Posts in category "software"

My support for the Disqus commenting system used on this blog is well documented. I have also had great support whenever I have had minor issues with a service I paid precisely nothing for.

Disqus are a small company with less than 10 employees. However, Disqus are not a cottage industry operating out of Daniel Ha's garage. Disqus are funded by venture capital (Union Square and angel investors) and raised $500,000 in the last round of funding (March 2008).

So it's not surprising that Disqus are growing and hiring people. However, what fascinates me is that in addition to hiring talented developers to develop, improve, enhance and fix the product, Disqus have recently appointed Giannii as a 'Community Manager'.

Ignoring the lack of a surname and some of the Web 2.0 terms sprinkled in this introductory post; for example, 'Chief Happiness Engineer' is frankly cringe worthy, it is worth noting that Disqus have many channels available for people to contact them:

• Twitter
• Disqus forums
• Email
• GetSatisfaction

More importantly, Disqus don't just sit by the computer waiting for people to call in - they proactively monitor all these channels and participate. Moan about a Disqus problem on Twitter and count the seconds until you get a response.

What is interesting about Disqus hiring a 'Community Manager' is not necessarily that a small startup can afford one but Disqus (and presumably the people controlling the purse strings) actually view this role as one of the first ten, and most important, positions to be filled in the company.

So what ? Every company has a 'Community Manager' - they are just called different things 'Sales', 'Marketing', 'Partners', 'Customer Care', 'Public Relations' - every company does this stuff but they don't a) shout about it and b) dress it up in Web 2.0 tinsel.

To pick just one example, Apple are a big, successful company who make clever videos and sell expensive, stylish computers, iPods and iPhones to this type of demographic so surely they must have a 'Community Manager' ?

Surprisingly, they don't. In September, Apple released the 2.1 firmware for the iTouch and this update broke WPA2 wireless connectivity. Having recently acquired an iTouch and been hugely impressed with the device, I was surprised Apple could have introduced such a fundamental bug but I ignored it and waited patiently for a patch.

Unsurprisingly, lots of Apple customers experienced the same issue and multiple threads arose to discuss the issue on Apple's official support forums. The most popular thread now has 36,208 views and 436 replies.

• How many of the 436 replies came from Apple ? None.
• Did Apple respond to any of these threads ? No.
• Did Apple even acknowledge the problem ? No.
• Do Apple care about their customers ? Not sure.
• Am I encouraged to give more money to Apple by spending in the iTunes Store ? No.
• What impression does this give to a recent Apple convert ? Arrogant.
• When is 2.2 scheduled for release ? Not known.
• Will 2.2 include a fix for this issue ? Not known.
• Is a fix even on the horizon ? Originally, I would have bet money on it but, given Apple's lack of response to date, I am now starting to have doubts.

It's obvious that Apple don't have a 'Community Manager'. Does your company ?

For reasons that are too long and tedious to recount here, I have had cause to rebuild my Lenovo T61 laptop many times over the last month, using a bewildering range of operating systems, Linux distributions, live CDs and dual boot configurations.

During this time, gparted and an external USB 500GB disk drive have become very close and reliable friends. In fact, I have only lost data once and, inevitably, that was due to my own stupidity.

Here are the invaluable Firefox plugins that I always install first:

• DownloadThemAll! - download manager featuring multi-threaded, lightning fast, resumable downloads.
• is.gd - URL shortener.
• Diigo - Great bookmarking service.
• Google Notebook - Useful for random thoughts, reminders, lists of people who have crossed you, transient bookmarks and, well, notes.
• Firebug - HTML and CSS diagnostics

London, near England - 23 April 2008. For immediate release.

Brightside Software Enterprises are pleased to announce the immediate availability of FriendOrFoe.

Tired of being followed by those mindless idiots on Twitter, not to mention those horrid spammers ?

Tired of having to search out new friends with similar interests, sense of humour and outlook ?

Tired of being a 'soul in isolation' with 0 (zero) friends in the whole wide world ?

