HAML anybody?
I just came across this by complete accident (well, actually, I came across a URL in OpenACS source code and wondered if the website still existed, then found this linked article).
March 18, 2007
November 20, 2006
Testing
Testing
November 13, 2006
Come work for us
There are currently two jobs up for grabs here at the Amsterdam techno hub of all things environmental. The big one is Unit Head of IT, which means taking responsibility for everything from the smooth running of the servers, to the long range financial planning of our IT infrastructure.
The guy you'd be replacing came to us via management positions at the World Bank, IBM and IFor (the UN deployment in Bosnia). If you think you've got the chops for it we'd love to talk to you.
The other is far more interesting but less glamourous. We'd like a Web Development Co-ordinator, which is how the words 'project manager' were translated when written onto a job description. Key requirements can be expressed in a form we'd hope you'd be familiar with
"As a web development co-ordinator you will work with campaigns to understand their needs and translate them into technical requirements so that our campaigns can achieve their online goals."
"As a web development co-ordinator you will identify, hire and manage outside agencies to develop online applications for Greenpeace so that we get great work and value for money"
"As a web development co-ordinator you will work with the Application Development Team Leader to deliver applications as part of a consistent architectural vision so that our systems function well together"
November 6, 2006
How big is my potato
It says something about the software development world that the answer to the comment
"How many people, I speculated, lacked scales in their kitchen but did have a computer close to hand."
is perhaps 'enough to justify this project.' I've lived with enough geeks to believe this to be true. However I've generally made a point of ensuring that at least one person in every house I've lived in was very serious about their home cooking, so scales have been in plentiful supply (although the PCs to scales ratio was typically 5+) . Still, there's a website for measuring potatos - take a look http://www.howbigismypotato.com
Perhaps more interesting than the site (fascinating as it is) is the blog, which gives a pretty good description of a project developed in iterations. Until I get round to having one of our internal projects set up so we can view each separate iteration I might use this for explaining to internal clients what 'not doing it all at once' actually looks like.
November 3, 2006
The revolution will be organised
Here's a little something from an internal office campaign I ran trying to get people to spend less time on email.
The Revolution will be Organised
You will not be able to stay home brother,
You will not be able to login, sit down and doze off,
You will not be able to lose yourself in emailed exchanges,
Sending messages for their own sake,
Because the revolution will be organised
The revolution will be organised
The revolution will not be brought to you in multi-part mime format
In four parts with attatchments
The revolution will not send you minutes of meetings you did not attend
And documents you have no intention of ever reading
Because the revolution knows you have better things to do
The revolution will be organised
The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Alt.goldfish.preservation discussion groups email digest and will not require
You to fill in a read receipt
The revolution will not CC your boss
The revolution will not CC your friends
The revolution will not waste your time with unnecessary email
Because the revolution will be organised
There will be no need to repeat in emails
Things agreed in conversations
There will be no need to repeat in emails
things agreed in conversations
F.Y.I. There will be no need to reply to emails just
Because someone sent them F.Y.I.
There will be no need to phrase your emails
Using language straight from the gutter or to
Defend your opinion using a selection of flames and curses you have been saving
For just the proper occasion
Because the revolution will be polite
It will be OK to get up from your desk
And walk the fifteen meters to your co-worker in order
To arrange the meeting you are going to have in ten minutes time
The telephone you have been given will not be left to recharge
While downloading a new ring tone by Eminem,
Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue or the Prodigy
Because you will be using it
The Revolution does not need to send everyone a message
About its opinion of snack machines, the temperature in the office or the next election
You will not have to worry or panic about messages labeled
Important or urgent, unless they really are
The revolution will not write without punctuation
The revolution will not feel the need to connect your spelling mistakes
The revolution will be organised, it will be organised
The revolution will not be virtual brothers;
The revolution will be live
Apologies to Gil Scott Heron.
September 26, 2006
Green My Apple Please!
It's tough buying computer hardware that meets the standards of an environmental organisation. It's even harder when one of the organisations you'd assume are green through and through turn out to be one of the worst in the world.
That's why we're asking Apple to make things a little greener...
Take yourself to http://www.greenpeace.org/apple and ask Steve yourself
(and don't forget to tag references to this campaign with greenmyapple )
September 20, 2006
Adventures in MySpace : The Revolution will be Blogged
I know a few things about blogging. I've run blogs, commented on blogs, marketed with blogs and well, blogged. I read a lot of blogs, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone in the blogosphere point to a MySpace blog and say 'look at this'
Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd. After all, my page has a space for blog entries and I'm going to fill it in...
Continue reading "Adventures in MySpace : The Revolution will be Blogged" »
Adventures in MySpace : PimpMySpace
OK, Now I exist in MySpace it's time to make things look good. Real good.
