Updated blog template

It's been a few years since I updated the template my blog uses, so I've taken the chance now to simplify things and apply a template that seems less busy and more modern. I've also updated the fonts to make them more readable on modern screens.

Windows Live Writer ate my blogger login

Well thank you Microsoft.

The latest release of Windows Live Writer demands that I configure a blog when I start it up - fair enough, it does want to know my blog styles in order to show me formatted posts, so I go to login and ...BAM! Login fails.

Oops! Retry. Login fails.

Expand to full email rather than just username. Retry. Login fails.

Try every combo possible. Login fails, fails, fails ...

I finally worked out that because I use 2-step verification with Google authentication, and this app doesn't have an app-specific password, it will always fail. Now this is a failing of the Windows Live Writer devs, but I wonder how many other dev teams would think of this?

My solution? Fallback to online editing. Nowhere nears as nice as Windows Live Writer, nor as available, but it works*.

Although the damn thing did put in DIVS in place of P tags and I instead of EM tags ... sigh.

EDIT: Matt was right, using an app-specific password solved my problem – apologies Microsoft devs, not your problem (well, except for perhaps not providing nice help around the problem).

My geek origin story

Delicate Genius (aka Microsoft’s Michael Kordahi) tweeted me a while ago about putting this up, and in the interest of historical accuracy, here it is! Other geek origin stories can be found from his blog post.

I wasn’t terribly geeky as a young lad, except I loved Lego and got into roleplaying games in a big way. At university I fell into a crowd that were much geekier than I (hat tip to Justin McLean), and along the way got pulled into doing an Information Systems major for my Bachelors of Commerce degree.

Something must have happened because by the time I met and married my lovely wife I looked like a true geek! (gotta love the Doc Martens)

Looking back I think the same qualities that caused me to fail Accounting Financial Management 1B led to my success as a geek. Things like:

• Always wanting to improve the system,
• Searching for truth,
• Wanting my work to matter.

None of those things applied to rote learning T accounts and double entry accounting, but they sure do matter when you are building fantastic tools for web developers to build awesome, award-winning sites with.

So that’s how I ended up becoming the geek t-shirt wearer I am today – although I no longer have those DMs ...

Arthur Douglas Burgess

I just got delivered a very nice present. The National Library of Australia maintains an online archive of Australian newspapers for the last hundred years or so called Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/). A couple of weeks go I found a reference to my grandfather on my mother’s side, and a few days ago I ordered a copy of it via PDF. Thanks to the miracles of scanning + the internet, here it is:

My other grandfather was also involved with Fairfax and the Sydney Morning Herald, but in the capacity of a typesetter on the printing presses.

Fresh design!

In case you’re reading an RSS feed, I have updated my blog design to use a core Blogger template, and done some (slightly) artistic tweaking to get a look that I’m happy with.

Keep Blogging, Don’t Stop!

This is a reminder for myself as much as anything else. With my meeting schedule and responsibilities it can be easy to avoid blogging for weeks at a time. However, I think that is a mistake – and I want to record why. In fact, blogging about not blogging is a meme all bloggers seem to fall into at one stage or another, so this might seem a little trite. My excuse is that I’m encouraging my team to consider blogging more themselves (and I need to kick my own backside from time to time too!).

In summary I think the Reasons to Keep Blogging are:

• Career
• Mental health/sharpness
• Community
• Memory
• Discipline

Career

I have had the unfortunate experience of working somewhere for a relatively long time (5 years) and then being retrenched through no fault of my own. What I found was that I had been ignoring my career in general in favour of my career in the company that employed me.

Let me unwrap that a little. It is easy when working for someone to find yourself learning just what you need to for the tasks at hand. To restrict your professional relationships to colleagues and clients. To ignore new ideas that are not acceptable where you work. To stunt your growth in other words.

Just as it’s important to have a life outside work, it is important to have a professional life outside of work. If you get to know people outside your normal range of professional contacts, explore ideas outside what is needed for work and generally get interested in your industry then it is surprising how much more effective it makes your job search chances later.

For information works, especially creative types like developers, blogging can be a very effective way of building a portfolio of work and ideas that future employers can be impressed by. As an employer, I know that it also helps potential employers validate their face to face opinion of you.