'FriendOrFoe' is a simple Twitter utility that will subject all Twitter 'Follow' requests to lengthy and vigorous inspection using sophisticated algorithms, advanced AI techniques together with analysis of 'social graphs' to categorise the prospective follower as:

• Spammer (Citeh or Liverpool fan filters available soon) - user will be automatically blocked and receive a DM stating 'Don't follow me, follow Jesus'.
• Friend - automatically follow back, sending a DM to the recipient's mobile, changing the ring-tone to U2's 'I will follow'.
• Stalker - automatically followed on Twitter, FriendFeed, Ponce, Jaiku, NetVibes and footage of user streamed on live Webcam, right into your bedsit.
• Anyone, anytime, anywhere (aka 'Promiscuous mode') - all Follow requests are blindly followed with a DM of 'Hey I'm pretty desperate. Fancy a drink ?'

'FriendOrFoe' is freely available now as a set of Greasy scripts written by 1,000 monkeys, bashing away continuously for 8 days, on a Dvorak keyboard.

This blog used to run on WordPress but now runs on Habari which is a blogging platform currently being developed by a set of very talented people.

Undoubtedly, the number of developers and users running Habari is far fewer than the massive community using WordPress. Similarly, the number of available themes and plugins available for Habari is relatively small (albeit growing daily) and dwarfed by the vast, almost bewildering wealth of add-ons and the extensive range of themes available for Wordpress.

However, this isn't a bad thing because it forces anyone contemplating a migration to Habari to think carefully about the core plugins that are truly essential to adminster your blog and valuable for your readers.

One such plugin (for me) was an equivalent of the Wordpress sitemaps plugin. Rick Cockrum published a excellent summary of why an automatically generated sitemap is useful.

When I first configured and activated the sitemap plugin for Habari, nothing happened. No sitemap file was generated. Initially, I thought that maybe the sitemap was only generated after a post was published. So I published a new post. Still nothing happened..

I posted a enquiry on the Habari users mailing list. In an effort to 'help' the Habari community, I even opened a ticket (bug request).

Then, I made an amazing discovery when an anonymous author was forced to waste some of his valuable time to close my 'bug report':

The plugin is not intended to generate a file, rather to serve the sitemap xml document when requested.

So, it transpires that the Habari sitemaps plugin doesn't actually generate a file. The sitemap is simply a URL which is dynamically built, on request.

Now I believe this is a much neater solution. No need for the user to specify where the file should be placed. Less work for the plugin to do. Much cleaner. Much simpler. Credit to the author, Andrew da Silva.

The lesson I learned was that just because something has always been done that way doesn't necessarily mean it can only be done that way.

P.S. If you're worried about the performance impact of needlessly rebuilding a sitemap, on the fly for 234,432 entries, don't worry - some clever individual has already implemented a cache for the sitemap data.

Not so much a walled garden as a high security prison with barbed wire and electric fences.

I dont know whether Ask have changed their agency but I think this advert is a marked improvement on the previous campaign.

Imagine you were a tourist looking to visit London, which site would you choose ?

Note to self: Dust off CV and apply for this job on Monday morning.

Any client who is interested in people running projects from cradle to grave' intrigues me.

Just installed the Lightning extension which provides an embedded calendar (Sunbird) within Thunderbird.

This is made even more useful by the addition of the Provider for Google Calendar add-on that enables seamless, two way synchronisation between Google Calendar and Thunderbird.

Back in the old days, things were very simple. You filmed endless hours of footage with your analog camcorder; your summer holidays, opening Christmas presents around the tree, your child's first steps and birthday parties.

Then, the night before you set out on your next summer holiday, the wife utters words that strike fear into the very heart of your soul:

'Charge the camcorder batteries and have you transferred all the tapes to video so we can re-use them ?'

Of course, you haven't. So while everyone else slumbers, you untangle the wire spaghetti and transfer six hours of tedious footage spanning 364 days that no-one will ever watch. Worse, to prove you did a proper job, the wife has included crafty snippets of footage of grey cloudy skies, the inside of the camcorder case and an inadvertent curse. Of course, she has done this deliberately to ensure you locate and edit these mistakes out of the directors cut presented for her final rigorous QA review. This task involves skillful dexterity with both hands on the play/record and pause buttons on the video and the camcorder and prolongs the agony.

Eventually, you decide there must be a better way and this is to embrace the digital age so you buy a digital camcorder.

Excited and eager to play with the technology, you make a short, 72 minute film, alone in your bedroom.

