November 2010
4 posts
6 tags
Using JIRA to inform process improvement prior to...
This week I showed my new JIRA key performance indicators (KPIs) to the ISO 9001 assessor for the first time. I have been keeping simple statistics for JIRA since installing it in 2006. For example the graph above tells me that we have been opening issues at a pretty constant rate since day one. For a while the number of issues in play (i.e. not closed) also rose. After about a year and a half...
2 tags
Two handy ASCII characters - Up Arrow & Down arrow
Just a real quick blog post here. This is because I have had to use these ASCII characters a few times now and I simply cannot find them by googling!
If you require a up arrow or a down arrow, and you are using a good font such as Arial, you can use:
▲ - ▲
▼ - ▼
These are specifically useful for select menus, drop-down menus and sortable columns!
Source:...
The End for Silverlight?
When Silverlight first arrived, I think we were all somewhat unsure exactly how Microsoft planned to topple Flash as the king of rich interactive online applications. Over the past couple of years Silverlight has failed to make the impact I expect Microsoft were dreaming of, and a recent interview with Bob Muglia seems to suggest a shift in position on the future of Silverlight.
Don’t get...
Mix Google and Wikipedia, add a sprinkle of... →
Blekko is a participative search engine, which went live yesterday. Users create “slashtags” which limit the scope of the search. Other built-in slashtags are optional search settings similar to Google advanced search flags. Blekko is openly fighting spam, scams and advertisement. How long can a search engine survive without sponsored search results?
Nicolas Desprez - Senior SQL...
October 2010
3 posts
Fast editing of gigapixels images →
University of Utah computer scientists developed software that quickly edits “extreme resolution imagery”. The new software - Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability, or ViSUS - allows gigapixel images stored on an external server or drive to be edited from a large computer, a desktop or laptop computer, or even a smart phone.
Nicolas Desprez - Senior SQL Developer
3 tags
What is the difference between the HTM and HTML...
This is something I have always wondered and yet I never thought to look up. To quote Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet:
O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;
Thankfully it means very little, well apart from the obvious lack of an “l”, and I can finally stop my occasional wonderings!
Technically speaking...
Google release new image file format: WebP →
The lossy compression algorithm is based on the WebM VP8 video codec that Google bought in February this year. They claim an average 40% gain on file size compared to standard web picture formats, and looking at the gallery it gives far better results than JPEG.
Nicolas Desprez, Senior SQL Developer
September 2010
3 posts
Evercookie: A very persistent cookie →
Samy Kamkar came up with a fascinating hack: Storing a cookie using eight different methods (including web history!) so that if all but one are deleted, the cookie is recreated automatically. Evercookie is written in Javascript, Flash and PHP.
Nicolas Desprez, Senior SQL Developer
IE9 to offer full hardware acceleration →
IE9 will use DirectX for its rendering pipeline. Unfortunately it won’t be released on Windows XP. Microsoft has just made a beta version available here.
IE9 appears to be ahead of the competition as far as accelerated rendering is concerned, although some disagree. Maybe web browsers will eventually look like the way they were portrayed in 90’s movies?
Nicolas Desprez, Senior SQL...
3 tags
Hi burglar, the keys are under the mat
Well, as reported by the Register, it didn’t take long for some enterprising tea leaf in the US to realise that looking at people’s FourSquare and similar updates gave a pretty good indication of whether their house was empty. Obviously they weren’t that smart as they’ve now been caught, however it does serve to remind that throwing out streams of digital footprints does have its downside…..
Ian...
August 2010
3 posts
3 tags
Why we love QA...... and why one-to-one marketing...
Quality Assurance is one of things you don’t really miss until one day it isn’t there. I guess it’s akin to house insurance or breakdown cover for your car. When you need it and it isn’t there you feel the pain. This was brought home to me when I got a mail this morning inviting me to renew a free subscription to a channel newsletter. The title told me it was time to renew...
2 tags
Hacking moving cars
It was only a matter of time before researchers moved from hacking stationary cars to targeting test vehicles travelling at up to 70mph. Using simple tools like GNU Radio they have managed to intercept and override wireless transmissions between devices such as tire pressure monitoring systems and their direct control systems.
Are these systems that complicated? An article on Jalopnik gives more...
Visual Studio 2010 - Database Projects - First...
Yesterday I spent a little time thinking about improving our database versioning. One of my most nagging frustrations has been how this topic seems to have been avoided by Visual Studio over the years. Yes we’re given ways to change the colour scheme of VS, and now it’s in lovely silky WPF, but where were the handy tools to manage your database?? These have been stuck in Redgate or in...
July 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Interview with me in the Project Management...
