Sun, 26 Jun 2005
Missing Opportunities or Being Conservative?
Fate offers you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take
them, Fate says to itself, `Oh I see -- this person doesn't like
opportunities,' and stops giving them to you. -- Douglas
Coupland
I have two (among many) rules, one that goes along the lines "if it doesn't feel right then don't do it" and one about opportunities that Douglas Coupland phrased much more eloquently than I ever could. The first one is about trusting your gut instinct. Sometimes, and this is explained in much greater depth in "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, you just know things and you should heed the flash of insight despite not being able to explain the how or why. Why spend days agonising over a decision that you had an immediate feel for?
And that's the problem, sometimes you don't have that flash of insight and you have to sit down and work through the pros and cons of the situation. And go back and forth between the two choices. And stop sleeping. And still don't know what the right choice is. And that's where I'm at.
So why have I put this entry up? Other than because it allows me to use one of my favourite quotes? In part to explain my silence after the initial burst of activity this month and partly because writing things down often provides some insight or new angle that just stewing on the choice doesn't suggest. And because the actual act of writing down your goals makes you more likely to reach them. Assuming you know what they are!
I'm a firm believer that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to, the only problem is making the decision that you want it, being prepared to pay the cost and striving for it. The problem is working out of you want it enough to reach for it.
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Posted: 2005/06/26 21:43 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 12 Jun 2005
Design Mistakes -- xinetd and crucial.com
Twice today I've suddenly stopped what I was doing and thought, they must
have set out to make this awkward... The first incident was also the
simplest one, in xinetd config files you'll often find "disable = yes".
Firstly this is insane because you should assume something's off and people
will turn it on if they want it. This is a basic principle that should be
stuck to. Secondly the option is strange to read. "enable = yes" or better
"enable = true" is much easier to mentally parse than "disable = yes".
The second one annoys me as it's a step backwards, Crucial UK have a memory selection tool that tells you how much memory your laptop can take. In the past it'd present all the options and highlight one in yellow as a recommendation. I used it every six months and it was simple, intuitive and consistent.
Today I went to buy some memory for an Inspiron 5160 (which has the backspace key one row in and is driving me nuts!). In order to make the "experience" simpler for the less willing to actually read the page buyers they've changed to only offering one on the initial page and hiding the others behind the "All memory upgrades" tab. They almost missed out on my custom as I want 2 1GB chips and the name of the tab distracted me. While I'd like it to all be put back on the same page if they won't do this then maybe they'll rename it, "all upgrades for selected model" perhaps?
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Posted: 2005/06/12 16:21 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 11 Jun 2005
GLLUG June 2005 -- Done!
After an initial problem with the projectors that looked like it was
about to sink the whole day (if you saw me at that point I looked like I
was about to either explode or cry :)) we managed to get the equipment
sorted and all four talks (with five speakers) went almost perfectly to
plan. The only talk that overran was the Xen talk, which was due to the
number of audience questions. I had a sneaky suspicion that was going to
happen so I put it on last; just in case.
Over all everything went pretty well, great speakers, interesting topics, and a friendly audience. It's the second (and last for a while) GLLUG I've organised and I've picked up some tricks from each of them. What does make me happy though, and yes I'm shallow, is that we had the highest turn out for over eighteen months; we had 65 people at one point! And the only other GLLUG near that was the one I did three months ago which got 61. I'm surprisingly proud of this. In general things went well and people actually seemed to enjoy it so I'm calling it a win.
Thanks to everyone involved!
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Posted: 2005/06/11 23:35 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 08 Jun 2005
Dive Into Greasemonkey -- Book Review
Q: What is Greasemonkey?
A: Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts
that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more
readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner
can't be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work
better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or
convert it to Braille. You can even automatically retrieve data from other
sites to make two sites more interconnected. From the opening
chapter of Dive
Into Greasemonkey.
It is often said that OpenSource projects have a lack of documentation and a major lack of good documentation, well Mark Pilgrim is fixing that one freely available (and GPL'd) guide at a time. In Dive Into Greasemonkey Mark takes the reader through the basic concepts of Greasemonkey, demonstrates how to get up and running with an example install, and out in to the land of custom user scripts. The whole book is written in an accessible, easy to follow way that takes the user through all the required stages but without the unnecessary padding that plagues too many commercial books.
After introducing Greasemonkey, showing how a basic script is constructed and how it can be debugged the book reaches its most useful sections. Chapter 4 contains a number of short snippets of reusable code and explanations on what each of them does. The presentation of the snippets is a basic Greasemonkey cookbook and makes the chapter a very useful reference you'll find yourself occasionally dipping in to.