Mental Health

As a creative type you need to keep your mental faculties well exercised and challenged. Work is not always the best place where you can get a chance to push yourself. Sometimes it helps to try something in public, but not to have too much hanging on the result.

Use your blog as a place to explore new ideas, techniques and ways of doing things. It is not just the content that needs to be fresh, so does the design and layout of the site. (reminder to self: take your own advice!)

Community

Don’t just blog on your own. Leave comments on other people’s site and link your name back to your blog so people can come see more of what you think if they liked it. Get into conversations, write articles criticising other’s ideas, commenting on them, stretching them, validating them, taking them further, or writing them off.

In other words, get involved with people.

Memory

Sometimes I wish I’d record how I fixed something, or where I found an idea out, because often I need it again later and can’t find it (easily). I discussed this with Neil Houghton the other day, sometimes you use a nifty technique in apiece of code, but then requirements change and it gets deleted, and you;re left hunting through sourced code control (Subversion in our case) to find it. Far better to make the effort to blog about it, and then some other poor schmuck might get help too!

Discipline

Aaaah the “D” word. Need anything else be said?

Self-discipline is something to be much admired, the enemy within is always vastly more difficult to conquer than the one without. But it seems to have a bad name.

Discipline is not about some rigid, heavily controlled lifestyle that simply denies and restricts our actions to the ones most acceptable, or least harmful to others.

Discipline is useful because it builds up the strength of will, and willpower is often the only difference between success and failure. Can you keep going even when you fail? Does one loss make you a loser? I think discipline is the habit of trying to succeed just one more time. It is denial, and restriction, but the purpose behind it is to do what we really want to do and not get distracted by the unnecessary, the mundane or the superficial.

If you really want to blog, if it fulfils one of the purposes I’ve outlined above, then you will find that continuing to do it helps build in you the discipline needed to do other things you really want to do. And that is the best reason I can think of to keep blogging.

Top 5 classic programmer folly projects

Back in the day when the British Empire was still new, wealthy landowners who had heard about great places elsewhere (usually ones where it didn't rain all the time) started a trend of re-creating these great places on their own land - often right down to the current decrepit state of said places.

Sometimes they didn't have a specific place in mind, but wanted a "ruined Greek temple" or similar stereotypical "interesting" structure (sometimes they were just plain strange). The point seemed to be to prove that a) you were interesting, b) you could pay for a spurious building for the sake of it, and c) foreign travel was all so unnecessary. These were known, rather aptly, as follies (presumably because they represented the folly of spending your children's inheritance on an expensive monument when investing it might have proven more prudent).

From: Xerones 

Programmers it turns out are no less susceptible to follies, although they might not realise it, and they are not deliberate fakeries. There are several classic programmer follies which tend to get repeated by each generation, with ever-increasing zeal and lack of awareness of their futility.

Now, don't get me wrong, these are all fine examples of throwaway projects that you might play around with and practice on, but for some reason programmers can't seem to leave them stay as just throwaway projects - they always want to upgrade them to the status of "next big thing".

Without any further ado, here they are.

Top 5 classic programmer folly projects

1. Bug tracking

Every software program has bugs, and most programmers find they need a good system to track said bugs. Some companies, Atlassian and Fog Creek Software have made their living providing great, simple yet powerful solutions for exactly this problem.

However, there is always a temptation to take shortcuts, customise the bug tracking, or get a cheaper solution, and so inevitably every programmer gets tempted to build their own bug tracking application.

It's a folly because ...
This is actually a fairly complicated domain, especially once you add in the bug resolution workflow, web interface and email integration that even free, open-source applications have. Of course there is also the problem of what to do when your bugs are in your bug tracking software ... evil recursion in the real world!

2. To do list

I just want to track what I need to do ... and what I want is to improve this to do list. Remember the Milk has the best free implementation I've seen of this type of application, but BaseCamp, your mobile phone and even GMail are worth mentioning (not to mention trusty old pen and paper).

