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?