%BKRESULT%"

22:

  23: %ZIPCMD% %BKFILE%.zip %BKFILE% >> "%BKRESULT%"

24:

  25: DEL %BKFILE% >> "%BKRESULT%"

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Are you Tweeting Yet?

The Timeline

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Saved Searches

Hash Tags

Address Shortening

Putting it all Together

Beware of Registry Cleaners…

Maybe not so Cut and Dry…

A Word on the Free Market Economy…

SPAM – An environmental concern

Some good points on Page Design

Mikogo: Free Online Meetings

Internet Voting Success…

Download details: Business Contact Manager Database Admin Tool