Melbourne Business School Merger

In the wake of an internal restructure this week, The Australian is reporting today that a merger between Melbourne Business School and the University of Melbourne may be imminent with the University likely to vote on a proposal this week:

An in-principle agreement will be put to the university's council on Monday after about three years of talks between university vice-chancellor Glyn Davis and MBS chairman and former BHP boss Ron McNeilly.

As a student and staff member of Melbourne Business School, I have very mixed feelings about any potential merger and I've very unsure how it will affect both the security of my job and the quality of my education. My sense is that the merger is being tailored to satisfy the faculty, without much regard to the professional staff. This is somewhat understandable, as faculty are really the "core" employees of a University.

However, my team at MBS has made a substantial investment in Information Technology over the past year that shouldn't be overlooked and certainly should not be subsumed by what Melburne Uni has. It is my belief that like faculty, information technology can effect the quality of learning, as well as support fundraising and marketing activities that faculty simply cannot.

I'm hoping that professional staff are well consulted and that management understand the potential synergies of merging professional staff, and also the amazing complexity, politically and technologically, or unifying or discarding IT systems.

I'll have more to say on this as more details are released to the public domain.

Our Dumb Planet: Summary of the Israel-Arab Conflict

From the Onion's atlas:

The area that makes up Israel was promised to the Jews by both the UN and God, but because the legitimacy and power of both entities is only recognized by a handful of people, the land remains contested.

Tagging Tags

I'm a big fan of tagging (folksonomy, as the kids call it), and I've written previously about the need to this be adopted to file systems as quickly as possible. One problem with tagging that comes up is when the existence of one tag implies that others should be applies. For example, "Mac" implies "Apple". This is a formal hierarchy, of course, and that effectively means putting tags in directories: exactly the scenario we want to avoid!

Luckily, the way out of this is simple. Tagging of tags! This follows from our first principle: folders are so 1990's and hierarchies are unnecessarily restrictive. Of course, we wouldn't make a distinction between types of tags; a tag could be applied to another tag or another "entity". So for a post about "Melbourne Business School", I usually use the "melbourne business school" tag. The "melbourne business school" tag should itself be tagged with "university" and "business" and perhaps "study" or "work". Similarly, sometime I write about ColdFusion. ColdFusion should be tagged with "technology", "Adobe" and "software". Potentially, "software" could likewise be tagged with "technology" but that's just fine.

So far, I have only seen this concept applied in one place: Taglocity, an Outlook plug-in, although it is framed slightly differently. I'd like to see more it, especially for blogs.

Dynamics CRM 4: Discovering the SQL behind an "Advanced Find"

Have you ever wanted to know exactly what SQL was generated by the advanced find? This question might just be because of shear curiosity, but the results of this query by also be the starting point for most sophisticated reports using SQL Server Reporting Services.

The process is straightforward. All you need is Dynamics CRM 4 and Excel 2007 (2003 should work similarly). [See update below for doing this without Excel]

Perform an advanced find
Run the query, and export the results to Excel. Make sure you select "Dynamic Worksheet" although I'm pretty sure "Dynamic Pivot Table" will work
In Excel, once you have data displayed (which might mean enabling data connections), go to the Data tab, and click "Connections"
You should have a single connection called "Connection". Look the properties for this connection.
Go to the definition tab. The command text contains the SQL behind the advanced find.

This approach works with SharePoint lists as well. Using this technique with SharePoint list data helps you quickly determine the GUID of the list and the view you are using.

Update: Dynamics exports the data as an XML file, not a binary XSL file. Therefore, you can simply open the downloaded "Excel" file with a standard text editor and view the SQL within. 

Bring it All Together

A couple of weeks ago, I had a go at Joel Spolsky for effectively blaming bad corporate policies on MBA graduates. As a Melbourne Business School student myself, this struck a nerve.

Well it looks like he sorta acknowledges that he often makes claims without any good basis, but that it does make for entertaining reading. I wholeheartedly agree!

Of course, he does that just after he trashes another of my favourite minds, Thomas Friedman. Still, I have to grudgingly accept that he is probably right.

78 Means "You're a just a very tiny bit better than average"

It's official: I'm slightly better than average. But I'm not getting cocky; the difference is not statistically significant. So actually, yeah, I'm probably average. And that's OK.

I have now received my grades for both of my syndicate assignments, which are:

• Marketing: 78
• Accounting 78

You might wonder what mark I received last term. I'm not shy. I'll tell you:

• Managing People for High Performance (MPFHP): 78 (update: my MPFHP mark was actually a 76)

This, of course, is no freakish coincidence. Melbourne Business School grades on a curve, and I'm pretty sure the mean of that curve is 77.

Update: I've been told the mean is actually more like 75, but the gist is the same.

I'll tell you why I love the curve:The curve opens upwondrouspossibilities or learning. You see, when I know that class average must be 77, I don't hesitate to take "hard" classes that I could otherwise avoid. For example, I'm not a fan of accounting, but might try my luck at a whole class on financial statement analysis. Why not? I'm not scared of a 75. And I won't favour an "easy" class like "Leadership" just to boost my GPA. A 79 won't make a difference.

Let me contrast this with McGillwhere I did my undergraduate degree. In McGill, my major -- Computer Science -- was "hard". I can tell it's hard for a number of reasons, but an easy way to tell is that the average mark hovered around a 65, which I think was C or C+. On my transcript, it was not unusual to see a C-, and even once, a D. Without context, this isn't too good. Don't worry, though, I was able to boost slightly my GPA by taking some "easy" classes. Among them:

• Sexual Ethics
• International Organization
• Understanding Planet Earth
• Space Time and Matter

Unfortunately, I was considerably more restricted in the classes I could take than a average McGill student so my GPA stayed low in absolute terms, although probably slightly higher than average for a computer science student. Still, this low GPA had real implications in finding my first job; a legacy which still haunts me in many respects to this day.

So embrace the curve. Ride it. And enjoy your 78.

Crashing Outlook Saga

My love affair with Microsoft continues. For the past few months, Outlook 2007 crashes constantly, severely limiting my productivity. Last week, I asked someone from our help desk to look at the problem again. They did the usual:

• uninstall/reinstall
• clean my registry

but without any success.

Today, it appears that one of Microsoft's background services detected that there was a problem with outlook (500 crashes later), and decided to try to determine, once and for all, how I could fix my Outlook. (I should note by the way, that while the diagnostic scan was running, Outlook crashed 3 more times).

Here is what the scan discovered:

 

Clicking "continue" took me to a worthless web page which I will now summarize: we don't know what the problem is and we don't have any solutions.

Can they possibly waste any more of my time?

Great Gift. Thanks.

I got a "Friend of a Squid" bookmark plus "On the Beach", a classic Australian book.

Thanks.

Marketing Syndicate Assignment Wrap Up

Last night was the climax of my syndicate work for this term at Melbourne Business School. My colleague has already blogged about our presentation, and I have to agree with him that overall, we had a very engaging presentation and a very successful syndicate. However, we did face numerous challenges, probably faced by other syndicates as well:

• we had trouble coming to a consensus about the topic. I really pushed for alternative fuel vehicle, while others pushed for mobile devices and music distribution.
• I had some trouble working effectively with a particular member of the team and while there was no major conflict, I don't think there was a good synergy between us

On the other hand, everyone contributed their own strengths to the team such as:

• taking ownership of the final paper, creating a unified document out of what was effectively 5 different "mini papers"
• organising samples of wine in a can as well bottles of wine featured in our paper
• handling the logistics of distributing the wine (which included a thoughtful consideration that we should present immediately after the dinner break)
• offering high quality, constructive feedback on the presentation run-through. This helped Shoaib and I improve our presentation style and content tremendously.
• pooling some money to purchase professional images for the slides

For those that might be interested, you can download a copy of our slides. I'd be interested in getting feedback on that, or if you were in class, your impressions of the presentation.

