A dream come true
Yesterday, Shane Richmond came bounding up to me and said: ‘I know you have three blogs already, but how would you like another one?’. ‘What crazy new project is he planning now, I thought. 56 books in a year not good enough for you?‘ But this was an offer I simply couldn’t refuse. The assignment? To write a blog for the Telegraph on what it’s like to be a supporter of the world’s ‘richest club’, Queens Park Rangers. The Rs. The Super Hoops. QPR.
This metric is based on the combined (assumed) wealth of the three investors who have recently acquired control of the club, Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone and Lakshmi Mittal, not on the state of the balance sheet, which is still threadbare according to some.
The name of the blog is ‘Considerably richer than you’ as suggested by Shane. I’ll be blogging about why we choose that in due course.
Anyway, for the vanishingly small number of people who read my blog and are also interested in QPR, you can check it out here.
del.icio.us links for 2008-01-10
- ServerInstallation - joid - Google Code - How to set up joid as an OpenID server
- Integrating Tomcat with Apache - How to get Apache to pass requests to Tomcat
- pydelicious - Google Code - A python client for the del.icio.us API
- The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry - iPhone has tripled [AT&T's] volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco … To predict the iPhone’s performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece
- Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities - Decent essay on Musil’s great novel The Man Without Qualities
- Shifting Mind > Postalicious - A WordPress plugin to auto publish your latest del.icio.us links as a post in your blog. Easy customisation of the HTML generated with a very simple templating system.
del.icio.us links for 2008-01-09
- Gojko Adzic » Returning the favour for on-site customers - ‘I propose a New Year’s resolution for software development teams - spend a week or two this year working at your customer’s location. You might not get a lot done in terms of coding, but it will make a significant difference to your users.’
- The word “intuitive”… isn’t. - “‘Intuitive’ is not a concrete or objective property of software”
- My default WordPress setup: 17 must-have plugins | FactoryCity
Two greats unexpectedly meet
One of my favourite books is Robert Musil’s massive The Man Without Qualities. The other day, Shane pointed out that Eamonn Fitzgerald had written not only about that, but also about the utterly superb TV series The Wire, whose fifth series got under way in the states last week. By chance he embedded a video of one of my favourite scenes - McNulty and Bunk doing their CSI thing in the most anti-CSI way you can imagine.
These are two niche things, and two of my favourites. It’s a strange coincidence that someone should blog about these things on consecutive days. I’ve been thinking about re-reading The Man Without Qualities. Now I have to.
One small quibble: Kakania was so called in Musil’s novel because it was a disparaging way to refer to the Austo-Hungarian Dual Monarchy - a contraction of the words ‘Kaiserlich und Königlich‘ - ‘Imperial and Royal’. So the book is not ’set in a country called Kakania’, but in Austo-Hungary.
Anyway, I recommend both greats unreservedly.
Spinny blog
I just noticed that one of my ex-colleagues, ex-Interesource Creative Director Simon I’Anson has a blog. He had a number of nicknames, the best of which was ‘Spinny’ - not because of his penchant for the phrase ‘I’m spinning plates’ (which I am happy to report he is still using) but because he regularly cheated at table football with his silly spinny finger action. You’ve got to watch him like a hawk.
He too has noticed that the Telegraph/Interesource story is out
Despite the dreadful pun that is the blog title, I’m subscribed.
Telegraph, Interesource and the future
So Shane has blown the gaff on the situation with My Telegraph and Interesource. I was one of the ‘techies’ he mentions who spent the whole night moving the servers back to Telegraph Towers one Tuesday in December. I eventually got to bed at 7 am. Despite that, the community has been slagging me off, which is nice. I hope they feel suitably chastened now.
Telegraph’s network configuration is very different from the topology at Interesource, and most of our problems were with getting the network configured correctly so that all the boxes could see each other over the right ports. As Shane says, we found some stuff yesterday that was screwing with performance - hopefully things should now be much better.
Shane mentions in passing an exciting project that we’ll be working on - I can say no more except that we’ll try to be as transparent as we can. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a very big announcement next week.
The reaction to Shane’s post has been interesting and I’d heartily endorse One Man and His Blog who identifies the perils of external hosting. To that, I’d add the perils of proprietary software. I spent a long time trying to convince people at Interesource that we should open-source our platform, not just because we could potentially harness the power of the community, but also because it would protect our existing clients and make us more attractive to new ones. Global Beach certainly did not see the advantage of OSS - once the acquisition was complete there was no chance of it being open-sourced.
For the benefit of people negotiating with people to write you software and provide hosting, I strongly advise you to establish an escrow agreement whereby a copy of the latest source code and data is regularly deposited with a trusted third party in case the company goes bust. Make sure that when people write software for you that you have a licence in perpetuity to do whatever you like with the software. Make sure that all the code you need is deposited, even code that was not written for you. You need to plan for an eventuality where the company simply doesn’t exist any more. The licence to use the software is also critical. It’s no use have a copy of the code if you’re not licensed to use it. Naturally, open source software doesn’t come with these drawbacks.
