So after rediscovering the distraction free editors to write reports, it seemed mad not to use the same environment to update my blog. I really like the fact that the editor only supports plain text and didn’t want to reduce the readability of the plain text by having lots of unneeded markup all over the place.

What I needed was a simple tool to convert my semi structured text into html and then I could just upload that to my blog. Ideally the tool would be a command line tool so I could easily automate the two steps.

So many moons ago I was reading about a fullscreen editor for Mac called WriteRoom. The basic premise is that it is a very limited editor that actively aims to block out all distractions from writing. It achieves this by:

• Running fullscreen (so no desktop distractions)
• Supporting plain text only (so no styling distractions)
• No toolbar
• No menubar
• No statusbar
• A few simple shortcuts to do what you need

Anyway I have been running Ubuntu for a number of years, and had often ran Nano fullscreen in a Gnome Terminal but was curious what might now be available. So a few moments googling and this was the list:

One of the pain points we see on web projects is the divide between client side and back end development. This pain might show itself in a number of ways:

• Small changes in the HTML cause lots of tests to fail
• Small changes to visual layout require large changes to the HTML which then causes the above
• Developers say the work is done but it can’t be signed off as it looks terrible or doesn’t work in certain browsers
• CSS or QAs want developer to add ID attributes to lots of elements so they can target them more easily

Now ideally all your developers should be poly skilled and understand javascript / CSS / HTML just as well as they understand java / C# / ruby but often the reality is not quite so rosy.
So if we are working in a world where we don’t have the ideal but still need to get the job done what can we do to reduce the pain?

UPDATE: Jim pointed out that you can access the field via reflecting over the delegate.  (See comment) Damn this is a bit like how java does anonymous access to private fields of the parent class. I wonder if you could use this for some nasty security violations as people tend to think local variables are safe from reflection.

After the crazy !@$%  with JavaScript yesterday I said to Christian, I bet we can do this with C# lambda. So the challenge was set….

So I was chatting with Christian Blunden about JavaScript, and he asked if it was possible to have private fields in JavaScript.

Now the language doesn’t have a key word but I knew that you could use function scoping to achieve the same affect as I had seen the same thing done using the E programming language.

So after 5 minutes here is what we came up with:

function Purse(money) {
	this.getMoney = function() {
		return money;
	}
	this.setMoney = function(newMoney) {
		money = newMoney;
	}
}

This will create a truely private field that can only be accessed via the methods.

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.