So at my current client we have a bunch of Devs that are fairly recent converts to Resharper and a bunch of old hats who know IntelliJ or have used Resharper since Version 1. We are pairing but we know different keyboard layouts and don’t want to decrease productivity by making one lot relearn the other layout. So with some searching around I found out how to create new layouts and using a simple macro switch between them. 

This could be just verbal diarrhea, but I was watching Autum Watch last night and it struck me that the issues with over fishing and the fishing industry as a whole have a lot to do with all the waste inherent with manufacturing processes that use economies of scale to maximise profits. There is waste all over the industry:

• The wrong fish get caught and killed then thrown overboard
• Same again for fish the wrong size
• Then fish go off or get damaged as they try and increase efficiency by doing bigger catches
• Then fish don’t get sold because of changes / floods in the market (another trawler comes in at the same time)

I’m sure there are a lot more and I’d love to know the ratio of fish that make it to one’s plate with number caught.  Anyway people tend to think that the only alternative is some tree hugging world where you actually catch the fish yourself.  Toyota have shown that there are alternatives that are highly profitable, consumer driven and extremely effective. So the question is could Lean be applied to the fishing industry?  Could we have a pull system? And what size buffers or queues would we need for it to work?

A little while back I was chatting to someone about SEO and the power of outgoing links. In the bad old days your client would ask you to build a web site that had no links leaving the site or put some horrible confirmation page asking you that you are leaving!

Whats interesting here is that by not having any external links you are reducing your interconnections with other sites, and so reducing your ranking in search engines. Not only do most search engines allow you to search for linked pages but each additional connection in either direction will increase the weighting that matching symbols (words) in those documents have the same implied semantics. This is just like a neural network where each additional connection re-enforces the bond further increasing the chance of a pattern match.

So I got some helpful feedback on my last post from John McCrea who is VP of Marketing for Plaxo. So I logged back into Plaxo and had a little hunt around and after about 5-10 minutes found my addresses.

My initial reaction was Doh! what an idiot I was, but then after a few minutes reflection I started to think about user interface design and intuitive learning. When I showcase new functionality to my users, they will often give feedback about how easy a feature is to use or find. Often as developers or familiar users of a system we don’t see that something might not be named or located in the most natural place.

I’ve been an occasional user of Plaxo (just the address book) for the last 3 years, using it to keep a few important addresses up to date. Anyway today was the first time I had used it since they launched Pulse, and guess what all my contacts have gone!

Now that’s not very clever for a social networking site and reminds me what Duncan Cragg would say about Web 2.0 and making sure all you data is public, readable in some open format and ideally distributed over the interweb. If fact this really goes back to why “data bases” were created in the first place: data lives longer than applications: well not in Plaxo’s case.

Well Kiran and I both gave our first public presentations at the OverTheAir mobile conference at the Imperial College.

Kiran talked about Agile & Mobile development and I talked about Progressive Enhancement

So the wifi seemed to work pretty well out of the box but I noticed after prolonged use it would just suddenly freeze and the only way to make it come back was to reboot. (You couldn’t even reload the module or restart networking stack).

You can tell if this will be a problem for you by running iwconfig: if you have lots of Invalid misc errors and the signal and noise levels are fixed at -60dBm then you will want to switch from the ipw3945 module to the iwl3945.

I had to start the install CD in safe VGA mode and have not got the slash to display yet.

To get sound to work you don’t need to recompile your kernel or go back to an earlier version just follow method G one this page:

Gutsy Intel HD Audio Controller

or

sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-generic

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

In the editor, add the following line at the end of the file:

Smart Contracts
http://www.erights.org/smart-contracts/index.html
http://www.waterken.com/dev/IOU/Design/

We may end up getting RESTful smart contracts for free due to all the goodness in the current design. This could lead (my client).com to an unheard of level of security and possible make it the most high profile public implementation of smart contracts to date. Watch this space

Auto Save Enhancement

We currently auto save on page transition but for JavaScript clients we could do this on any change. Imagine a world were your browser behaves like IntelliJ and you never loose any data you type in.

Decoupling Resource selection from Representation selection in our Urls

This will allow resources (domain objects/documents) to be selected (think SQL WHERE clauses) and presenters re-used by the client editors without specific coding by developers. So a url like “/video/skins/latest” could return all videos tagged with skins or possibly any resource tagged with video and skins. What we are aiming for is totally dynamic / fluid urls with uses we never imagined.