A New Era

I just finished watching Obama's acceptance speech. I spent much of the day examining in detail the electoral map. Today's the day the I reconnected with CNN.com. Do you know the last day I spent clinging to CNN and other news sites?

September 11th.

With that thought, I realised that we have well and truly passed from one era to another. The previous one, the one when I came of age, was a cynical time. I was apathetic. It wasn't long ago that I was struggling to find excitement in my life. I think it was typical of my generation and our supposed apathy. Little did I know the effect our leaders can have on our individual self-esteem.

It was today that I learned as much about myself as I did about America. I had cast America aside. I lost faith in its ideals and in its people. In the same way, I think I lost faith in myself. I didn't believe in the value of hard work, or the many benefits a true and equal society can bring to humanity. It seemed like those who manipulated the truth were destined to get ahead.

Tonight, I really believe I'm a changed man and that America is a profoundly changed nation. I'm so proud of the message that our electorate send. That finally, we will punish those in government that will betray our trust. That today truly marks the end of our civil war. The end of a nation of used car salesmen. The end of the attacks on 9/11. Demonstration that we can be a progressive, inspirational society. We can demonstrate moral leadership. We can be a light unto the other nations. We can innovate. We can better the lives of everyone.

For the first time in a very long time, I'm proud to be an American.

Don't Diss the MBA

One of my first blog posts was in praise of Joel Spolsky whose insights into the software sector from both a business and technology perspective are invaluable. But last month Joel wrote an article for Inc magazine on commissions, taking two opportunities to blame poor commission schemes on corporate MBAs:

I can picture the M.B.A. who worked at corporate headquarters. I bet he reaped a big bonus for coming up with an incentive program that dramatically increased the sales of the high-profit silicone spray.

Meanwhile, did anybody notice that the sales of shoes fell by about the same amount?

Or that I started buying my shoes on the Internet?

Sure, blame the MBA for the success of Zappos!

And then:

...Instead of buying the exciting new products I wanted, I was hurled into a mass of people scamming one another -- and all because of stupid, perverse commission systems that seemed like good ideas to the M.B.A.'s back at corporate.

Why Joel has chosen to single out this with a postgraduate degree in business is beyond me. During my MBA class Managing People for High Performance (MPFHP) [see description of the class] we learned of the pitfalls of poor incentive systems, as well as scheme to motivate people through a sophisticated, multi-tiered reward system and to develop them through feedback, not to mention consideration to

• organizational structure and design
• investment in training
• impact and analysis of corporate culture

and lighting the fire to make implement these changes in a dysfunctional organization.

Joel shouldn't blame the business school graduate (or degree) for the demise of companies with poor incentive schemes; he should be engaging MBAs and MBA students to further improve his company, and to articulate and enhance what makes his people high performers.

There will be some MBA students looking to analyze companies in the MPFHP class beginning in Term 1, 2009. I suggest any company skeptical of MBAs to engage the school for these projects.

Reflections on Marketing Class: Using Apple as a Case Study in Marketing Channels

Today in my marketing class at Melbourne Business School, we examined distribution channels vis-à-vis marketing. Not surprising, we examined the distribution of music, tracing it from a technological standpoint (vinyl to MP3) and its channels (independent shops to iTunes).

The lecturer's main point with regards to Apple's success was the control over the hardware, software, and content of their "ecosystem" which allows them to control the channels of music distribution. While I don't disagree with Apple's dominant position, I take issue with some of comments and perceptions with regard to Apple's technology approach that were made in passing.

Primarily, the point was made that Apple is successful because their system is "closed", as compared with Microsoft that must struggle to handle software from a multitude of vendors. In fact, the underlying assumption, it seems, was that you simply could not develop any custom software for a Mac. Of course, this is simply not true.

Let me briefly explore the development options for both systems.

Unlike Windows where developers need to spend hundreds of dollars on software development products like Visual Studio, all Macs come bundled with X-Code, their development environment for building Mac software. One could argue that this alone makes it easier for a developer to create software for a Mac compared to a Windows PC.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. There was many who would argue that the Mac development environment is superior to Windows in other respects. The Cocoa framework seems to be a very elegant paradigm for developing applications, and Mac applications can often be created without writing any code. This doesn't mean anyone can create software for a Mac, but it does mean that more software can be created faster with fewer defects. (As an aside, Automator for Mac does mean that some tasks can be automated by someone without any development knowledge, and there simply isn't anything like it on Windows).

Steve Jobs understood the benefits of having a superior development environment (as well as other marketing principles such as segmentation, targeting and positioning) as demonstrated on this now-famous video from when he was at Next:

This philosophy was brought to Apple when they purchased Next, and brought Jobs back into the fold. Mac OS X is based on Next technology.

In class, it was also mentioned that the iPhone is Apple's first device which supports third-party applications. This, too, is not true (although it is the first iPod which can supports third-party applications). The Newton supported application development,although I don't know if it was a good environment or not.

Finally, Apple has success not just on Macs, but also on PCs with their iTunes software, showing they can success even when they don't control the hardware. Microsoft, too, has had success on Macs. Internet Explorer was highly regarded, and Office for Mac is sometimes regarded as superior to its Windows counterpart.

In summary, I'm making the point that Apple computers and devices are not closed systems; they do support software development, and provide a robust environment at that. Steve Jobs not doubt continues to realize the contribution that software developers make to the value proposition of a computing platform.

Trying to get Dugg

I've recently been experimenting with commenting on Digg postings.

For the uninitiated, Digg is a system where you vote (or digg) Internet pages that you like. For example, if the author if this blog was so-inclined, you might see a "Digg This" button for this post juxtaposed with the number of diggs this post has already received. Each time you Digg a page, the number increases. Having many diggs means your site gets listed on Digg, which generates more traffic for your site and indicates a high level of positive interest.

Digg has a commenting system along the sames lines. You create comments for each Internet page's Digg count. Users then digg comments up or down. A positive rating on a comment means you have more digg-ups than digg-downs. The higher your score, the more people that "digg" your comment.

Digg seems to attract the Internet savvy, and many highly dugg stories relate to

• movies, especially those that might appeal the comic book loving type or have a cult following
• politics, with a strong pro-Obama, anti-Bush agenda
• technology, with constant strife between Apple fanboys, generic Microsoft bashers, and Linux geeks

My experience commenting hasn't been positive. My first comment was dugg down, and the response to comments range from vial to just plain offensive. Subsequent ones followed similar patterns of engendering loathing by Digg readers; it was not uncommon to the word "fuck" in those comments, directed squarely at me. Often, some kind-hearted soles would stick up for me, only to be subjected to further attacks. The Internet is a mean place.

Today, I'm happy to report that Bush (and Cheney) bashing seems to be a sure-fire way to get your comments dugg up. Finally, I have received a positive score on a comment, and even a tongue-in-cheek reply.

I'm really moving up in the world.

Dancing Around The World: Where the Hell Is Matt?

This guy went around the world to... dance. Very cool, interesting and inspiring video.

Blink and you'll miss the dancing in Melbourne at Federation Square.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

How many of these places have you been to?

