Floyd’s Thoughts…

HEllo World

Wow, isn’t the new SourceForge style absolutely awful?

As you know iTunes 8 has a new feature called Genius, which when activated will create a playlist based on the song that you are currently listening to.

Let me take this opportunity to say that the iTunes Genius feature is… well GENIUS! It has changed the way I use iTunes for ever!

Once your iTunes library get over a few thousand tracks you often find that you loose the ability to put your hand on a great track to listen to next, the grouping of albums, artists, genres, etc makes it almost impossible to create a “Fresh” new playlist that hangs together well, Genius solves this issue in an instant.

The icing on the cake is the Genius side bar that includes songs that would fit well into the playlist that you don’t already own, in the few hours that I have been using it, I have already found several “GEMS” that i would normally not have in my library.

The only down side to the Genius feature that i can see it that I’m now going to spend even more cash on iTunes each day! Doh!

Yesterday evening i spent a couple of hours sitting in my garden reading while the summer evening sun rained down. It was one of those peaceful moments where time seemed to stand still.

This morning when letting the Dog out to do what ever it is she does first thing in the morning, i took a stroll down the garden to reminisce about the night before only to realize that i had left my IPhone 3G on the hammock.

The sun that had blessed us the night before had been replaced by Rain and the IPhone was soaked! Needless to say, it doesn’t switch on any more and I’m gutted!

Fortunately i still have my old IPhone 2G so i can use that, but every time i look at it, it reminds me of my drowned little baby that was only a few months old
Oh well life goes on, I’ll get the insurance company to send me a new one tomorrow

When your developing, enhancing, evolving your software you will introduce bugs which range from trivial UI issues to “Show Stopping” issue in business logic that will drive your customers away.

Its pretty easy to prioritize these bugs as tasks for your development team by making the “Show Stoppers” #1 priority and so on… and this list of priorities is often geared around the customer, we make sure the issues that the customer will react to the most are sorted out first and then we get to the other “trivial” issues later (if ever).

While this method of prioritization works well in theory I have observed that developers who are not allowed to fix bugs that annoy them or are “easy” to fix, often loose motivation and interest in fixing those bugs that are not so easy to fix.

I have myself worked on projects where the PM has taken exception to me spending an hour to fix and test a bug because I felt that it was worth doing even thought the “Plan” didn’t express this.

Its so important to let your development team cherry pick issues to fix as well as prioritizing the “Show Stoppers”.

Why?

Developers love marking tasks as “Dev Complete”, it gives us a sense of achievement that motivates us to crack on with the next task at hand.

“Wasting” (if your a PM) an hour on a task that isn’t the most pressing one at the time can have a profound impact on your teams productivity, letting the developers mould the shape of the product by picking the issues, tasks to work on gives them a sense of ownership which brings with it a sense of determination to deliver.

I liken this to the Broken Window (Tip 4) theory expressed in The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.

An Investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

Benjamin Franklin

I used to use my Mobile phone as an alarm clock but i find that these days I’m already awake before it goes off!

Talk about waking up with a smile

Harrision (5 1/2 months), Liberty (3) and Charlie (9) who is far to grown up to participate in a family photo

As part of my role at Component Workshop Ltd over the last 12 months I have been responsible for internet marketing of our Code Spaces product and in this time we have spent ~£20,000 on google adwords.

While I have not compiled the stats in a presentable form I can say without any doubt that bidding for the #1 spot on your given search phrase is not only expensive in comparison to the 2nd - 10th slots it also yields pretty disappointing results.

Recently I have been able to cut a third off our Google Adwords spend while retaining the same level of conversions by doing no more than excluding the #1 slot from our adword bids.

While I can’t fully explain why this phenomenon occurs my feeling is that as users of google we are instinctively drawn to the genuine search results verses the sponsored links and as the 2nd and 3rd placed sponsored links usually appear closer to the genuine search results we are naturally drawn to them rather than the #1 placed link.

Food for thought me thinks…

Bourbon Creams and Bananas are not a balanced diet.

Phusion Passenger on Amazon EC2
Some useful stuff relating to Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) on Amazons Elastic Computing Cloud.

Moving from Java to C#
A senior ThoughtWorker talks about his first C# project 10 years after he first tasted the Java bean.

IPhone GUI PSD
Some photoshop goodies for mocking up IPhone UI’s.

If you have recenlty or are about to Upgrade an existing Rails application to Rails 2.1 (and why wouldn’t you), be aware that your implementation of Exception Notifier might not work due to a scope change in Rails where:

@controller.filter_parameters

Is now protected, therefore the code in Exception Notifier that called it needs to be change as follows :

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   #exclude_raw_post_parameters? ? @controller.filter_parameters(parameters) : parameters
   exclude_raw_post_parameters? ? @controller.send!(:filter_parameters, parameters) : parameters

Utilizing the send method allows you to call the protected method.

Fortunately the Exception Notifier plugin on GitHut has already been updated to accommodate this fix and can be installed by :

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	./script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git

NOTE
Exception Notifier (like most plugins) comes with a suite of tests that you should run as part of your build or at the very least whenever you change something as fundamental as the Rails version your using… BTW I did neither of these things and found out the hard way :-/