PM Network recently got in touch with our PR company about interviewing me for their monthly print / online magazine - the resulting interview can be read here.
It was an interesting thing to do. I’ve read PM Network for many years and it’s full of people with very nice suits who have their photos taken in front of huge glass buildings and do things like build skyscrapers and dams. I don’t...
2 tags
Sometimes the greatest ideas are the most...
How’s this for a truly great idea that is so obvious you can’t believe no-one else patented invented it first. Meet Microsoft Instaload which is a hardware solution for people who put batteries in the wrong way….
Ignoring nasty digs about people who are too stupid to match a ‘+’ symbol as they panic at the prospect of a lifetime of having to get off the sofa to change channels on their 50”...
June 2010
6 posts
1 tag
Does the iPhone 4 lose reception if you hold it by...
Gizmodo reports that many users are reporting issues with the outside antenna on the new iPhone. Apparently when users hold the iPhone in their hands, touching the outside antenna band in two places, they drop reception. Placing the phone down gets them the usual 4 bars. Gizmodo references an article by a Danish professor who suggested this was exactly the kind of issues this design would...
Tags for the MRMLondon technology blog
These are all mechanisms of attaching digital content to real world objects - basically by sticking the tag on something so people can scan it with dedicated applications on their phones.
In no particular order…
stickybits
http://www.stickybits.com/
Allows you to attach content to any bar code, or create and download your own.
There’s no API that I can find so you’re tied into their...
4 tags
You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks
I.E.6 does not support transparent PNGs, it renders a blueish flood-fill in place of the transparency.
Back when people were using I.E.6 it was tempting to try and force PNGs into I.E.6 by employing Microsoft “filter” effects, probably through a component such as unitpngfix.
Here’s why you shouldn’t…
As I.E.6 dips below 10% on its ever downward trend in market share it really is time...
5 tags
Project Natal becomes 'Kinect'
The project formally know as Natal takes another step closer to becoming (virtual) reality according to various reports from E3 today. Microsoft have renamed the controller to ‘Kinect’ and also released details of the first games that will be available.
For anyone who hasn’t heard of Natal / Kinect it’s a controller for the Xbox that allows users to play games controlled by body movements ...
5 tags
2 tags
Specify Your Canonical
Recently we wanted to track a whole bunch of banner ads that link to the same page by appending a query-string, something like…
http://mysite.com?referrer=001 http://mysite.com?referrer=002
The problem with that is each link accrues SEO value independently; In fact what we want is all those links to be associated with the one page.
Thanks to our colleagues in Digitalis for a client based...
May 2010
6 posts
Great short video about the Semantic Web
See http://vimeo.com/11529540. Includes interviews with various web 3.0 experts including Tim Berners-Lee. I think the need for the Semantic Web is summed up nicely by John Hebeler a couple of minutes in: “There should be enough information out there that you should be able to ask for something extraordinarily specific, but you can’t. You pretty much have to do all the integration in your own...
5 tags
Not a five minute job: the JIRA 4 upgrade...
Last month I wrote that ‘JIRA 4 is coming to MRM London ‘real soon now’’ and I am pleased to report that although it took three attempts, ‘real soon’ is now. Despite extensive testing*, the upgrade did not work first time in our production environment. Specifically, the dashboard plug-in failed to initialise.
What we ended up having to do:
Roll-back to JIRA...
6 tags
A Quick tip for developing web pages for an iPhone
Ultimately you’ll want to get your pages on a server and look at them directly on the iPhone but you can approximate the environment locally for development.
In Safari go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Preferences’ -> ‘Advanced’ and check ‘Show Develop menu in menu bar’
Then from the menu tab select ‘Develop’ – ‘User Agent’ and set it to iPhone
[This from “Building iPhone Apps with HTML,CSS and...
3 tags
JQuery quick tip: multiple selectors
jQuery is a very useful JavaScript framework and at the heart of the code you will find a powerful selector engine called Sizzle. One of the lesser known shorthand expressions is using multple selectors…
//why take two selectors into the shower...
$('#first').hide()
$('#second span').hide()
//when you can select and go!
$('#first,#second span').hide()
View a little demo on...
3 tags
CSS Direction is ignored by Internet Explorer for...
I recently found a little bug behaviour which affects all versions of Internet Explorer.
We were in the middle of delivering a multi-language site when it was noticed the copyright symbol did not follow the CSS property ‘direction’ properly. It baffled us at first as the words themselves changed to right-to-left just fine but we were left with the copyright symbol at the wrong end....
8 tags
Viva le Playgrounds. CSS and JavaScript cloud...
Working in the cloud is becoming more popular month by month and blogging is going from strength to strength.