[via Presentation Zen where you'll find more videos too]

How to Charge Your Chevy Volt

Run the electric car by charging it in the lighter of your Hummer

The End of ColdFusion

The marketing gurus at Adobe have just released an Evangelism Kit for ColdFusion [via Damon Cooper's Blog].

For as long as I've been using ColdFusion (over 3 years), I always heard detractors saying it was a dead or dying product. We never got much help from Adobe (or Macromedia) in justifying ColdFusion; we were forced to speculate on the future of the product, and the number of customers using it. I suspect that Adobe never had the need to justify CF; sales were fine, and so too, most likely, were revenues from the product.

So now I am going to become one of those detractors. Let's just say that this kit hasn't inspired me. On the contrary... I can't but feel that this Evangelism Kit spells the decline of ColdFusion. Here are few things to consider:

• Why now? 10+ years without such an offering. Why create this document now? I suspect that some of the major clients listed are actually migrating away from CF, so better to indicate that these companies are using CF while it is still technically true.
• Where are the exciting new features? I mean, look at the roadmap. Sully features "enhancements". I'm surprised "bug fixes" didn't make it onto that list.
• Open source competition: Blue Dragon, Railo and more
• Leveraging other products and scripting languages as middleware in the RIA stack: Groovy (the boys at Broadchoice, filled with names synonymous with ColdFusion, are using Groovy more and more these days: 9 posts tagged with "Groovy", zero posts tagged with "ColdFusion"), PHP, and Ruby.

I like ColdFusion, so I hope Adobe can keep it alive and keep its developers highly productive, but just when I think Adobe will push to make CF mainstream, I feel they took at least one step backwards, and may not have any more momentum to move forward.

Cloud Computing and Privacy

Will Cloud Computing Violate your Privacy and Security? at Ben Balbo

My friend Ben discusses the implications of cloud computing and privacy. What follows is my rambling on the subject.

"Cloud computing" really means software running on service hosted on a server (or cluster of servers) accessible via the Internet. At least, that is what lay people understand it to mean, and I've grown quite happy in accepting this definition (Ben's definition is more general and correct, though). It does introduce some peculiarities. For example, if I purchase Confluence, for example, as a hosted product, that's cloud computing according my definition. If I buy the server license and install it on my fire-walled server, that's not cloud computing, even if it is accessible via the Internet.

So, given this definition (whether you agree with it or not), their are multiple factors to consider:

• security: is the cloud provider better able to secure data than I would be running my own server and infrastructure?
• reliability: is the cloud service provider able to offer me more reliable uptime than I would otherwise get by managing my own hardware?
• trust: do I trust the cloud service provider more than I would my own staff in not accessing data that they shouldn't?
• functionality: is the hosted service something I just can't get anywhere else?
  

Then, of course, you'd need to weight the risks and relative benefits of all these points.

Just a small anecdote regarding security:

There are companies that refuse to use cloud services, especially those managed by Google. For example, Google Apps is  off-limits as it is considered too risky to host data and communications on a third-party server. Instead, companies keep sensitive information on their local servers. These servers are backed up by amateurs. The passwords are insecure. The users don't understand how to security documents as the systems are not easy to use.

I would argue -- strongly -- that Google's services, in this case, are much more secure.

Receiving Peer Feedback (En Masse)

I just received my marks for both my syndicate paper and presentation for the "Managing People for High Performance" class at Melbourne Business School. Both of these marks were based partially on peer feedback, and in slightly different ways. [The peer feedback for the paper hasn't yet been received, so I'll talk about the presentation and update this posting later.]

The presentation, worth only a small amount of my total grade, was given to the entire class and the mark was based 50% on feedback from my classmates and 50% from the lecturer. Our final mark was 7.4 (out of 10): 7.2 from the professor and 7.6 from the rest of the class. Included in the document containing these marks were four pages of quantitative feedback from my peers, not all of it positive.

I'm still reflecting on these comments, and while many were positive, there was a general consensus that I relied too heavily on reading the slides (which were behind be, being projected) instead of making eye contact with audience. This is certainly good and constructive feedback; I will definitely watch out for this next time (note: I had forgotten my notes on my desk when I went to up to present, so I'll be sure not to do that in the future). There was one comment in the listing that struck me as both offensive and complementary. It said:

First speaker (Scott) was very distracting. Spoke very quickly and did not make eye contact with the audience as they had their back turned reading the slides. Second speaker articulated the information clearly and engaged the audience.

I find the use of the term "distracting" particularly puzzling, and I'm left wondering if the first sentence relates to the second, or is something reflecting an aversion to my general speaking style and personality?  However, I think most speakers would like to described as distracting when the presenting; what exactly was that person distracted from? The focus of this person's attention should have been on me, and I certainly won't apologize if something I did was a distraction from, say, Facebook (a favourite of students during a boring presentation).

[As you can probably tell, I did get a bit defensive at this point, but I will definitely take this criticism on board for next time.]

As a member of the class, I too was required to provide feedback on the presentations as well. I have to say that despite my defensive tirade above, I was even more harsh on my fellow classmates, perhaps having higher expectations or because I was simply grumpy. I'm concerned that my low scores will start to affect other presentation scores. I hope that the professor scales people's scoring, because everyone will have a different baseline of how to score. For example, I often gave a 4 for a very slightly below average performance, my hope is that they would receive a 70 - 75 for their presentation, based on my expectation that the average mark would be 75 - 80. Certainly, I did not want or even believe that they should fail!

I have to say that receiving feedback from classmates was extremely helpful, and it is very hard to be in denial about relying on the slides when dozens of fellow classmates -- bright, friendly, and intelligent people -- all say the same thing.

I'll leave you with one of my favourite videos on the subject (we made some of the same mistakes):

Language, Framework or Platform

When I try to talk to people about a technology they are not familiar with, I often try to make comparisons to something they are already using. The generally involves drawing parallels between ColdFusion and Ruby on Rails on the one hand with Java and .Net on the other. I frequently find myself explaining some of the differences between what is a programming language, what is a development framework, and what is platform that the application runs on.

The last one, the platform, is one that I find the most difficult to articulate. Generally, you know you're using a platform when you are relying on something inherit in the operating system or you have installed something. The platform determines where your application can run and what artifacts of the host system you have at your disposal. Examples of platforms are:

• Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - runs on any computer with the JRE installed. Includes Mac OS X without additional installation.
• .NET - runs on any computer with the .NET framework installed. Windows only.
• Ajax - Browsers which support XML HTTP requests and Javascript
• Flash - Browsers which have Flash plug-in installed, or the standalone Flash player

The language is, at its simplest form, just a compiler which generates something executable from code. The compilation of a language targets a platform, or is evaluated by the platform at run-time. Depending on the targeting or which platform is doing the evaluation, the application will have access to resources and services native to the platform. Examples of languages:

• Java
• C#
• Javascript
• Actionscript
• Ruby

What's interesting about these languages is that, perhaps with exception of C#, they can be executed on various platforms:

• Java: Java Runtime Environment or .NET (via J#)
• Javascript: in a browser, .NET (via JScript), and Java (via Rhino)
• Actionscript: in a flash player, AIR application, or in ColdFusion (via the little-used server-side ActionScript -- and yes! this makes ColdFusion a platform)
• Ruby - using a standard Unix environment, JRuby, and IronRuby

Finally, there are the frameworks. Frameworks generally may target a platform or a language, depending on the nature of the framework. A framework exists to organize code in a systematic way, but may be bound to features present in the underlying platform. Often the confusion with something like Rails, ColdFusion or Flex is that they are not understood as frameworks, but as programming languages. This is simply not true; they are frameworks, tightly bound either to their underlying language, platform, or both. For example, Rails for another language such as Java simply isn't possible: Rails relies on very specific language features of Ruby simply not available to Java programmers. However, some frameworks are indeed portable across languages. Spring, with its IoC container concept and API to access it is indeed used across multiple platforms and languages: ColdFusion, .NET, and Java.