Chapter 5 continues this approach but takes the reader through some fully developed scripts which get longer and more featureful as the chapter progresses. While snippets are useful I always like to see a couple of full examples and this chapter provides some varied ones that expose the reader to some of the more common itches they'll want to scratch.
So what else is there to mention? The book comes with a small number of videos that show the some of the tasks step by step for the more basic users. It provides enough further reading to be your first stop even when looking for tricks and tactics beyond what the book covers and even provides short, but informative introductions to the DOM Inspector included in FireFox and a short tangent in to Jesse Rudderman's JavaScript Shell.
Summary: So how good is the book? Well after reading through it once I'm writing my own basic scripts and consulting chapters 4 and 5 for code snippets I can use immediately; what else could you ask for? 8/10.
I've also filed this under Dive Into Greasemonkey book review.
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Posted: 2005/06/08 21:01 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Selling With NLP -- Book Review
When it comes to sales people there are two main types, those that
believe in win/win selling and the ones who don't get my money; and
hopefully have bad things happen to them.
"Selling with NLP" (Neuro- Linguistic Programming) aims to provide salespeople with the skills required to increase rapport with their clients and help them understand the customers needs rather than just the wants. It does this by presenting a number of practical examples and anecdotes from within the sales process.
It's coverage spans from the basics, working out your customers preference for having information presented in an visual, audio or kinesthetic style through to the different closing styles. I was quite surprised to find that this book provides a better introduction to NLP than most of the NLP books I've read do. While most books on NLP are too academic, this one provides enough real world relevance, especially if you are actually in sales, to keep the reader interested.
Unfortunately any tool can be used for either good or evil and so I approached this book from a different angle to most readers. After one too many meetings with salespeople from enterprise software companies who all used the same tired hooks and had been through the same basic training I decided to broaden my understanding of NLP when used in sales and ended up inadvertently enjoying this book. While it's not the most interesting of reads it is well paced and clearly written. Although the tone of the text is a little too American it does present the principles of NLP and how they can improve your sales performance in an easy to digest way./p>
Summary: A decent book and a good, concise, introduction to some of the more important parts of NLP. 6/10
I've also filed this under Selling With NLP book review.
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Posted: 2005/06/08 14:58 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sith and Sin -- My Views and No Spoilers
I ended up seeing two films in the cinema yesterday, and for the record
going to the cinema during "working hours" doesn't make it any less busy
dammit! After watching both Sin City and Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith I
have only a few comments to make.
Firstly I enjoyed Sin City more, Sith seemed to be about 45 minutes too long and, despite the gorgeous backdrops and neat fight scenes I found myself clock watching. Sin on the other hand was better paced but more disjointed. You follow different characters, in unrelated stories, through the film, which helped keep my attention. Sin had some great acting, Marv and Hartigan spring to mind, while watching any scenes with both Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen in were just painful. They were wooden, motionless and completely free of chemistry.
Overall they are both worth a watch, seeing Yoda in action is always worth a cheap ticket but Sin City gets the thumbs up. Now roll on Serenity!
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Posted: 2005/06/08 13:57 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 06 Jun 2005
Simple Bash Debugging: set -{x,u,n}
The bash shell gets more
negative press than it deserves from most "real" programmers. Between
the "I can't see what it's doing, I need an echo after nearly every
line!" and the "Why doesn't it have a check option like perl's -c!?"
most people that only occasionally dip in to bash end up frustrated by it's
lack of features. All because they can't be bothered to read the man
page...
I'm going to show you three simple bash "tricks" that'll make your script debugging a lot easier; and none of them require that much searching to find!. Each of the three tidbits presented can be used in one of two ways, they can either be placed one to a line near the top of your shell scripts, just under the shebang line like this, 'set -x', or they can be used as command line arguments to bash itself (bash -x script.sh).
First up we have the '-x' option. This provides a simple trace of each and every command executed by the shell script, it also shows the interpolated values of the variables; which can save a lot of echo's and printf's!
Next up we have '-n', the syntax checker. When this is specified the script doesn't actually run but instead has it's syntax checked for any errors. This removes the annoying "String not terminated" messages that you'll occasionally get from not terminating your strings. Only when '-n' is specified you don't run half a script, leaving the system in an inconsistent state.
The last of our time-savers is the '-u' option, this forces any undefined variables to terminate the script rather than carry on with no values. Although this is often useful, and saves you backtracking through the output of '-x' to find the undeclared value, you can't combine it with the '-n' option. You have to allow the script to run in order for the undefined values to be detected; while this is less than ideal it's better than nothing...
I hope these three lesser known bash features make your scripting more enjoyable and productive, I've lost count of the time they've saved me!
