Rambles and Riff Raff vol. 5
I am seriously time constrained this days. I promise a good post later today or tomorrow (read that: tomorrow).
In the time being the infamous unordered list of random thoughts with no connection with reality whatsoever.
- Being having musings about crisis and leadership lately. Discussed some of that with "da Boss". Food for post. Not right now, but expect it soon.
- I have hosed my system. Rendered it unusable. IT was of no help, so I did what any nerd would do. Grabbed a copy of windows 7 beta and installed it. Corporate IT should be pissed if they find out. But let's just keep it a secret for the time being. (more first impressions on Windows 7 after the end of the list)
- I am very distracted. The fact that I might become a parent any time now might have a lot to do with that. Lots of doctor appointments and stuff like that.
- Starting to feel excitement and inspiration in relation with work again. I have one person to thank. He knows who he is. He thinks he is no good at motivation. I say BS.
- I have written 5 drafts in the past 2 days. Lots of good "starting ideas", but I'm procrastinating on giving those posts the tie and attention they require.
Windows 7 on my T60p
So... what has this linux-evangelist-wannabe have to say about with Windows 7?
I'll be doomed, but I like what I see. It is still not there (it is a beta after all), but it is a good improvement from Vista and from XP. I have encountered some bugs and quircks and there are some behaviours that one should get the choice to remove alltogether (for instance all the confirmations you get when installing software!). But the OS behaves quite well, quite stable and fairly nice.
I have also noticed some stuff which might be inspired on things I've seen on Linux for a long time (look and feel, placement of user profiles, application data).
Finally I also got rid of Lotus Notes 7 and installed 8.5 beta. That is also a fairly good improvement that will make my life easier.
The only memory hog left on my system is TweetDeck. 250MB on Ram for a program that retrieves images and texts from the web is unacceptable.
Microsoft doing things the Linux way?
After reading this article on CrunchGear and particularly after gazing this inevitably quoted paragraph:
Still, it seems that MS has changed up the strategy for putting things together, emphasizing smaller teams with less higher-up input. Teams called “Triads” — one developer, one tester, and one program manager — chisel away at problems and work independently. The poster says this leads to a more integrated approach to creating a feature, and more transparency in management means decisions can be made in good time with enough visibility for the teams to accommodate them.
I can't help but wonder if the big Redmond Company is not trying to replicate the Open source way of doing things.
The old Cathedral model might be gone. And it might of took Vista for some companies to realize that Open Source and transparent development cycles are not a dreaded enemy but rather smart ways to tackle complex projects.
Please don't see this post as a "Windoze sucks, linux rulz" kind of thing. I'm keen to Linux, true enough, but I make this point as a mere observation of what could put Microsoft back into track.
My Wishlist for Windows 7:
- Don't make it a process hog.
(end of list)
Aggregating – Part 2
So, the challenge was to build an aggregator that could display the life lessons I mentioned on part 1.
When faced with the white canvas I could of done anything. Search for a CMS, build something from scratch ar whatever crossed my deviated mind.
I went with the best platform I know. WordPress. Mainly thanks to me finding a beautiful RSS parsing library called SimplePie. That library enabled me to do whatever I wanted with the feeds. And so I did.
Building a feed reader within WordPress was fun.
First I went for a "live" approach. I just fetched the feeds and presented them. But that proved to be slow and unreliable.
Thus I made the choice to save everything into the DB. That allows me to sort, change, and adapt the content while boosting the performance quite visibly. And there's quite some processing that needs to be done.
For starters the greatest challenge was to make things somewhat usable for the visitors. With over a 100 people aggregating to a single page we had to provide a simple way to sort and find whatever is of interest.
The Solution? Creating filters. If you go into the "Voices" page you'll see 3 dynamic dropdowns (Country, Language and Sport) that allow to get just the content that you are interested in. The same logic will apply, in the near future, to an aggregated feed.
There was quite some degree of learning on the process. For starters I found out that blogspot's feeds are full of rubbish. Also I reinforced the Old Addagio: "IE 6 sucks". I truly believe that that particular browser is the accounts for way too many extra development hours (as the need to "hack" stuff to make it work correctly is a must if you want to build anything somewhat "modern") and a lot of wasted bandwidth.
Also making anything non-that-conventional requires intensive cross-browser testing. Here's a sample of my 3 ThinkPads showing the page on various OSs and Browsers:
(Left to right: Firefox [top] and Konkeror [bottom] under Linux; Opera [left] and IE7 [right] under Windows; Firefox [left] and Safari [right] under Windows. No I don't own a Mac, thank you very much).
I hope you enjoy reading this guys posts and stay tuned, there's a lot more to come.
With some luck I'll leverage part of this efforts and build it into plugins that people can use on their own blogs. (Chances are this wont happen before the end of the games).
PS: In case you wondered why I haven't posted much lately: this is the reason.