In summary, although the distinction between languages, frameworks and platforms isn't necessarily complex, it is important to keep in mind the distinction when exploring new technologies.

Gap Shopping: Separate sites, one cart

I don't know if it's a new change, but I just visited the Gap web site and was immediately notified that I could now shop from the Gap site as well as other brands under the Gap umbrella (Banana Republic, Old Navy and Piperlime). Gap would combine the shipping costs for all purchases across the sites and ship them to me (assuming I was in the States) for $7. Not a bad deal.

Aside from the shopping potential, this strikes me a way to create synergies across brands while not removing the differentiation between them; for all intents and purposes, the branding of each site is quite distinct, yet every page on every site is tied together with a familiar "tabbing" system, not mention the same shopping cart and simple checkout.

I can't help but think -- ahem -- that if an organization wanted to separate two distinct arms of their business -- for example, award business degrees and executive education programs -- that a unified tab system but distinct branding below is probably a good way to go.

Walking Directions now in Beta: Apparently to Feature Safer Walking When Released?!

Onion Video: Genetic Engineering

"At first we were trying to cure Alzheimer, but now we have a sheep with the mind of a goat."

Genetic Scientists Develop Sheep With Brain Of A Goat

The Consequences of Flash Indexing

A couple of weeks ago, Adobe announced that they partnered with Google and Yahoo to allow for effective indexing of Flash content, allowing Flash content to appear in search results just like normal HTML web pages. I didn't think much about this at the time, but I think there will be a number of interesting effects and questions:

• This really puts Silverlight at a disadvantage for creating web sites. But I suspect Silverlight is more appropriate for internal development (on Intranets and such). I don't think anyone really expects Microsoft to dedicate many resournces to Silverlight on Mac or Linux.
• Given the above, I'd still like to see of Live Search starts to offer indexed Silverlight content (if there is any to be found). Live Search, by the way, was not included in Adobe's press release.
• The search engine optimization industry for HTML is still going strong. I can tell horror stories of some of the dodgy ones I have worked with in the past and the obsession marketing teams have with whether a given change will affect their position on search results. In a way, using Flash was nice because it was saying "to hell with search engine marketing". Sometimes, this resulted in better usability. Sometimes. But now, there are going to "specialists" focusing on optimizing Flash content for search engines. I'm not looking forward to it.
• Still, I expect this announcement to do very little to drive plain old web sites to use technologies such as Flex. The lack of Flash on the iPhone is a serious achilles heal for Adobe and I expect less adoption of Flash for content publishing, even with this new development.
• I have found web developers of with multiple years of experience who can tell me when it's a good idea to use POST or GET for their HTML forms (tip: use GET and Google might index it. Use POST and Google won't because it may not be safe). Having little understanding of exactly how the Flash content will be indexed, and given that Flash developers almost certainly did not consider whether a given action was "safe", I'm not sure I'd like Google clicking around Flash my application trying to discover its dynamic data. Who knows what kind of load it would create if there was lots of server-side data coming across?
  

What do you think? Will you be creating content-heavy sites in Flash and hoping Google find it and approves? Are you going to examine your Flash development practices to make sure the crawlers don't create chaos on your servers?

First Days of .NET Development

Last week I wrote my very first .NET program in order to fulfill some requirements for SharePoint project I am currently working on. I wanted to reflect on my initial experiences with multiples aspects of the development environment.

Just some quick background on me for context:

• I have some commerical development experience with: Java, ColdFusion, Ruby and PHP
• My prefered IDE is Eclipse which I use for Java and ColdFusion development. I have used Eclipse, Netbeans and Textmate for Ruby development.
• My understanding of OO concepts and design patters is rather high. I have used frameworks like Spring and Hibernate.
• I've used multiple UI development tools and I prefer those which support a mixture of markup and scripting (Flex, Laszlo and HTML come to mind) over pure coding (Swing, for example) even if there is good IDE support for component layout and wiring events.
  

Visual Studio 2005

I was unable to install Visual Studio 2005 on my workstation. I had to rely on a copy installed on a virtual machine running on my workstation. Obviously not a great start to any development project.

Visual Studio runs surprisingly smooth on the VM (VMWare player) which was a bit of a surprise.

Overall, Visual Studio 2005 seems adequate, even for a beginner like myself. However, I would prefer a bit more documentation on the referenced classes in the project. This is probably more a limitation of some of the SharePoint libraries than of Visual Studio, but I didn't feel like each class and method has enough documentation to use it correctly.

SharePoint SDK

One the major shortcomings of SharePoint development is that to really be productive, you develop on a machine running SharePoint, which, therefore, means you are running Visual Studio on a server operating system. This seems like a significant limitation, although I've seen that there are ways to work around this, I don't have the time or skill to undertake such an endeavour at this point.

The SharePoint object model is relatively straightforward, and its component based architecture for UI lends itself to less spaghetti code, but doesn't seem to completely eliminate the ability to code things badly. That's fine. Developers should always have enough rope to hang themselves. And as a beginner, I fully expect to do just that in the coming week.

C#

For a Java developer, C# adoption is not too difficult but there are some nuances to be aware of and some keywords, which, frankly, I'm not sure about. Luckily, C# is common and a quick Google search easily clarifies any confusion I may have. Still, I'm not competent enough to just get things done just yet.

There are many times in past couple of weeks where I have checked on the status of IronRuby and considered IronPython. Ultimately, I opted against investing any time here because

• as a company, we should standardise .NET development on C#
• I'm not sure what the IDE support for these languages is in Visual Studio (and I don't know what my other options are)
• I have no idea how to get started installing other languages into the .NET environment. One thing at a time, please.

Documentation

At the code level, the core SharePoint object model definitely could use an increase in documentation, probably of at least triple the current level. Comparing what Visual Studio gives to what Eclipse will show with Javadoc, I'd take Eclipse any day.

At the conceptual level, MSDN does provide some good, short examples and background to assist development. Still, its structure and content could be improved. (I really don't want to see Visual Basic examples when I'm doing C# development. Can't I turn these off?)

There are many blogs about .NET development, but much less so for SharePoint-specific development. This is definitely a problem because even trying to solve a beginner level problem (created alerts automatically for SharePoint groups) doesn't appear to be solved and posted by a blogger. I suspect I would have better luck in the Java Portal world, but I could be wrong.

Conclusion

It has been easy to achieve a base level of productivity with Visual Studio, C#, and SharePoint for someone with a moderate amount of experience with other technologies. Still, Visual Studio suffers from many of the shortcomings of other Microsoft products: unreliable (at least of installation) and a high dependence on other Microsoft products (Server for SharePoint development).

The code-level documentation is still lacking, but there are ample sources of information out there, both on Microsoft's development site and on random blogs. Still, Microsoft's documentation is the most comprehensive (but could definitely still be better) and there aren't enough interesting bloggers solving SharePoint problems and posting their code.