Many new bloggers, like ourselves here at MRM London, have chosen to use a free hosted solution. After much careful deliveration we chose Tumblr.
This has opened up the need for a new type of web application, playgrounds!
Essentially a niche site, also called shells, they are...
April 2010
5 posts
If I had an iPad I'd drop it
I’ve just fondled an iPad, one of three we now have kicking around the building. It’s beautifully made, very responsive and very desirable (says Ian the PC lover and all-round ‘cult of Mac’ cynic) The problem is if I had one I’d drop it. Then, assuming it wasn’t broken I’d pass it to my kids and they would drop it. Finally my wife would drop it and that I guess would be the end of it…. Seriously...
4 tags
CSS3 is hot stuff!
CSS3 is becoming a hot topic around the web, as excitement grows more people are starting to experiment with the new properties and more browsers are supporting them.
One of the more widely available properties is text-shadow. Basically this replicates the drop-shadow filter in photoshop and can immediately enhance and improve any web site. The only browsers which do not support this property...
BCS: The Use of Automated Testing Tools...
Last night, instead of waving a colleague goodbye over a couple of well-earned beers, I dutifully attended a talk at the BCS headquarters. The event entitled ‘The use of automated testing tools throughout the traditional software development lifecycle’ was given by Dr Philip Isles (Test Manager at HSBC Private Banking).
As we increasingly adopt TDD (test-driven development) practices...
Good to see organisations remembering Open Source...
The US government’s White House blog: www.whitehouse.gov/tech detailed yesterday how they are releasing some of the custom code they developed for the relaunched WhiteHouse.gov site six months ago back to the open source community. As many people are aware this was done using the open source Drupal CMS framework, so it’s great to see them feeding back into this project
Ian McDowall - Head of...
5 tags
March 2010
8 posts
Disturbing trend - Malware faking Adobe updater
Interesting article at blog.bkis.com/en/malware-faking-adobe-update/ discussing a new trend in virus / malware writing. Apparently they are faking then overwriting installers for programs like Acrobat, DeepFreeze, Java, Windows, etc. and mimicking icons etc. I have to admit I’m not surprised and actually have wondered for a while when it was going to happen….
Ian McDowall - Head of Technology
Still want Windows Server 2008 in a virtual...
As I mentioned in my previous post I couldn’t install the 64 bit Windows Server onto Microsoft Virtual PC as it doesn’t support 64 bit guest operating systems, even on 64 bit host platforms. I’m still really pleased with my native ‘boot from VHD’ solution as it gives full access to all hardware resources, however another alternative would be the open-source ‘Virtual Box’ virtualisation product....
Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 to run natively...
It started as a simple task on a Sunday evening. I wanted to get Windows Server 2008 R2 running on my home network for some dev work, however it’s 64bit only and my trusty home webserver is 32 bit and frozen in time on Windows Server 2003. As I didn’t fancy forking out on new hardware the next plan was to install Windows Server 2008 on my workstation and work directly on it with Visual Studio. The...
Some development approaches they didn’t teach you...
Just reading an interesting / humerous blog article about alternative development methodologies by a guy called Scott Berkun. In it he describes a number of models that will be depressingly familiar…
Asshole Driven Development (ADD)
Cognitive Dissonance Development (CDD)
Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE)
Development By Denial (DBD)
Get Me Promoted Methodology (GMPM)
They make you...
Windows Phone 7 drops cut and paste
Yet another grumble about the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 - apparently it won’t support cut and paste says el Reg. As a confirmed stylus and keyboard user, rather than someone who likes to press everything with their massive pinkies, this drives me mad. I’m not ashamed to say that what I want from a phone is a computer….. and that includes editing documents using cut and paste betweeen...
Microsoft follows Apple down the App Store route...
The Register reports back from Mix 10 in Las Vegas that Windows Phone 7 will be following the Apple model and locking developers into using an app store and certifying all apps….. www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/15/windows_phone_7. As someone who likes to be able to randomly copy across .cab files and take it from there I’m not convinced, though I guess it is a more usable approach. Let’s hope...
Surely being offered a bonus makes you work...
Ok, stick with me - there is a tech angle to this post….
Here’s an interesting video from some bloke called Dan Pink, a guest speaker at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) - www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/dan-pink-drive In it he discusses how traditional financial incentives don’t seem to work for improving individual performance on...
A Risk Framework for web development
It feels a bit like a guilty secret - the kind of thing you hope isn’t mentioned at dinner parties or that the local lynch-mob never get to hear about. Yes, I have to come clean, I’m interested in risk management……
To prove this here’s an article I wrote for the British Computer Society a while back which asks whether a risk framework for web development would be...