It's a folly because ...
You really don't need to waste brain cycles re-inventing something this simple, and when you look at the sophistication of Remember the Milk (web, offline Google Gears, Twitter, email and mobile integration) anything you do yourself looks kinda ... sad.

3. Website/blog engine

I want to use something I built myself, and it's a good chance to try my hand at content management ... except it isn't. If you are blogging then do your readers and yourself a favour and use an existing blogging application. You will have a more consistent user interface and will never find yourself not posting because the build is broken after that last refactor and you can't be bothered fixing it yet.

It's a folly because ...
The free alternatives are great, the cheap ones are even better and frankly it's not that great a domain for learning how to code, especially web stuff.

4. Hobby management

My hobby (roleplaying games, model robots, high performance cars, salsa dancing, etc) is out of control and I need a way of managing it. Actually no you don't, you probably just need to get out and live more.

It's a folly because ...

You don't really want to mix up your hobby and your work, it just makes one less fun and the other less professional. it is also an area where you will never really be satisfied with the result because it's your hobby. Finally, when you show it to other people they are likely to go "Ummm ... very nice. What is it?" Hugh MacLeod defines a geek as "Somebody who socializes via objects" and congratulations, that's exactly what you've just become!

5. Application Building Applications

This is the one where you build an application that uses meta-data to build an application. It seems this is the purvey of the very smart and the very dumb. The really smart guys believe they can be the ones to break through and nail this problem, the really dumb ones just don't realise how hard it is.

It's a folly because ...

It's possible to do this in theory, but in practice you only ever get around 80% of the way there, and it turns out the other 20% is the bit that an application really needs to live and breathe. Really, really smart guys manage to push that 80% up to the giddy heights of 81.63%, but hey, it still doesn't do what you really wanted it to.

Bonus! Installer software

OK, here is number six. What do you do when you want to distribute your application to clients? Use the MSI installer for Visual Studio? Heck, no! You go ahead and create your own installer software, complete with license number check, built-in unzipper and some cross-platform nastiness.

It's a folly because ...

You already know you shouldn't be doing this. Go use something someone else created and love the fact that you don't need to do it by hand!

 

OK, time for confession time, I've been guilty of each of these (at least through to the design stage). What about you, what were your follies?

My new role at Elcom Technology

Some of you might be aware that Elcom's Technology Director and my friend Craig Bailey is leaving Elcom Technology - in fact his last day was last Friday. As our Technical Director he was inspiring, motivating and a great encourager - he let us know we had his confidence and trust, and backed that attitude up with his words and actions when under stress.

I will be stepping into Craig's shoes, and taking on the role of Technical Director for Elcom and helping guide our development, sysadmin and helpdesk teams. Whilst we have some similarities, I have more of a focus on Agile development and software craftsmanship (as Craig has mentioned). I will probably be taking a more hands-on approach to the role - simply because I have contributed to the dev work I will now be managing.

Craig and I have been discussing this role over the last month or so, and he got me interested in the hedgehog concept. That last link explains it pretty well, but basically it is all about helping you focus on what you could be best at in the world, how you can add (money) value and what you are most passionate about. The point where you will be most effective, rewarded and fulfilled, lies in the region where those three overlap.

After thinking about these, and discussing them with people that know me, my (current) take on these three is below:

I had followed a similar process many times in the past, but without the emphasis on coming up with a "simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection" of these three circles. Or as my Dad put it to me, something actionable and concrete.

Being Technical Director at Elcom offers me a chance to move closer to that intersection point, and I hope that in my first few months I can work on those things that might currently distract me from that focus in order to generate some very tangible results for myself and Elcom's owners.

I am a firm believer in servant leadership and am honoured that I have some of the best technical people it's been my pleasure to work with in our development, sysadmin and helpdesk teams. With great people in the team around you, it certainly makes my job easier, and more pleasurable. Like a good scrum master I am aiming to remove obstacles in the way of our technical teams and act as force multiplier for the whole team (the OODA Loop has some interesting parallels with the Agile principles).

It should be an interesting journey ahead!

Hello Perth!

 

'nuff said.