I'd say that I'm sufficiently encouraged to continue working through all the hiccups that are common when starting on a new platform and paradigm. Hopefully I'll be able to remove my beginner status in the next couple of months.

A Better Credit Card

It seems there are two extremes when it comes to credit cards. On the one hand, I have friends who refuse to apply for and use a credit card, claiming that they could potentially get themselves into some heavy deb quite quickly. On the other, there are those with a credit that has, err, some heavy debt.

There is middle ground of course. I use my credit card whenever I can because it makes financial sense. There are a few key reasons for this:

• protection against online fraud
• travel insurance
• reduced car rental excess
  
• protection if items are lost or stolen within 30 days of purchase
• extended warranty
• no interest or payments on purchases for up to 55 days
  

Depending on the specifics of your credit card, you'll have similar benefits. The last benefit is key. That means that if I spend within my means, I will make money using my credit card, since I can earn interest on the cash I would have otherwise used to make a purchase. I would estimate I earn about $100 a year on this fact alone, more than covering my card's annual fee. And I also benefit from the other features listed above.

So for those in this first category of people (who don't have a credit card), here's an idea for the banks. A hybrid credit/debit. It would work like this.

• Up to 55 days interest free
• Linked to a main savings account
• Only allows purchases up to the value of the savings account
  
• Each purchase moves cash from the savings account into an account where it is frozen but it earns interest
• Payment is deducted automatically from this account when the credit card payment is due
• Left over interest from this account is moved into the savings account every year

That would definitely work for me. Would it work for you?

Snow Leopard: A Whole OS to Call Web Services?

I was just checking out the new Snow Leopard page [via TUAW] and it is quite defunct of anything remotely interesting. Sure, Exchange integration is great, but it only supports Exchange 2007. That's because Exchange 2007 supports standard web services (something that Microsoft should be applauded for doing). Now, I'm no OS X developer, but I suspect that incorporating, say, Exchange syncing of Address Book contacts is no more complex that adding the GMail Address Book sync included in the 10.5.3 update. Why a whole OS for this?

And why would I would I care in one year's time about an OS with a smaller hard drive footprint? I can buy a 1TB drive for around $200 these days. I have unlimited online backup via Mozy for $5 per month. I'm not sure how big Leopard is, but let's say its 10 GB. As a percentage of my primary hard drive, remote Airport disk and Mozy backup, that probably represents about 0.1% of my hard drive space. So if Apple manages to reduce the OS size to 1/10 of its current size, that will save me a staggering 0.09% percent of storage space.

And that's "in about a year" when hopefully laptop drives will be approaching 750GB, online storage will be as close to free as possible, and you'd just carry around your iPhone instead of your laptop for most media viewing activities.

So call me cynical, but I can't why anyone should get excited about a Snow Leopard or why I would consider paying for it.

Plug for New Book (Please Sign It)

I've seen Joshua once when his couldn't access the Intranet. And I spoke to him once on the phone when I noticed a misprint in something he wrote.

I'm hoping he will be kind enough to sign a copy of the book he wrote (and one for my friend) which is about parenting and economics. I hope it's in the same vain as Freakonomics and The Logic of Life, both of which I find fascinating.

Recursively Unscalable

From Profy:

Scalability has become the latest buzzword of the social media set, with finger pointing and accusations flying. Most users seem to miss the irony that they are using the very applications they are complaining about, like Twitter, to talk about the lack of scalability, making sites like Twitter clogged with complaints about… well, itself.

Blogo: Nice but Slow and Unstable

I've written the past couple of posts using Blogo. It's a nice simple app and I especially like that includes support for traditional blogging and microblogging, i.e. I can post Twitter updates using the same tool. It also shows me the twitter status of my friends in a manner similar to Twitterific.

Although the UI isn't as Mac-like as some other apps, it's simple, subtle and refreshing. Definitely won't get in the way of your next brilliant post. It also doesn't seem to offer spellchecking.


Still, the editor almost too simple, lacking some key features such as the ability to embed flash video or vary your font size (it doensn't have an HTML view so there are no workaround here).

I could almost live with all of these flaws, except that Blogo does something unforgivable on a Mac: it crashes. Often. Users may also find it slow. On my new Macbook Pro, I'm frequently exposed to the beautiful colors of the spinning beachball. I've had the app crash about 6 times while writing my previous post. For a $25 piece of software, I would hope that at least the stability issue would be resolved.


Still, this app has tremendious potential so keep your eyes open on this one still worth a trial if not a purchase just yet.

Putting "Original" On Originals

When I was in high school, I remember taking a test that was included with the teacher's copy of the text book (the one with all the answers to the questions at the end of the chapter as well). On each page of the test, on the top right, in large bold text it stated clearly: "Original Copy". Obviously, there is some flaw in using these words on anything that can be copied, and is one of the most meaningless practices I have discovered.

Tonight, as I'm reading my case study, I notice on the bottom of every page: "Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner." Seriously, if this is legally binding or has any meaning whatsover, please let me know what it could be and how it would not be transferable to the photocopies I could make of this document?

Zappos is All the Rage

I've been buying shoes form Zappos for about 3 years now. They are the old place I can get Gravis shoes in South Florida, and I'm sure to order a pair every time I head home.

Lately, they have been getting lots of press: They started using Twiter. They're on track for $1 billion in revenue. And they offer new employes a buyout after one week of training. They offer free shipping both ways.

I just wanted to chime and say well done to Zappos. I've always had a great experience buying from them and they set a model of customer focus that every organisation should follow.

Happy Banking = Weird Web Site

Bank West has an interesting campaign called Happy Banking. Going to their campaign landing page, you can create a "music video" featuring singing kittens, a ukulele, and your name (sort of). Interesting, to be sure. Reminds me of an old Burger Kind campaign featuring a subservient chicken which was so popular, it's still live. And creepy.

Enjoy.

Note Taking Application Suggestions?

I've recently completed reading a somewhat lengthy case study on the Bank of Melbourne and Westpac merger. I know that tomorrow I am going to be grilled relentlessly on its contents. I know this because I have been in this class before. I have also read this case study before. Twice. Still, the chance that I will look stupid when the lecturer asks in what city did the Bank of Melbourne and Westpac staff meet prior to the merger (Stonelea) remains perilously high.

Now, as I was reading the case study and having experience reading other such case studies, plus my experience with webby things like the using tags and multiple ways of viewing structured data (Mingle grids and trees is a good example) I was thinking: I need a good note-taking piece of software with tag support. Today.

Here are my requirements:

• tag support for notes
• notes as versioned wiki pages
  
• hierarchy of notes, like an outline form or tree
• calendar view when some of the structured data are dates. Bonus points for a GANT view.
• easily search and filter by tags
• arbitrary columns (like SharePoint lists or Mingle card attributes)
• collaborative notes with others would be amazing
  

With these tools at hand, I could create a notes like this:

Note	Tags
Just before the merger, the banks sent key managers to Stonelea for a conference	1997, region, city, Westpac, BML, manager

Then, later on, I can slice and dice the information any way I want, seeing information only related to "Westpac" and "manager", for example. Or information related to cities. Or things that happened in 1997. Later, I can also see what the key issues of the article are by viewing the tags as a cloud.

Can anyone recommend a tool that can do this? Would anyone else find this useful?

[I'm thinking Mingle might even make the cut here. But it needs tag clouds and calendar views. Add it to your backlog, Thoughtworks.

I might post on using Mingle for this after I give it a try.

Continuing completely off topic, someone from Thoughtworks will be lecturing at my business analysis class at Melbourne Uni. I'm looking forward to it despite having nearly 12 hours of class tomorrow!]

