Marc Benton in his new blog has written a good write up on the spec of the £100/$200 laptop offered by the “One Laptop Per Child” charity - the XO laptop. Saw this on News Night last night and was impressed that they could get a laptop that cheap. Marc’s post describes the specs and explains how they kept costs down. Nice work Marc.
Browsing about the internet this weekend, and came across an Analog Binary Clock by Michael Battle on the rather brilliantly named domain: footloosemoose.com. Flicking through his other articles, it looks like a good blog to follow.
A great article has been posted on the Agile FAQs blog. It is a list of 11 myths of Agile Development, and why they are wrong. If you’re into agile development at all, I’d recommend a read.
If you’re a web developer like me, but don’t have access to all the different operating systems and browsers, check out browsershots.org, I’m testing it out now to see what my blog looks like, so hopefully by the end of this article, it’ll be done. Free too, which is nice.
Patrick (of Bingo Card Creator fame) has just posted a new article on his Blog, about exploiting new niches for SEO. I’m an avid reader of Patrick’s blog, and neat little posts like this are the reason why.
And finally, web2Project is nearing release. As a user of dotProject many moons ago, before the development temporarily stopped, I’m looking forward to the inaugural release of a brand spanking new project management system, built on top of the dotProject framework. As many of you know, I use Timersheet.php, but am thinking of taking on the development as the project seems to have died. Lets see if web2Project has all the features I need, yet be simple enough to use.
Some screenshots have been uploaded of my blog by browsershots.org….wow! what a great service. I recommend using this 100% (even though my blog does look rubbish!!)
Found this article whilst browsing Digg. Being self-employed it’s quite interesting to read other’s opinions. The discussion is good to read too.
I follow a guy called Noel Perlas on Twitter, and he’s just posted a tweet about how he’s giving away a Moleskin 2008 planner. You can read about it on his blog here:
http://noelperlas.com/2007/11/19/im-giving-away-a-moleskine-planner/
This is a brilliant idea! Like Noel, I and many others (girlfriend included, hint hint, help me out with this one Noel!!) love these things.
Why is this such a good idea?
Whilst this may be a clever marketing ploy, is isn’t out of the blue. Noel seems to have a strange attraction to notebooks. In fact he’s raved about them before, which, in my mind, makes this idea even better.
Well done Noel, keep it up!
Wow! Whist an avid user of Joe’s Goals, I’m not subscribed to the blog, but when ticking off stuff I’d done today, I noticed that he’s reached 1.5 million checks! Wow, well Ian! (aka Joe’s Goals)
Going to be a work filled weekend, but before I whack on a bit of Goa-Psy Trance at Digitally Imported, and settle down to some coding, I thought I’d have a quick browse around the interweb.
First up for you is a great post By Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software, his latest post following on from his FogBugz world tour: How to demo software
A good read, some nice pictures of Cambridge and London and a great bit of advice: story telling.
The only interesting way to design a demo is to make it a story. You have a protagonist, and the protagonist has a problem, and they use the software, and they… almost solve the problem, but not quite, and then everybody is in suspense, while you tell them some boring stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else, but they’re still listening raptly because they’re waiting to hear the resolution to the suspenseful story, and then (ah!) you solve the protagonists last problem, and all is well. There is a reason people have been sitting around telling stories around campfires for the last million years or so: people like stories.
The world seems to be going OpenSocial mad at the minute, so need to look into it further, found some sites which I still need to browse
Some Micros ISV blog posts to read when I get a chance.
I like these guys and avid fan of their blogs. If you are a one man band and develop software I strongly recommend reading their blogs.
Also, found a nice little post from Nick at the BreezeTree Software
Yesterday I wrote about whether I should rewrite or refactor a website I have now taken over. As this website is the lively hood of my client, and because I have fallen into the trap or rewriting before, I have decided instead to refactor the code piece by piece as and when I encounter it.
I’ve had a further scoot around the web for some different opinions (or matching ones) and came across quite an interesting, if slightly old (2005 - positively ancient! 
) article by a guy called Marcus Whitney: Refactor vs Rewrite. Something that struck true with me was:
and immediately began ranting about how the code was crap and needed to be replaced. Well… that attitude is pretty much crap. Obviously the code did SOMETHING for the client prior to my arrival.