Trying out Kaboodle

I've recently discovered the social shopping site Kaboodle. It makes it very easy for you to get up to speed, and bring data into it from various other social sources, plus eCommerce sites. Very nice. Here's my wishlist (imported from Amazon.com):

falkayn's Wish List by falkayn

A parable of 4 investments

I entered this presentation into SlideShare's World's Best Presentation Contest. If you like it then go and give it a vote!

A Parable Of 4 Investments

view presentation (tags: business christian religious creative)

It's the water

There is something elementally satisfying about my current commute, and this morning I realised what it is. It isn't the beautiful houses (Mosman) or views (Spit Bridge/Harbour Bridge) we go past; it isn't the crowded buses or traffic jams either. It's the water.

No, I'm not guzzling some funky, intelligent, over-hyped, green-hating plastic bottled über-water, but rather looking out over the harbour, Sydney's great appendix of the Pacific Ocean.

It's not the beaches that move me. Nor am I fascinated by the breaking waves. In fact that is just the sloppy, noisome edge of the real deal ... the Sea - mistress of ship Captains and mighty in her play and rage alike.

Playing in the surf is fun (I thoroughly recommend it) but it's rather like running to work - a more primitive existence, where we rely upon our body's strength to sustain us - and frankly as the world's ultimate tool makers it behoves us to take a more mature approach to something as dangerous and amazing as the Sea.

Like many things in life, it's my Dad's fault. As an aside I'm sure my son will have many things to lay at my feet too ... if you're just getting to grips with your own parents' imperfections then I suggest you look at something like the Search for Life course from Careforce Lifekeys.

But I digress. The reason it's my Dad's fault is that he exposed me at an impressionable age to the Sea via his yacht Dreamtime. I was around 13 when I first held the wheel of a large boat (41'6") and it was thrilling. In the rest of my teens I spent many a weekend racing with my Dad and his crew and thoroughly enjoyed most of it (except for the end of the day when we cleaned up).

I find that the Sea is the place where I feel most spiritual and closest to appreciating the sheer grandeur of my heavenly father's creation (I was going to say handiwork, but he spoke it into being ... hey! Maybe Bill Gates is right about the future of speech recognition after all?).

Modern heraldic eye candy

From the fertile marketing minds at Toyota comes Scion Speak, a website promoting the Scion brand. The site is fairly simply and flash heavy, the main aim of it is to give Scion enthusiasts (or anyone really) a way of creating an eye-catching heraldic symbol with modern iconography, such as the one I did below:

It's great fun, and likely to lead to a lot of buzz amongst the right people. From a technical standpoint it's a little weird that they chose to output the results in JPEG format (GIF would have been far smaller for this sort of image).

In mine I used the circuit board wings to represent my background in computers, the phoenix represents Falkayn, the glasses are for Angus and the burger is for my last name ... of course!

Apparently I'm in marketing now

There's an ongoing joke in the dev team at Elcom that I'm actually a sales guy, due to the number of sales meetings I've been doing recently. Well apparently I'm in marketing too, because this blog just appeared in the inaugural Top 50 Australian Marketing Pioneer Blogs list, compiled by Julian Cole and to be published in the August edition of Marketing Magazine.

I am honoured to be in that list (at #33) as a large part of what I do is thinking about how IT products or services can offer better value to customers, including innovating beyond the current market space - which is certainly included in the Wikipedia definition of marketing.

Having said that, you might have to look hard to find anything specific to marketing on this blog. So for anyone who has just come from the Top 50 list, here's a summary of my posts that might be interesting from a marketing viewpoint (especially if your product includes software):

• Om's got the wrong business model for Twitter
• How aware are you?
• Feeling secure or not ...
• Rewarding failure
• Cost Accounting, Lean Manufacturing and the Craftsman Within
• Google Gears
• Norton 360: Should we tell him?
• Shape of the world
• YouTube suckers Google? Or gets swallowed?
• Innovation more diffuse than we think
• Not forgetting Enterprise 2.0 ...
• SaaS is letting me down
• Dell's Got a Blog!
• Long Tail Wisdom
• Success/Failure Web 2.0 Style
• Falkayn's List of Web 2.0 Lists
• Thomas Nelson's Corporate Blogging Guidelines
• Software Building Angst

Photos from Code Camp Oz

There are some great photos from CCOz on Flickr. I even managed to find one on Mitch's blog that showed me ... I'm the bloke slouching inside the big yellow ellipse (thanks to the Expression Design eval I picked up).