Touching Sports Moment

I'm not one for professional sports players being made out to be important, but still, this story is nice.

Tagging. Because directories are so 1990s.

No long ago, I was presenting at meeting and sifting through our company's shared drive searching for some document. We have a semi-structured directory structure for files related to projects. At the top level, the project name, of course. But then things get murky. At level 2, we have things like "Mind Maps", "Business Analysis", and "Governance".

Of course, not every document neatly fits into each category and, in fact, most items fall into multiple categories. The most obvious is the mind maps related the business analysis. It was then I realised how grotesquely outdated the modern file system is. We are still stuck in a filing-cabinet world and we can do so much better!

(Side note: Having a folder based on the file type is completely useless and probably stifles adoption of the mind map software we are encouraging because it presupposes that it's special in the gamut of software. Imagine seeing a folder called "Word Files" and "Spreadsheet Files". We know what file type it is from the icon and/or extension. But, as usual, I digress.)

So as I was imaging an operating system which eliminated the file system paradigm entirely and replaced it entirely what a tagging-based system, I was extremely pleased to discover Leap by Ironic Software which brings tagging to the Mac Finder. Leap is extremely clever, deriving tags from things like the folders in which your file already exists (each folder level is a tag) as well as metadata which might be associated with a given file type (MP3 tags, for example). Still, there are some missing features, such as the tag cloud, which would be nice to see. Interestingly, Ironic Software's other product , Yep, offers the tag cloud for its PDF repository.

Finally, under the tag theme on Macs, check out Delish [via TUAW] which offers an iPhoto-like way of browsing your Del.icio.us bookmarks via their tags. Nice stuff. Nice enough to make me finally trial a Del.icio.us account after all these years. So long, Google Bookmarks.

Three Steps to Troubleshooting a Windows Computer

1. Turn it off and then back on.
2. Uninstall an application and then reinstall it. (Repeat with other/same application(s) as required)
3. Uninstall Windows and then reinstall it.

Microsoft Madness (Enterprise Edition)

We just launched our first deliverable of our internal SharePoint project, codename MBS Direct. As part of this first release, we needed to migrate some functionality from our old infrastructure onto the SharePoint platform. This functionality was simple: show a list of events and allow the user to sign up for the event. I decided I would give it this a shot, despite have no development experience with SharePoint (although I was comfortable configuring lists and such). After playing with InfoPath for forms and Visual Studio for workflows for a couple of days, I decided to give SharePoint Designer a go. After hitting a wall trying to pass variable data into the start of a workflow, I found this useful tutorial which essentially mirrors the functionality I was trying to accomplish. Lucky break! (Still, the way to pass data into the workflow when it starts doesn't appear to be documented anywhere but there.)

However, once everything was set up -- forms, workflows, lists, permissions -- things turned sour when I tried testing this solution as a standard (i.e. not administrative) user. I kept receiving "Access Denied" errors when the workflow ran. I tried some obvious things, not the least of which is was make sure visitors have contribute access to this list that workflow adds to. No effect. It was difficult to determine to what, exactly, access had been denied. Troubleshooting SharePoint errors is a bitch, to say the least.

I gave up; there was no way I was going to solve this problem myself. So we asked the company looking after after our support to help.

First, kudos to So what was the problem? Here's the first sentence from the "solutions architect" who managed to solve this problem several days after it was raised: "To resolve your workflow issue you need to give the user starting the workflow contribute access to a hidden list." This is certainly one of the funniest "features" I have ever come across.

So for those of you who encounter this problem, here's what you need to know. When you create a "custom workflow action" without explicitly binding the workflow to a list in SharePoint Designer, it will cleverly use a list called "Custom Workflow Process" located in the _catalogs folder of your site. You must set up the visitors to have contribute access to this list. And you must do this by looking at the properties for this list in SharePoint Designer, going to "Security" tab and then clicking "Manage permissions using the browser."

Crazy, right?

Great Movie Review Line from Review of Apparently Worst Move

The New York Post excerpt is classic, although there are a number of good ones on the page. It's always good to read a meta-review of an awful movie.

88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.

Alumni Donations

I am trying so hard to find the text of a column I read in Time magazine about 5 years ago. It really stuck with me. I'm pretty sure it's written by Joel Stein. Joel is talking about the ridiculous amount of money he paid for a Stanford education and the subsequent requests for alumni donations. 

I'll paraphrase about the fictional letter he received from Gillette, the fine makers of the Mach 3 razor: "Mr Stein, I understand you enjoyed our Mach 3, which offers you a very close and comfortable shave. Would you consider giving a small donation to Gillette?"  He then goes on to lament the expensive "art" around the $30,000-a-year tuition Stanford campus which he notes is a private institution.

If anyone knows where I can find the original text of this column, could you let me know in the comments?

Update: I found it.

Something Very Interesting About Speed Dating

I've been thinking of doing speed dating for a while now, if only as a social experiment.

I'm currently reading The Logic of Life by Tim Harford (who I happened to miss when he was in Melbourne Business School last month). He has a very interesting chapter on dating and marriage. A few interesting bits:

• men will usually pick 1 in 5 women to date in speed dating. Women: 1 in 10
• men will select 1 in 5 regardless of the actual talent pool, i.e. we will lower our standards
• young, single women tend to congregate where men earn the most money, i.e. in the cities. This creates an abundance of single women.
• the high incarceration rate of young black males is one reason why African-American females are more likely to go to college.

When Projects Go Wrong: Scrum vs. Waterfall

I was thinking of the comparison between a traditional IT project going over budget or late vs. a Scrum project. In Scrum, we reduce scope instead of moving milestone dates. So whereas a project manager might tell the business sponsors

I need another 3 months and $250,000 to finish this project

a Scrum-master might say

As the product stands right now, a few minor features have yet to be implemented. The software is documented, tested and ready for use. For another $250,000 we could get the other features done.

I know which one I would prefer to say, and which one I would prefer to hear. Luckily, they are the same.

Update: As a I get a lot of traffic to this page, I thought of the problems mentioned in CIO magazine about when Agile projects go wrong is also important. What resonates with me is the tendency to avoid getting into too much detail with the client, even though you probably should.

Still, we just deployed a new CRM system over 1 year in the making, and I think an iterative, agile approach would have been much better (and yes, the project was late and over budget).

A Very Interesting Hobby: The Hidden Mickey Finders

Did you know that Disney hides references to Micky Mouse throughout their movies and theme parks? Neither did I. But there is a whole site dedicated to documenting this.

Who are the people who want to be my Facebok friend?

I mean, seriously, I'm all for Facebook. But you can't just click a button and expect to be my friend. Just like I will not connect with you on LinkedIn if you if I hate working with you (yes, I'm talking to you, guy-I-hate-working-with), I will not be your Facebook friend if I don't like you. 

Hint: I like people that send me Facebook messages. I'm not sure about the poke... it tickles.

On Tibet: If you're Chinese-Australian, Should You Protest?

On my tram ride home today, I noticed a few dozen young Chinese protesting. They were holding long banners that read "Tibet was, is, and always will be part of China." There were at least 3 such banners held up by aournd 8 people so everyone could read it several times on the their way up Swanston Street.

My first question is: what exactly were the people protesting? Were they taking issue with some of the comments by Kevin Rudd the other day? If so, I believe his statements were more about human rights than geopolitics; I don't think he was disputing the borders of China.

