The VirginEye visualizer

I’m currently attending the Fuel Conference in London. I just saw Alex Hunter from Virgin talk about the online marketing campaign they ran to launch Virgin America. The really interesting thing showed us was a fantastic new 3D visualizer called the Virgin Eye (click through to view) which captures articles from over 5000 news channels and displays them as a sort of star systems. Much like the Digg Labs visualizer, but still very cool!

Here’s a static view:

Technorati Tags: Virgin Eye, Virgin America

Zero Inbox Widget

I’ve recently made the push to get to Inbox Zero. It’s a productivity technique popularized by Merlin Mann for dealing with the ever increasing deluge of email. It feels great when you get there, but as with every productivity methodology you have to stick at it and continually do it. Sometimes I need a little reminder on things like this, so I created a very simple Dashboard widget to help. I have this running constantly and it acts as a visual reminder every time I flick to my Dashboard of what I need to do to maintain my Inbox Zero.

If you are interested, you can download the widget here. I hope it helps with your quest to get to and maintain your empty inbox.

Technorati Tags: Inbox Zero, Widgets

Continuous Integration presentation

I recently created a new presentation on Continuous Integration. It’s pretty nifty if I do say so myself! I was trying to simplify the message from my previous presentations and also provide some good actionable steps people can follow to implement CI.

Update

My presentation was recently one of the Featured presentations on Slideshare. Dunno if that really means anything, but it’s nice anyway. Apparently a few people added it to their favorites so it can’t be all bad!

Technorati Tags: continuous integration, agile, slideshare

Mac terminal tips

I still love the power of the terminal and command shell. By default however, the Mac Terminal leaves a little to be desired. Luckily, you can use Terminal to er… fix Terminal. Here are a few handy tips.

Make your terminal window show you your current directory:

    export HOSTNAME
    export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}:${PWD}\007"'

Add some color to your prompt:

    export PS1="\033[0;36m\][\u@\h: \w] [\033[0;36m\]\$\[\033[0m\] "

Make your ls commands show directories as color:

    alias ls="ls -G"
    alias ll="ls -lG"

Just add this into e.g. your $HOME/.bashrc file.

Technorati Tags: osx, mac, terminal

Quite possibly the best stop-mo surfing movie ever

As you know, I like to surf. So this movie stop motion movie really appeals to me! ‘Nuff said.

Technorati Tags: stop motion, surfing, play mobile

Unexpected popularity with C++

You know, blogging is such a strange experience. You try to write stuff that will interest people. You try to have a commentary on popular subjects. But you never know what is actually going to be popular. [Of course, I could be writing about the Twitter outages, but why follow the sheep? ] Take my post on using libcurl with C++. This was something that I threw out there a couple of years ago as a result of a small project on which I was working. Just a throwaway post really.

Currently, it accounts for at least half of the new traffic to my blog and a large number of repeat visitors. It’s even the top result in Google when searching for libcurl and C++.

Who knew!!

And I’m not really a C++ fan. Not that it’s not a useful language, but it’s just not really my favorite. Donnie would be amazed!

So the moral of the story? You can’t always choose that for which you are famous. Or, in this case, what generates a bit of traffic to your blog (but certainly doesn’t count as fame!).

Technorati Tags: libcurl, C++

Mint Site Statistics Review

For a while now (well, several years) I’ve been using the venerable analog and Report Magic to generate the statistics for my hosted sites. Unfortunately, they have become a little dated in appearance and currency. Nightly reports were fine five years ago, but we live in faster times now!

Enter Mint. A relatively new entrant to the statistics gathering scene, released by the ever present Shaun Inman. Ok, it’s not that new, I’ve been wanting to try it for a while. Version two seemed a good enough excuse. Rather than trawl through your logs after the fact, Mint takes the approach of logging statistics about your site as live as people browse it. That’s pretty common nowadays I guess, pioneered by Google Analytics, with clones like Piwik (an open source competitor) using the same mechanism.

The Good

• The UI is excellent! Orders of magnitude better than the Report Magic reports
• Installation was a breeze, and pretty much driven through the web interface. I had only had to make changes to a single php file before uploading
• Even better, there’s a compatibility suite that will figure out whether your hosting environment is suitable for Mint
• Mint is extremely extensible, something I’m a big fan of, and there is already a thriving community of extensions
• I love the Junior Mint dashboard Widget, which saves me hitting Refresh all the time

The Bad

• The collection mechanism depends on you inserting a custom script link into the HEAD of your pages. This is fine for well structure PHP apps like Wordpress of zenphoto, but more tricky if you have a bunch of static pages
• I find myself wanting to drag and re-order the Pepper containers around all the time, a la “pick your favorite portal”. The mouse icon even turns into a hand, making me think something will happen. Piwik does support this.
• I’d like to be able to “roll up” (think minimize) some of the Pepper containers
• I have session problems from time and time and find myself having to log in again.