I absolutely agree, and this goes along with my conclusion of my earlier post: One of the main reasons I started the rewrite was my pride - I could do better than that, but I was really missing out on the bigger picture: that site is my client’s livelyhood.
Anyway, thanks for the post Marcus, spot on.
I’ve been messing about with an open source project: Timesheet.php and have found it pretty useful, keeping track of my time for billing purposes. I always meant to write a nifty little app like this for me, so it was quite handy that I stumbled across it. However, whilst it is useful, there are, like everything, a few bugs that need to be ironed out and a couple of improvements I would like to see implemented.
Normally I don’t think this would be a problem, fix the bugs, send a patch. However, this project appears to be dead. I’ve done a rigorous search on the web for anything relating to this project, finding quite a few places it appears:
and finally (or firstly becuase it’s linked from the bottom of every Timesheet.php page)
I’ve tried to get in touch with the developers, I’ve sent emails to the mailing lists and forums asking if this project was still alive, but no response from anyone in charge - a couple of emails from people, like me think it’s a good project and would like to see it developed further, but aren’t sure if it is dead or not.
Now here’s the thing. Although I’m pretty rushed out I would quite happily take this project on, on the side, to fix the bugs, implement some amendments and generally to see how far it can be developed. I’ve been emailing with Gregor from the Phex team who is someone how would like to see this developed, and he told me that it is possible to take over a dead project on Sourceforge. However, I’m not entirely sure this is the best route for this project. Primarily because it appears to be an in-house development for a company and I’m not sure what the fall back would be if I just waltzed up and took it away from them. I know it’s Open Source so technically possible, but it doesn’t really seem polite. Also, what if this project isn’t really dead, just a little bit slow in updates?
Like I say, I’m pretty busy at the moment, so no real time to spend on it anyway right now, but I’ll have a mull over the “shall I take over or shall I fork” question for a little bit longer.
If anyone out there has had similar problems, please let me know!
Cheers
Rob
As those on you on Twitter may know, I have a Spam problem. It’s not nice, it renders me not fun to be around, I don’t know if it’s contagious, but it’s still not pleasant. So today, with 5 mins to spare, I decided to install the Bad Behaviour Wordpress Plugin. 10 minutes in and no Spam! I wonder if this will cure me of my horrible, anti-social disease and make more more fun to be around?
I’ve just read a couple of interesting articles whilst having my miso soup over lunch:
Both offing good advice about roughly the same thing, but coming from different directions.
"How hard could it be?" offers a blueprint for software failure within a small to medium sized development team so the mistakes aren’t replicated, where as "Process and the mISV" notes some points to developing software when working on your own.
As ibrow is effectively just me most of the time, but also as someone who uses freelancers, both these articles were of interest to me. Whilst most of the issues raised by the two articles, I should already know, it is to be reminded, as sometimes when up to your eyeballs in work it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees. A tip that I’d never thought of, especially if in a development team of one, was holding a Business and Technical review
Hold weekly business and technical reviews When you’re starting a business on your own, it can be hard to see the big picture. Why not devote two hours a week to self-review? Sit down with a pad and a big cup of coffee and ask yourself: What have I done right? What have I done wrong? How do I do better? from Process and the mISVAnother good bit of advice was from Joel’s article:
Mistake No. 2: Set weekly milestones. … [developers] need to draw up detailed plans before they start writing code. … When you ask developers for one, however, many of them will respond by creating a schedule that breaks pieces of the process into weeks. This may seem perfectly reasonable, but it’s not. If you let a software team submit a schedule with big chunky estimates of time (by big I mean more than two days of work), you can be almost certain that they’re not considering every detail that needs to be implemented, and those details will add up to a huge delay. from How hard could it be?
As a self employed developer, it is often far too easy to get wrapped up in the "must do this now" and "so much work todo" mentality, without thinking about the larger goals. Certainly spending a couple of hours each week away from the computer, have a coffee and really plan what the important things are, both this week, and beyond would be beneficial to both me and my business. I think it was Seth Godin who said (paraphrasing now, I have his "Small is the New Big" book) "do the important things first.".
Well, I think the moral is to work out what the important things are, but not just work orientated.