Perhaps these people were simply showing solidarity with the Chinese government. On first thought, this seems fairly innocuous. Certainly I believe that these people have the right, in Australia, to speak out in favour of any policy they want, whether of the Australian government, or of some foreign regime. 

Here's where the contradiction arises. You see, the Chinese government doesn't believe that foreigners should interfere with what is essentially (according the banner of the protesters, to be sure) an internal matter for China. How then does it make any sense for those on Australian soil to essentially intefere with an internal matter, even by showing their solidarity? It seems the Chinese goverment would be prefer -- whether you're for or against their behaviour -- to keep your mouth shut. These protesters are trying to have it both ways, but make sense in neither realm.

Worst. President. Ever.

And everyone knows who you mean. Interesting, no?

Mac Stuff: Using Mail to Run Scripts

Here's a good and simple post on getting your Mac to run commands based on e-mails it receives. Try doing that with Outlook Express.

I know that post is supposed to be simple, but wouldn't be even better if there was rule that just evaluated the message of your e-mail as if it was an Applescript file? I've never tried any Applescript-ing, but surely this must be possible.

Google App Engine Blog: Introducing Google App Engine + our new blog

Google recent released a new application engine which runs "in the cloud." I tried to sign up, but the 10,000 spaces were taken up faster than my tiny fingers could type.

This is a major step forward for making scalable application infrastructure something handled by the likes of Google and Amazon and not by Dell consultants or your IT folk: the so-called Red Shift that someone saw coming.

My advice is twofold:

• If you're investing heavily in virtualization for new projects or an attempt to scale existing one, seriously reconsider and explore these new options.


• Invest in Sun, Amazon, and Google. Not VMWare or Microsoft.

There's good potential here.

Signing Up for Microsoft's TechNet Forum

Trying to help a poor soul on the Microsoft forum, I decided I would create an account so I could do just that. I was presented the following screen:

Note the advice beneath "Display E-Mail" field. Microsoft is essentially saying that you shouldn't actually put your e-mail address there at all and offers a rather silly ways of preventing spam which I believe even a simple e-mail harvester would figure out (since the open bracket is a token which would end an e-mail address). It reads:

This will be visible to all forum members. If you enter your real e-mail address, you will likely receive unwanted messages (spam) because spammers regularly gather e-mail addresses from public communties. We highly recommend that you use a modified version of your e-mail address. For example, if an e-mail address were someone@example.com, we would recommend modifying it to someone@example.com.(donotspam).

How does Google solve this problem? Google parses every posting and obfuscates the e-mail address with the first few characters followed by some ellipses. To retrieve the full e-mail address, I would need to click the link, fill in a CAPCHA form and only then would I be able to see the full e-mail address. This seems like a very reasonable process, especially compared with Microsoft's "please don't actually put an e-mail address into the form" recommendation. To date, AFAIK, I have not received any spam to my GMail account from something I posted on Google Groups. (Actually, I don't think I ever received a single spam e-mail to my GMail account ever).

For those who wish to use a real e-mail address for the MSDN forums and who use GMail, you can try using a custom e-mail address with rules. It's a very simple and elegant solution which I am about to use.

The Geek Inside Me

Better that the geek outside you, but still...

The new X-Files movie is fast approaching and I'm quite excited. I haven't any posters, trailers, or mainstream media buzz so whether it's a good movie or not, I'm predicting a total financial failure and if we ever come across the X-Files again, it will have to be in a new TV series with a new or partially new cast.

Resume 2.0: Part 1: The Skills Cloud

Your resume is boring. That's probably by design. Nothing to be ashamed of there.

These days, resumes are often geared two audiences: the recruiter and the employer. They have different needs and it might be difficult to convey the information best to both parties at the same time. This is not unlike your web site which also has two different audiences, the search indexers and the human browsers. A lot of money has been in trying to keep your web site optimal to both the former and the latter, sometimes with hilarious results.

In this post, I'd like to examine a very simple way to convey information on your resume: your broad skill set. I'll focus on technologies here since I have a resume geared towards a job in the IT sector. Keep in mind that this style is probably better for those in the same boat as it relies on a concept familiar to most technologists (except, perhaps, the team at Blogger): the tag cloud. In the tag cloud, all the tags you used to categorize your posts appear, with tags used more frequently appearing more often. Most blogging engines support this natively.

Let's substitute "blog" for "resume" and "tag" for "skill" where skills with larger fonts are those which I am most skilled/experienced with. What do we have? A "skills cloud" if you will. My looks a little something like this:

Actionscript Ant cfcUnit ColdFusion Coldspring Dojo Toolkit Farcry Groovy Hibernate Java Javascript Jetty jQuery JUnit Mingle MySQL Oracle PHP Prototype Rake Reactor Ruby Rails SharePoint Spring Spry SQL Server Tomcat Transfer YUI

As you can see, it plainly apparent which skills I have and my relative strength in each. A good recruiter would use my employment and education to get a baseline level of a few skills to be understand the relative disparity.

If you wanted to separate your skills based on categories -- on my resume I have a frameworks, database, and programming language sections -- you can color-code your tags where like colors indicate the same category. Of course, most resumes are not printed in color so be careful on this one.

Customizing Your Blogger Feed Using Yahoo Pipes

In a previous post, I talked about adding an extra query parameter to your feed so that you can track feed subscriber's behavior in Google Analytics. Some of you may have wondered how to accomplish this if you can't control your feed's formatting. It turns out that this is quite easy to do using a fun and geeky tool called Yahoo Pipes. Here's what my pipe looks like:

This just loops over the link elements in the feed and adds the extra query parameter to it. From there, save your pipe and get the feed URL for it.

If You're Not My Facebook Friend, Are You Really My Friend?

Dear "Friend,"

We hang out sometimes. Or we work together. I like you. You like me. But if you're not my Facebook friend, we have issues.

You see, if you want to know what I'm up to this weekend, what book I'm reading, or what other friends I'm talking to, you need to see my Facebook profile. Nothing personal, but I have no intention of calling you to invite you out this weekend despite the individual that you are; if you're not in the list of people I can invite to Facebook events, i.e. my Facebook friends, I probably won't invite you. It's not that I don't like you, it's that I'm a busy man. I don't want to look up your e-mail or call you or SMS you. I'm not going to do that because frankly, dear friend, you need a Facebook account.

I want to you, my friend, to know what I'm up to. I want to talk to you about the books I'm reading. I want you to ask me about the New York Times article I thought was interesting.

And I want to know what you're up. If you're someone I lost touch with, changes are I still care how you're doing. Make it easy for me to reconnect. Post something interesting in your status. Help me out. If you're someone I met briefly at party who is now my Facebook friend, let's grow and expand our relationship. Post those pictures, however embarrassing they might be. If I can how you're doing, I'll be sure to ask on your wall. Or if I really like, I might send you a private message. But still, if I really really like you, I might just be old fashioned and send you an SMS. Call me old-fashioned.

So "friend," please, please, please create a Facebook account and be my Facebook friend. It's not creepy or geeky to be Facebook friends with me, even if I barely know. We may have more in common than you know. Write on my wall. Please! And I'll write on yours.

Sincerely,

Facebook Profile #642686356

P.S. If I happen to have asked you out in an ambiguous sort of way via a private Facebook message after briefly meeting you at a party and you weren't quite sure what to do or say, sorry [Amber]. That was probably beyond the limits of acceptable Facebook usage and was a bit lazy. My bad! I'll call you when I'm back from Hawaii (which I planned with the help of some of my Facebook friends) and hopefully you will say yes this time.