Overall, my impression with Mint has been excellent. The UI is great, installation was a breeze, and it’s easily customizable and extensible. What more could you ask for? I do love my Minty fresh stats. And you can’t argue about the beauty of the logo design!

Technorati Tags: mint, inman

Mac Screen Sharing via SSH

With Leopard you can now use your .mac account to get back to your home machine using the Back to my Mac feature. However, I’m a little paranoid and don’t like leaving a bunch of ports open on my firewall. I still want to get back to my home machine though and can easily do so using SSH. This is great for most things I need to do, but occasionally I want to actually drive the desktop. This requires a bit more SSH magic:

ssh -L 8888:hostname.yourhost.com:5900 hostname.yourhost.com

will open a local port 8888 and pass all traffic from there to port 5900 on your remote machine. You can now use this to open a screen sharing session to your remote machine.

1. In Finder select Go -> Connect to Server
2. Then enter vnc://localhost:8888

This will start Screen Sharing and allow you to control your remote mac’s desktop. Neat!

SSH bouncing

The above example was pretty simple and should suffice for most people. However, what if your network setup is a bit more complicated? Let’s say you have multiple machines in your home network, but only one is visible to the outside world (pretty likely if you have just got a single IP from your Internet provider). You can still open a screen sharing connection using some more SSH magic:

ssh -L 8888:otherhostname.yourhost.com:5900 hostname.yourhost.com

this will open a local port 8888 and pass traffic from there to port 5900 on your other machine, bouncing through your first host. Follow all that? Easy really

If you’re wondering how you can address your home machine and don’t want to have to keep remembering your IP address, use a DNS alias service like DynDNS to create an easy to remember name.

Technorati Tags: screen sharing, macos, ssh

Daniel Burka’s FOWD London presentation

I was recently at the FOWD London event, put on by the ever busy Carsonified team. There were a slew of good presentations, of which I haven’t really said much (yet), but one of the standouts was from Daniel Burka of Digg, Pownce and Mozilla fame.

What I liked about the presentation was that although Daniel was actually talking about design, the core principles are exactly the same as those I’ve been pushing in my software teams for a while. They also are extremely reminiscent of the key tenets of Agile development.

Less is More

One of my favorite tenets for software development. My preferred way of stating this is:

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This is always the first principle I try to establish with any of my software teams. In Daniel’s parlance, it comes out as “Iteration is subtraction too. Try to remove as much as you add”. For those of us practicing Agile, that might sound like “Refactor, refactor, refactor”!

Build extensible frameworks

The mantra:

Leverage, extensibility and re-use. Todd Papaioannou (yeah, I’m claiming it!)

will be extremely familiar to those who have worked on my projects. By this I mean that a key goal for all software that I build is to continually review whether it is stove piped, or whether it is either a) leveraging other software already out there, or b) someone else can leverage or extend it. Think plugin architectures. Nothing drives me more crazy than people with the NIH attitude wanting to reinvent the wheel. Do you know how many XML parsers/serializers I’ve seen??

In Daniel’s presentation he talks about the difference in Architecture, the High and Low road. His preference is the Low road, which gives you lots of reusable idioms to construct your final product. This is the same message I push in software development. Which leads nicely onto …

Continually Iterate

Again, one of the core tenets of Agile development, this is summed up in the KISS approach. Do the simplest thing first that works, get it out there, and then see if it works. If it doesn’t iterate quickly. Lots of software developers get mired in the mud of trying to build super edifices, when all they need to do is to do something much more simple.

In fact, Iterative design as a means of designing adaptable websites was the general theme of Daniel’s presentation, and I think it’s spot on. You never know exactly how the humans that use your interface, game or software product are going to react, and what they are going to do. That’s a lesson I learnt with running Terafirma. But you have to be prepared to iterate quickly if there is a problem, or a concerted need for improvement.

Here’s the video of the presentation:

From Future of Web Design on Vimeo.

You may also want to follow along with the slides:

[Updated - May 25]

Looks like Daniel has updated his slides for Mesh Conference. They now include a case study of the Digg Comments system.

Technorati Tags: fowd, webdesign, agile, daniel burka

Now built with Marsedit

I’ve recently ditched Firefox as my regular browser in favour of Safari. The consequence of doing so however is that I’ve had to find a new blog writing tool. I used to use the ScribeFire plugin for Firefox (which was great by the way) to write my blog entries. Marsedit seems to get a lot of good press in the Mac world, so I thought I’d give that a try for at least as long as the eval version will let me.

Setting it up for my Wordpress blog was relatively simple, although contrary to the documentation, it didn’t not immediately recognize my blog as such so I had to configure it manually. Pointing the API URL here:

http://www.luckyspin.org/xmlrpc.php

was the main key, as was setting the Blog ID to 1. Now we’re off to the races!

First impressions are good. Writing blog entries is extremely easy, but I’m already missing some of the “extra” stuff Scribefire used to do for me. Like auto pinging blog networks, adding tracking pings to other blogs or easily allowing me to insert technorati tags like this:

Technorati Tags: marsedit, scribefire