 

It has been great meeting so many friendly and helpful people and Twitter has had some very lively threads on it. If you want to check out what is happening realtime (or afterwards), look for the ccoz tag on Hashtags.

Jeff Wharton challenged me to do a presentation myself, I guess because of my smart aleck comments from the peanut gallery. I'd like to do one on XML literals in VB9 having just spent the last month working on our branching pathways diagram code for Elcom's Learning Management System and being up to my elbows in it (and Prototype).

Annealing a sword

OK, here is a good reason why I am not a swordsmith:

In case you're wondering what he's doing, it's annealing, the process of softening the metal so it can be re-worked (in this case ground).

8 little known things about Falkayn

Anthony tagged me with this old meme. Here are the 'rules':

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So here are 8 little known things about me:

1. World traveller
   My Dad's work always took him around the world. That led to my family living in New Zealand, the USA, Canada, the UK and back home in Australia. By the time I was 10 years old I had travelled around the world roughly 5 times (and I've done it another 4 times since then).
   
   
2. Sailor
   In 1986 I did the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. As one of the few Category One ocean races in the world it was a challenge, especially as I was just a teenager. I sailed with my Dad on his boat Dreamtime, and he made sure I trained properly. So it was a half mile swim every morning before school that year, a training sail midweek and then weekend ocean races, with me completing the mandatory two overnight races in the lead up to Boxing Day.
   
   It was a tumultuous 4 days with gale force winds, rough seas, a crew that was only half experienced and cold, wet conditions. As my Dad had intended it was a watershed moment for me - I ran the mainsheet and at one stage we were in a death roll whilst skimming down the Tasmanian coastline, and I had to ignore panicked commands from my fellow crew (men in their 40s!) and just listen to what my skipper (Dad) was telling me to do.
   
   I survived that race (and the return sail), but it was quite a few more years before I could be convinced to start ocean racing again. However, I helped my Dad move his new boat, One Step Ahead, from Pittwater to Sydney Harbour a few weekends ago, and you know what? It felt pretty good being out on the water again, and it's not many guys who can say they've "sailed with my father, man and boy, these twenty years".
   
   
3. Bent middle fingers
   The last joint on each of my middle fingers is bent outwards slightly. It's something to do with the angle of the joint because they seem to straighten up when they bend. Weird, huh?
   
   
4. Hate sandals
   Sorry but closed shoes are what I prefer - even on hot days. Having said that, living closer to the beach has caused me to actually buy a pair of thongs.
   
   
5. Love to cook
   It seems to be something about the physicality of cooking, along with the appreciation for good results, that makes me love cooking. I'm not a fast cook, but there is nothing more relaxing after a hard day's work than taking an hour or two to turn out a nice meal. Of course you sometimes have to knock up something edible out of minimal ingredients with 20 minutes notice - that's definitely less fun.
   
   
6. Chlorine blind 
   One family holiday in Spain when I was very young my Dad tried to help me learn to swim with my eyes open underwater. It was a pretty successful day, with me triumphantly announcing I could now swim underwater. However I woke up the next morning unable to open my eyes due to an allergic reaction to the (massive) amounts of chlorine the hotel had dumped in their pool. I've been a firm believer in swimming goggles ever since!
   
   
7. Skiing a white Christmas 
   I spent the bulk of my childhood living in the UK, and one of the (few) nice side-effects of that was my family being able to take holidays in Europe very affordably. The best ever holidays turned out to be ones we had around Christmas when my Dad took us to Lech, Austria for skiing trips (it wasn't quite so exclusive then). We would go for two weeks at a time, and spend the first week re-acquainting ourselves with the sport and the second week revelling in the fantastic snowfields of the region.
    
   My fondest memory is of getting woken up just before midnight on Christmas Eve to gather at the local church, sing Carols and watch the midnight torch run, local ski instructors snaking down the mountain in lines, carrying burning torches to light up the dark. There's something spectacularly appropriate about all that fatty Christmas food that suits cold, snowy places - somehow 35 degree Centigrade sweaty Christmas days in Oz better suit cold seafood and salads.
   