Tracking the Behaviour of Feed Subscribers Using Google Analytics

Ever wanted to know which visitors in your Google Analytics were RSS subscribers. This is quite easy to set up if you can control some basic formatting of the item and channel guid element. In this example, we'll simply append an extra query string parameter: ga:source=feed. So, for example, if the URL of your blog post is http://friendofasquid.blogspot.com/2008/02/don-worry-be-happier.html, then in the RSS feed it would be http://friendofasquid.blogspot.com/2008/02/don-worry-be-happier.html?ga:source=feed.

On to Google Analytics. We need to set up an advanced filter for your blog. It looks like this:

I've kept the request URI regular express very simple. You can always make it more precise by ensuring it is within the the query string but it's probably more effort than its worth? Make sure you add the filter to a profile, and click finish.

Presto! When you view your sites report, you should a User-Defined value as expected.

Don't Worry. Be Happier.

After hearing about Tal Ben-Shahar's positive psychology class and book from my usual media outlets (NPR podcast and The Daily Show), I decided to buy his book and have a read. The book is called Happier and if you're having trouble finding it in Melbourne, it's because I bought most of the copies and gave them to my friends. It won't change you're life, but it does offer some good insights on what can make someone happy, and is a gentle reminder where we should focus our efforts in like (hint: not money). Tal stresses that all decisions and activities in your life should be measured in terms of the happiness they create; happiness, in the end, is the ultimate currency. I highly recommend it to everyone.

My mom sent me an e-mail this week that there was a full piece on happiness on 60 minutes last weekend. Here's the clip. Tal speaks at the end.

Microsoft versus Thoughtworks. SharePoint versus Mingle

This past week has been dominated by our portal project. SharePoint is our platform of choice for the portal, and Mingle is the documentation and project management tool that I'm using for this project. As a business analyst (my job title), it makes sense to use tools like SharePoint where I can address business requirements without relying on developers; I can often gather requirements and configure the system in real time if required. This is a tremendous asset.

So yes, SharePoint is a nice tool insofar as it satisfies the 80-20 rule for off-the-shelf-software: 80% of what you need is available out of the box, and 20% is missing and requires customization. Luckily, it seems SharePoint doesn't suck too much at customization, so we are not stuck trying to reinvent the wheel and hack into areas where we shouldn't. Still, there isn't much of an open-source community around this project as I would like to see, and it's difficult to get a grasp of what is an easy customization, and what is nearly impossible. The amount of blog posting from non-Microsoft employees regarding SharePoint, for example, is lacking.

Aside from poor community support and documentation, the other gripe I have is that finding out how do the 80% out-of-the-box functionality very time consuming. SharePoint doesn't actually do much, but finding out what it does and how to do it is quite challenging. Things that would seem natural to be able to do (reference the Now() function in calculated columns, have global lists, changing the link to text for document library items) are nearly impossible. Since you can't easily determine what's possible and the system is so unintuitive, a lot of time is spent searching for options which do not exist but presumably should.

Contrast this with Mingle.

Granted, Mingle does a lot less than SharePoint, although one could argue that there is much overlap. But the learning curve is negligible and the user interface, despite feeling less like a real desktop application than SharePoint, is actually a pleasure to use. Mingles features are easy to find and configure, the documentation and screencasts are well though-out so it's easy to see what Mingle can -- and more importantly -- cannot do, so little time is wasted searching for ways to do the impossible. Mingle comes with meaningful templates that actually show off "advanced" features like card transitions, graphing, and well constructed card properties.

(As a side point, the Mingle concept of "cards" is really not all the different from the SharePoint concept of lists. The both offer custom, typed columns and they both offer different views.)

There are a few lessons here for me:

• ship your application with meaningful out-of-the-box samples. Even better if some sample content could actually be applied to whatever project you're about to begin. (The SharePoint logo as an image web part is not really helpful)
• web applications should not try to feel like desktop applications; the should feel like web applications. This way, when I want to move the location of something on a page, I'll be pleasantly surprised that it drags instead of frustrated I have to click the "Move Up" button on a "toolbar" 30 times
  
• product marketing pages should actually show how to use the product, and relevant scenarios. Otherwise, I can't get started quickly, and I'm not sure what's possible.

Are you using Mingle or SharePoint (or both)? I'd love to hear about your experiences.

What I'm Using

I've seen similar posts so I thought I'd just list things I use:

• Hardware: Apple 17" Powerbook G4
  
• Web Browser: Safari 3 (and Safari 3 Beta for Windows at Work)
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The Cult of Fitness First

Not to pick on them, but during a recent stroll through Melbourne Central, there was a "fitness class" on a makeshift stage near the large clock. It featured two or three smiling, attractive "participants" going through the motions of an aerobics class. Nearby, a similarly perky group of people were giving up free two week memberships to Fitness First.

Who are these people that, upon watching 3 people do step aerobics, decides to join a gym? And why does this remind me of the free "stress test" that Scientologist sometimes offer nearby?

Either way, the lesson here is clear: never give a Fitness First sales rep. (or a Scientologist) your real phone number.

The Secret to Meeting People: Talk to Them!

People often comment on my seemingly natural ability to talk to and befriend strangers. This is not something I am necessarily comfortable with, but I do excel at it in certain settings. Here are some things I noticed about myself and generally as they relate to meeting people:

• Meeting girls at bars is hard work and can be expensive! In Australia, it is much easier to befriend a guy. In America, the dynamics are a bit different and depending on the location, making small talk with another guy is a bad idea.
  
• Say something! Anything! The hardest part is definitely saying that first thing to someone you don't know. But unless you are being sleazy, the other person almost always responds positively and makes it easy to get a conversation going.
  
• Remember: ask questions. This is a skill I learned when I was a little kid and have read over and over in various books and blogs. People will remember you favorably if they remember you are a good listener, not a good talker. Still...
• Be flexible. Everyone is different, and some interactions require more effort on your part than others. You can make your random encounters more interesting by trying to understand what sort of person you are talking to: introvert/extrovert, optimist/pessimist and so on. Ask questions that might help you determine this.
• Make yourself interesting by doing stuff. Again, nearly anything you do is interesting to someone, but mainstream activities are, by definition, more likely to resonate with a random group of people. Read books. Watch a movie. Travel. But remember, don't talk about yourself too much.
• Don't go to uncomfortable places to meet people. Meet people where you are comfortable. For me, this is in shopping centres, cafes, and book stores. Notice I didn't say bars and clubs.
  

As practice, I would try saying something to a stranger at least once a day. Here are some easy ones:

• Is this seat taken? (even if it clearly isn't)
• That's a cool jacket/purse/shirt/dog (even if it isn't)
  
• Do you know how to get to ... (even if you do)

Good luck.

YAML Configuration for Spring

Finally, thanks to the fine folks at JYaml, you can now configure your Spring application context using YAML with YAML4Spring library.

Ridiculous Marketing

I just came across some interesting copy on a web site:

Fitness First Gym Melbourne - QV Platinum is conveniently located for those people living or working close to the Melbourne - QV Platinum area

Convenient location for those to whom it is convenient. Nice.

It also reminds me of this beauty:

If you find a better advertised price anywhere that we can't beat - provided the magnets are of a similar quality - you'll get all of your Magnets.com magnets absolutely free! Even up to 3 months after your purchase!

Describe a situation in which a company would not be able to beat an advertised price, and then must give you the product for free. Makes no sense.