Year: 2006

Thank you Firefox!

Just as I was finishing the last sentence of the previous post, my computer shut down. There was no warning, no time to process that it was happening, it just… went off.

I was already mentally composing the short I had written up a cure for cancer but my stupid computer ate it and now I can’t remember it note—because naturally I hadn’t saved an intermediate copy, despite being a geek who knows full well that this sort of thing happens all the time at the worst possible moment—but I remembered that Firefox 2.0 saves the last browser session in case of crashes. Hoping that didn’t just mean opens the last bunch of tabs, I started it up… and, as you can tell from this post’s title, it was all there. Every last character. Huzzah!

Now if I could just figure out why the SATA drive I installed a few months ago has been causing this to happen at least once a week….

Eep! It’s a work post!

One of the most common complaints I hear at work these days is that it’s too hard to find information, particularly on our relatively new wiki. I see this as a combination of several issues:

  • We treat the wiki as a bunch of individual, unrelated documents instead of a web of complementary information. A coworker recently set out to map the structure of our wiki; I haven’t heard back, but I’m fairly certain his graph will look more like a bicycle wheel than a spiderweb.
  • We don’t use the wiki as a wiki. The idea of a WikiWord seems foreign; many people actively override the automatic linking given to CamelCased words because they don’t like to see little question marks on pages that haven’t been created. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to a page and found nothing but a bunch of attached Word documents; worse, they’re often just multiple revisions of the same file; worse still, the documents are invariably nothing more than a paragraph or two of text, which could have been put directly into the wiki in the first place! (This happens with email too, and manifests itself in our source control system.)
  • We use the wiki as a dumping ground, and try to force it to do things it was never designed to do. Got a status report that’s a snapshot of a webpage? Cut-and-paste it onto the wiki, preferably on a new page so it’ll be impossible to link to the newest version. Need to parse an XML file, look up some values in a database and make the results into a PNG file? Write it as a wiki page!
  • We don’t have the WikiNature. If WikiNature is typing in a bunch of book titles, coming back a day later, and finding them turned into birds in the Amazon, WorkNature so far is typing in a bunch of book titles, coming back a day later, finding the same book titles, then never coming back. I’ve tried to create some artificial “hub” pages, and to add context where I think it’s useful or relevant, but it seems to be a losing battle.

I’m sure Matt is reading this and chuckling to himself (or tearing out his hair) thinking about how this sounds like our early experiences with adopting agile development practices, and I don’t deny seeing certain parallels myself. (Some of those are in my reaction to how I see things being done versus how I think they should be; I think it was Mike L. at work who coined the term irrational idealist, and that certainly fits the bill.) Several solutions have been proposed, including adding a search engine (marginally successful due to the lack of interconnectedness noted above), hiring a librarian (perceived as a waste of resources), and—my favourite—education (scuttled due to lack of interest in mundane topics). In the end, it’s going to be up to the company’s employees—my coworkers—to work together as a team to start making the wiki work for us.

I just hope that happens sooner than later, before our several thousand pages become several hundred thousand.

Top 5 TV shows

In the vein of Matt‘s recent lists, here’s one of my own: what are your favourite TV shows of the past?

I don’t imagine there are many shockers on this list, at least for people who know me:

  1. Babylon 5
  2. West Wing (the Sorkin seasons)
  3. SportsNight
  4. Max Headroom
  5. Slings and Arrows

Hey, what the heck… how about a bonus two-part trivia question, based loosely on a discussion with Matt today, and to welcome James to the ’verse:

  1. What television show featured the adventures of Ralph Hinkley?
  2. To what was the character’s name changed midway through the series? (Bonus bonus: Why?)

Shame-based man (aka Porch Song redux)

For several months I’ve had a tab open with the beginnings of a post called Porch Song Trilogy*. It was going to be about a concert I went to at the Round Tower Pub, the other music venue at the former King’s Inn, featuring Claire Jenkins, her bandmate Treasa Levasseur, and Andrea Revel, who was new to me.

For one reason and another, I’ve never written the actual post, despite loving all three fabulous performers and having a chance to hang out with them and a few others including Allison Brown and Erin Clark. And the evening, and everyone there, deserve much more than this much-delayed post, which is in part prompted by Matt’s gentle prodding. But that’s what we get tonight, and I promise I’ll do right by them in the future.

The clever title of that post wasn’t mine, much as I’d love to claim it. Andrea told me it was Treasa’s contribution. 🙂

About to burst

I learned some exceedingly happy news from a friend today… but I don’t know how widely it’s been disseminated, so I’m not going to spill the beans. Instead, I’ll just say here, publicly, to said friend, thank you, and congratulations!

Reading material

Prompted by a (mild) tweak from Matt—and yeah, there is a certain pattern to the subject matter around here :)—I thought I’d post links representing a tiny excerpt of the online writings that keep me informed, entertained, and occasionally outraged:

Technology

  • Tim Bray never fails to have something of interest at Ongoing. It’s not entirely accurate to list the site under technology (although he is Sun’s Director of Web Technologies), because he’s just as likely to post a review of a great CD in his 5 ✭ ♫ series, or photos of his travels in Vancouver and around the world, or his analysis of the political situation in the Middle East. But technology’s what took me to the site originally, so there ya go.
  • Sam Ruby‘s eponymous blog is generally more tech-oriented than Ongoing, but always as engaging, whether he’s writing about web services, personal projects like Planet Venus, or just pointing to other items of interest around the web. Anyone at work who’s heard me talk (and talk, and talk) about syndication or moan with displeasure at our intraweb (and other servers) ultimately has Sam to blame.
  • Ditto on assigning blame to Eric Meyer, who writes about CSS (and other things) at meyerweb.com.
  • Dive Into Mark, Mark Pilgrim’s recently-restarted blog, is one of the ones I’ve been reading longest, and is almost certainly the first I subscribed to via RSS. He’s big into technological freedom these days, a topic that’s lead to discussions of things from backing up terabytes of data to website accessibility.

Music

  • Lenni Jabour’s petites pensées are a monthly snapshot of the loveliness that can be found in day-to-day existence, if you just know where to look. sigh
  • On the Road is Kristin Sweetland’s occasional journal and a jumping-off point to disparate and distant parts of the web that make perfect sense together once you start to understand a bit of who she is.
  • I came to Scott Andrew’s lo-fi acoustic pop superhero! site for the JavaScript techniques, and stayed for the music and insights into the world of indie musicianship.

Politics

  • Rick Mercer takes few prisoners and eats sacred cows for breakfast. His blog posts are like scripts for the streeters he performs on his weekly comedy show, made only slightly less biting by being in print.
  • Mike Watkins dot net (which is actually a .ca domain) is the blog of a Progressive Conservative—you remember what those were, right?—who I came across during the last Canadian election campaign. He’s very vocal about the arch-conservative turn his party has taken, and also happens to live in turncoat David Emerson’s riding. It’s surprising sometimes how much his opinions match mine, me being a social libertarian on the economic left and all.

Friends and Family

  • Donna’s denim blog has been through a few sites and incarnations, but it’s currently a place where she posts snippets about her life and travels, accompanied by photos taken with her vast array of cameras.
  • I’ve mentioned that brother Ed and sister-in-law Tara both have blogs; as far as I know we’re the only three in the family that do.
  • Coworkers John and Mike haven’t had a lot to say on their blogs recently. Perhaps this tweak of my own will shame them into a post or two. 🙂

A short coda, just for interest’s sake: of the current Technorati Top 100, I read exactly… wait for it… one. And it’s A List Apart, which is really more of a magazine than a blog.