   
8. Swordsmithing
   Back in my university days I hung out with a bunch of friends who were all into roleplaying games, and hence swords, armour and pretty much all sorts of historical military goodies. We were also into martial arts, especially Japanese ones (I did Judo). One of the guys had a book on Japanese swordsmithing, which we pored over. I had topped my year at school when it came to Design & Technology, and I fondly remembered standing over the forge bashing out some metal.
   
   I remember dreaming what I would like to do in the future and imagining the perfect blend of natural environment, zen-simple lifestyle and heady success. For me that seemed to be an Austrian chalet on a mountain in New Zealand, with a fully kitted out forge in the back and international customers waiting for one of my original katanas ... since then I've had a friend actually take up blacksmithing, specialising in historical reproductions of weapons (spears, swords, etc). As is often the case the reality turned out to be far more prosaic and boring than you imagine.

So there's 8 (reasonably) useless facts about me. In the spirit of this whole meme I'm going to tag eight other bloggers to follow on:

• James Dellow
• Servant of Chaos (Gavin Heaton)
• Anubhav Goyal
• Jason Yip
• Tim Lucas
• Matt Moore
• Icy
• Kimberly

My coding themes

Scott Hanselman posted some samples of various developer's coding themes and asked people to link to their own, so here is mine.

This is how C# code looks, I couldn't find any snappy looking VB code to post that wasn't live code I couldn't share, so I took a snapshot of our internal code generator's code:


ASPX files look slightly different, and as I spend a lot of time coding them it's important to get those looking good too:


I spend a fair chunk of time going into SQL Management Studio, so I figured I needed to theme that in a similar fashion:


In Visual Studio 2008 I'm using the Consolas font, set to 11pt in size. My aim with these themes was to get something where I had nothing too high contrast, but I could clearly tell the difference at a glance between a string and a comment, or an XML comment.

A big shout out to Alan J Lee!

A big shout out to my compadre Alan J Lee , who has just entered the world of blogging. One of his first posts is about a Silverlight presentation we had yesterday from Microsoft Developer Evangelist Michael Kordahi.

Keep on blogging Alan!

Rob Walling's developer archetypes

I've mentioned Rob Walling's developer archetypes before, but my first week in my new position has brought home to me some of how I fall across those archetypes (and I'm egotistical enough to believe it is of interest to you). This is how he sums them up:

The archetypes are:

• Trainer/Author -
  spends the majority of his/her time teaching, training, writing articles and books, and otherwise helping others learn how to program.
• Coder - a hard-core developer. Into design patterns, the next cool and experimental language constructs, and talking about web service proxy generators.
• Lead - excellent organization skills, driven to make projects succeed, and skilled at leading others.
• Technologist - into all the new applications; would rather integrate than write code.

I mulled about this myself, but I didn't like the answers I got, but I know that's never a good reason to ignore something. This last week, it all came together for me. I'm in a senior developer position - not team lead, not project manager, not even consultant. Of course a fair bit of the week was spent settling in (getting the right keyboard for instance), but I found that by the end of the week I've done exactly four new lines of code, amended about 30 lines of code, re-designed 9 web page wireframes and yet feel valuable, energised and eager to go to work each day.

This settled an internal argument I'd been having about Coder vs. Technologist. I am definitely more of a Technologist than a Coder, but I'm more of a Coder than anything else.

30%
Coder

40%
Technologist

20%
Lead

10%
Trainer/Author

The part of my week that I'm most proud about? Getting a mental picture of how the whole company operates, particularly with regards to software development and deployment. I now understand how the whole hangs together - yet I'm sure a pure Coder would not be interested in that, it's more of a sign of a Technologist/Integrator. In any case it justifies for me the decision to go back to a development role, especially in light of Rob's recent post about why good developers re promoted into unhappiness. I'm far happier now than I was when all I ever got to see was Visio network diagrams, the occasional test script and tons of paperwork, meetings and decisions about what others should do.