Lets see how I get on
Adventures in MySpace : Signing up
For a variety of work related reasons it has fallen to me to head into the realms of MySpace and find out what all the fuss is about. In order to do this I'll be using Internet Explorer, since some early investigations revealed that it's not too keen on Firefox. Lets see how I get on
August 16, 2006
Site Launch
CoolThePlanet.net has gone into softlaunch. Feel free to browse around, add things, use things and generally kick the tyres.
If you find anything leave us a message here
We'll be rolling out a second site on the platform, hopefully by the end of the week.
August 15, 2006
Intranet Interface
As I mentioned earlier our developer Lars Pind has been running a quick discussion at his blog on how to address an interface problem. Here it is...
August 14, 2006
Much work in progress
We've got a lot of irons in the fire at the moment, which given that we're in the midst of holiday season may be a touch optimistic. Still, here's what we're up to...
We're very close to deploying not one, but two versions of our social networking platform Custard. Read about it on it's own blog.
We're working through some final glitches to switch our mass mailing over to Skylist's StormPost system. This will be accompanied by a new application codenamed Garlic, that will handle signing people up to mailing lists in the new system. It's been developed on our new platform of choice for small web applications (recent security scare not withstanding) - Ruby On Rails.
We're getting ready to deploy a vBulletin based discussion forum. Choosing a forum package is probably worth a blog post all in itself. The short version is that finding appropriate functionality wasn't hard - finding it in a package we were keen on from a technical point of view was.
We've got a major upgrade of Write-a-Letter ready to go as well, after which we'll probably make a bit of an effort to push this tool out to a wider community than just Greenpeace.
All that along with ongoing improvements to our intranet and content management system mean it's turning into a busy month. I'm optimistic that by the end of September we'll have a bunch of new stuff available to our campaigners on the ground, and that somewhere along the line that will translate into campaign victories...
As you'll notice from the product names above we're also moving away from building everything ourselves to taking as much off the shelf as we can. We're confident that this results in much better value for money, and means that when we do develop new tools it's for something of real value.
August 7, 2006
Useful languages site
While doing yet more character set testing I came across Omniglot, a website that covers character sets, languages and writing systems for the past and present.
Most useful - sample text for all the languages. In this case my usual source didn't include Turkish.
August 2, 2006
Advice sought
Yes, we're the ones with an interface with 3000 check boxes (well 2952 to be precise). This is what happens when you follow Jakob Nielsens advice you see. Hierarchical dcument structures make sense he said - best way to organise your documents he said. Never had to file all Greenpeace's documents did he?
Although to be fair I think we can make this work - it's just this particular interface that's got out of hand.
July 24, 2006
Stories. Well, not always.
Stories, stories, stories, stories everywhere.
Someone at work suggested that all the team goes for dinner and beers tonight. Well, "dinner and beers" are already too many parameters.
Hey!! We have a problem, with requirements, LETS MAKE STORIES ABOUT IT.
Trac via email the hard way
I don't know what it is but when there's a hard way or an easy way to solve a problem I generally want to have my cake and eat it, i.e. take the hard way. Fortunately I can restrict this urge and keep the habit out of my work as appropriate for the most part, but that just makes the itch even more in need of scratching occassionally.
Suddenly creating inbound email support was the tip of the iceberg - it was time to create the ability in Trac to have background tasks that don't require a page request to invoke code, in a cross platform way, which could ultimately be used to periodically trigger Trac code to check remote IMAP or POP inboxes for emails to tickets.
Read on to see how my pet project has turned out...
July 19, 2006
Good reading
Found via Creating Passionate Users is this post on user communities by Danah Boyd. A nice mix of academic theory and practical application.
Testing Unicode
Ximon just found this very useful page of Unicode strings
http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracUnicode
which will make breaking the software of potential suppliers that much easier. I think it's fair to say we could be using any of the languages on that list - and indeed we use most of them on a daily basis. The only one I don't think I've seen any need for in the last two years is Vietnamese.
Sadly lack of good UTF-8 support is one of the reasons we end up building so much software rather than taking off the shelf products. If it doesn't work in Rekjavik, Beijing, Hamburg and Bangkok it's just not that useful to us...
July 13, 2006
Stories everywhere...
This morning I sat down with part of our research team to discuss how they can document their requirements for a new software system. We suggested they write user stories, and once they'd seen the spreadsheets for a couple of our existing projects they enthusiastically agreed.
Then I went to a meeting to discuss the development of a new discussion forum. The campaign team had already produced a set of user stories and we spent the time working through them, discussing some implications and generating the next set of requirements, again in the 'As a ', 'I would like to', 'so that' story format.
This afternoon has been spent working on the next round of stories for the write-a-letter application, work which was interupted to explain to the finance department how they might want to describe an IT project. Finally we just sent out tender documentation for a new co-location facility to handle our hosting and that too was in story format.
End result is one simple story
As a project manager I want to spend some time not working on stories so that I remember how to think without them