You unwrap all the wires, connect them to the computer only to discover you need something called a Firewire card. Your interest wanes and you tell the wife you 'need a part and I haven't got one in the van so it will be 6 weeks'.

Weeks later, and much to your surprise, you successfully install the Firewire card needed for video capture.

Finally, you can transfer the footage to the PC. Sony helpfully include software (curiously named 'Picture Motion Browser') to perform the transfer. Staggeringly, you can even rewind, play and fast forward the camcorder from your computer.

Amazingly, you transfer your alternative film which traces the life of a pair of socks from the drawer, through a full day worn on a pair of feet and finally into the wash basket.

You proudly gather the family to review this stupendous and life changing event. Feedback is mixed; 'Is that it ?' and tantalisingly 'Can't you edit out the 32 seconds of the ceiling ?'.

Of course, you can edit the footage. You are a master of the digital age. You are a budding film director. You quickly remove the spurious footage from the final cut. Only you can't because the Sony bundled software doesn't support video editing. You have to shell out £50 for a separate product called Sony Vegas.

Alternatively, you can use Windows Movie Maker (freely available with Windows) which is capable of importing the AVI files and actually editing clips. Even better, you can add opening titles, closing credits and an impressive fade effect as the socks are tossed into the wash basket.

Your life is complete. You turn the computer off and forget all about digital video technology.

Until 8 weeks later, when you are going to visit the in-laws and the wife says:

'My mum and dad would like to see the DVD of our holidays and that alternative film you make about a pair of socks.'

No problem. You simply turn the computer on, open the project and click 'Burn to DVD'.

Only you can't. Your computer doesn't have a DVD burner. No problem. You share the files to another computer and hit 'Burn to DVD'.

Only you can't. Windows Movie Maker can't create DVD's.

No problem. The computer happens to have a trial version of Video Studio installed so you simply save the Movie Maker film as a new, large AVI file, import it, and click 'Burn to DVD'.

Only you can't. There isn't enough disk space.

You count to 10. 10 times. Then, in a fit of pique and a last desperate effort to preserve your sanity, you spontaneously splash out on an external hard disk drive with half a terabyte of storage dedicated to digital video data and a DVD writer.

The Freecom drive simply plugs into a USB port, has a separate power supply and works out of the box. No need to read the non-existent instructions. Oddly, the drive is formatted as FAT32 so you perform a quick format to NTFS and start copying files. Happily, the drive is quick and more importantly quiet.

Similarly, the LG DVD writer also plugs into another USB port and has a separate power supply. The drive includes a copy of Nero Express so you can finally burn the godforsaken video footage to DVD.

Finally, the holiday footage is edited, trimmed with effects and titles. There is even a top level menu including Chapters, humorous out takes, interviews, biographies, versions in French, German and Italian and an 'Extras' disc.

You are delighted and even though you say it yourself, quite proud of your achievements in the past 3 weeks. You go downstairs to share the glad tidings and sit down with a bucket of popcorn and a gallon of Coca-Cola to enjoy the DVD with the family.

It is unusually quiet and there is a note on the kitchen table

Couldn't wait any longer.
Gone to Crete.
Back in 2 weeks.
Hoover upstairs, mow the lawn and wash the pots.
Window cleaner on Wednesday.

I was interested to read that Microsoft have over 17,597 employees registered on Facebook out of a total of 70,000 employees.

I thought I would try to discover how other leading IT companies compared, including my own. The staff numbers come from Google Finance and the rounding errors come from me.

The following Facebook networks are only open to company employees with a valid email address although, obviously, a better metric would have been some measure of recent activity.

Inevitably, I guess - Google lead the way (again) but I was surprised to see that Sun Microsystems have a significant proportion of Facebook members.

IBM were slightly lower than I expected until I remembered that half their 350,000 employees are busy building fantasy worlds in Second Life. No wonder I can't get spare parts for my Thinkpad.

Nice to see Oracle positioned just ahead of SAP after recent discussions about the companies' respective contributions and reputation in the Web 2.0 community.

I still have wildly oscillating feelings about Facebook; on one hand, a walled garden, puerile, teenage and gimmicky but undoubtedly an insidious, strangely compulsive and probably important platform.

PS. For example, I have just seen the immortal words 'Andy and Mark Burgess (The Chameleons) are now friends'. Superb.