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Posted: 2005/06/06 22:55 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding -- Book Review
After the enjoyable and easy to read "22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" (my
review) I decided to give "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding" an
afternoon of my time. This book is very similar in presentation, format
and even writing style to the "Laws of Marketing". It's an accessible,
easy read in which each law is broken down in to a very short chapter
that makes it as enjoyable to dip in to while on the go as it does to
read cover to cover.
As you'd expect from the title, this book focuses on branding. Using brands that were current at the time, it presents the authors thoughts on how a brand should be maintained, why tightening your focus is always better than line extension and why a number of the less successful brands suffer their fates. Using a number of (mostly) anecdotal examples the essential points of what not to do with your brand are conveyed in an easy to following and occasionally light-hearted tone.
Although the "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding" contains nothing as profound as the "Laws of Marketing" it does provide some valuable insights on how the big players of the time, some smart and some not so, approached their brands and tried to exploit them. Summary: 6/10.
I've also filed this under 22 Immutable Laws of Branding book review.
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Posted: 2005/06/06 22:19 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 05 Jun 2005
June 11th 2005 GLLUG Final Announcement
Is out and hitting mailing lists now. You can find the full details on this
very site at the Unixdaemon GLLUG June
2005 page.
Organising this meeting has been quite strange, the speakers roster has changed almost completely from my original plan, the dates moved and, because of the summer, a lot of my usual routes of publicity have either cut back or gone off on holiday. I'm actually very proud of the talks we have and the quality of the speakers that have freely given up their Saturday to come and talk so it's a shame were not getting full exposure. This is the strongest line-up GLLUG's had in quite a while so I'm curious as to how many people turn up.
One of the things that always amazes me when I'm involved in something like this (or one of the short one-off events different groups occasionally do) is how friendly, flexible and willing to help almost everyone I contact is; the very worst response I've had back is a list of dates the speaker could do and a request for travel expenses to be covered! I consider myself very lucky to be able to participate in a community like this and I'd like to take this opportunity to say thanks to each and every person who's been involved. For not hitting me when I got annoying with date changes, prodding for talk details or any of those other emails I've sent I say thank you and it is appreciated by each and every person who sees the talk, hears the recording or reads the slides.
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Posted: 2005/06/05 13:48 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Blosxom Plugin -- raa_tag
Following on from my cpan_module_tag
and some comments from one of my victims/testers I've put a version
together that translates tag shortcuts to Ruby Application Archive project
links. It's called raa_tag,
it's on my Blosxom Plugins
page and it's GPL'd.
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Posted: 2005/06/05 12:33 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
SVK Talk added to June 2005 GLLUG!
I'm happy to announce the addition of a talk on SVK by its author, Chia-liang Kao,
at the June 2005 GLLUG. He's graciously volunteered some of his time to
take us through the headaches of version control, how SVK removes a number
of them and, and this is my favourite bit, how to use it for distributed
/etc versioning without any version control artifacts getting spread
across the file system. I've heard a couple of people make very positive
comments about CLK's previous presentations so this should be good!
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Posted: 2005/06/05 12:23 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Blosxom Plugin -- cpan_module_tag
This blog is powered by Blosxom and while it is more than adequate for most of my
needs, occasionally I feel the need to add some code to make something a
little more "Dean" orientated. I've put the first one of my "ready for
public consumption" Blosxom Plugins up on my Blosxom Plugins
page. It's called cpan_module_tag.
cpan_module_tag allows you to link to CPAN modules in your blog posts without performing the tedious steps of looking up the module, getting the URL, putting it in an <a href=""> etc. It adds a couple of tags that you use to specify the module to link to. It's free, GPL'd and hopefully of some use.
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Posted: 2005/06/05 12:17 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 02 Jun 2005
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing -- Book Review
While marketing books ain't my usual bedtime reading material but as the
Open Source movement continues to forge ever onwards the softer skills are
going to become every bit as useful as writing code or documentation. While
looking for an accessible book on these dark arts I stumbled on Eric Sinks
take on the The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and just had to read the
original.
The "22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" is an extremely accessible book that details, as you'd guess from the title, 22 common elements of marketing that the authors consider to be (near) immutable laws. While some of the laws are a little shaky most of them present interesting concepts and some candid real life examples.
Although some of the cases examined (BurgerKing and Pepsi come under repeated scrutiny) are great examples of where things went right (or wrong!) some of the brands mentioned were never successful or even launched in the UK so they lose some of their impact.
Summary: 7/10 Good introduction to a number of interesting ideas. The examples could do with an update and a retrospective about their judgements would warrant another point or two.
I've also filed this under 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing book review.
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Posted: 2005/06/02 19:41 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