Although Interesource had verbal agreements with customers (I know, because I outlined the agreement myself countless times) that they could have access to the source code at any time and could do whatever they wanted with it, except transfer the licence to another party, the contracts that Interesource produced did not actually include these terms in many cases. Therefore, it’s been very difficult for customers to get access to their code and data - and by difficult I mean expensive, in some cases prohibitively so. Simon Dixon guesses who this might have affected.
I was asked about escrow many times in pitches by prospective clients. I always answered truthfully - that we’d be willing to have an escrow agreement for both code and data. Not one customer took us up on this. So, it’s not good enough just to ask if an agency would be prepared to enter into an escrow deal - you need to make sure it actually happens from day one. If you get agencies during the first month or so, they’ll be falling over themselves to oblige - once the relationship has had a chance to develop, they will have more leverage over you and so may be less willing to do such a deal.
My iPhone - Week 1
We might as well get it out of the way early on: I adore my iPhone. Today my old number ported over (although with some weird side effects) and so I should be a one portable device man from now on.
As always with Apple it’s simple touches that make all the difference. The screen is really crisp and rendering in Safari is utterly brilliant - it’s even sharper than a MacBook Pro. The zoom in and out are just superb - you can’t keep the childlike smile off your face. The automatic orientation detection is lovely too.
There are, of course, some features that I want Apple to add. Top of the list is a to-do list app. Ideally, that would be OmniFocus when the SDK is available (any day now, hopefully). I’d like to be able to remove the idiotic Stocks widget from my home-screen. Even better, I’d like to rearrange the screen in any way I choose. For top marks, the list of widgets should sync between the phone and my MacBook Pro.
Next, I’d like an RSS reader - ideally NewsFire. Again, that should sync with my Mac. At a push I might be willing to swap to NetNewsWire if it synced properly.
Then, I’d like a mobile blogging app - ideally MarsEdit, which I’m using to write this post.
Syncing generally could be better - although it works very well when you have your iPod cable available, it should also work over .Mac so that I don’t ever need to physically connect it. That would take care of Calendars, Contacts, Mail Accounts, Bookmarks and Widgets.
The last thing that’s missing is Copy & Paste, although that’s rumoured to be included in the next software update.
But these are little gripes. The iPhone is the best device I’ve ever bought. Everyone should have one.
Windows Update
I just installed Windows 2003 Server into a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Windows Update has a mere 32 31 updates for me. Thanks Windows!
Lightweight vs Heavyweight
Nik Silver has a thought-provoking piece on Heavyweight vs Lightweight content management. As the (former) architect of what you might call a middleweight CMS, I find his argument almost totally wrong. As far as I can tell, it amounts to a false syllogism that goes like this:
- WordPress is a lightweight CMS
- The Guardian use a heavyweight CMS
- WordPress cannot do everything needed for the the Guardian website
- Therefore, a heavyweight CMS is better than a lightweight CMS
I think the argument he’s trying to make is that a well-designed system with a judicious amount of abstraction is better than one without the abstraction. But I don’t follow his argument that any changes to WordPress would necessarily result in unmaintainable code. In fact, there are numerous newspapers who use WordPress, and several very high traffic sites that use it too. His argument is basically a retread of the tired old-skool IT dirge “but this isn’t enterprise software”. I find this surprising given that Nik is an eloquent advocate of agile methodologies and should, in theory, be sceptical of the idea that software needs to be big to be effective.
He says:
Lightweight is often good, but it must have its tradeoffs, otherwise other technologies wouldn’t exist.
Really? He seems dangerously close to the ‘one true language’ trap here - an El Dorado of a language that would be perfect for every job and everyone would agree on. This is absurd. Heavyweight software will continue to exist for a long time in my view, mainly because of the vested interests of the corporations that sell it. And not all heavyweight software is bad of course.
Every single decision you make when designing a software system is about compromise - manageability vs performance, explicitness vs extensibility, productivity vs complexity and so on. Every system you ever use has tradeoffs: not every system needs to be extensible, and not every system needs to be optimised to the limit. I prefer the Pragmatic Programmers’ advice: “do the simplest thing that could possibly work.”
To suggest that WordPress is, out of the box, a viable alternative to an existing bespoke system is faintly silly. Is WordPress the cleanest abstraction possible for a CMS? No - it’s targeted pretty much exclusively at blogging. But to suggest that there’s something difficult about getting ads into a page is a bit weird - check out TechCrunch if you don’t believe me.
Lightweight languages and frameworks (for example, Ruby or Python) are all the rage because they make developers very productive. There are downsides, performance being the most often raised one. Many of these downsides are FUD though. Everything I see at the moment leads me to think that the days of Java and C# are numbered as the ‘enterprise way’. The productivity you can get out of things like Ruby on Rails is so great that people are going to be forced to re-evaluate the ‘heavyweight’ options. The (perceived) performance problems of scripting languages are sure to go away. Remember the days when people hand-wrote assembler because they didn’t trust the C compiler to optimise their code properly?
In 2007 I failed to learn a new programming language, although I dabbled with Objective-C and Cocoa. 2008 will be the year of Python (with a smattering of PHP) for me. There are many places to read more about extending your language knowledge, but I recommend Martin Fowler’s One Language and Improvement Ravine.
