siliconsoul

Do you have a minute for me to call you?

poorgeek — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:23:27 +0000

Recently at work I’ve been experiencing this strange phenomenon where some of my coworkers will message me via chat to ask if they can call me. I have no idea why they are doing this and I’m pretty sure I never asked for this consideration. What’s stranger is that I’ve told several of them that there really is no need to do this especially since I rarely pay attention to chat and so their request could go unanswered for quite a while.

I’m really starting to wonder how this behavior developed. I’m sure that they don’t text their friends and loved ones to see if it is ok if they can call them on their cell. I realize that they are just trying to be considerate of my time, but this is a little extreme. Like anyone else, if I’m available to take your call then I’ll take it. If not, then leave a message at the beep and I’ll get back to you.

Overcoming the first draft

poorgeek — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:05:26 +0000

Something about Justin Thorp’s “blogging is the first draft of history” article last week stuck with me. In it, he said,

for quite a few people, the idea of writing freaks them out. They start over thinking what they’re writing and more or less take themselves out of what they’re writing.

For me this is absolutely true and I think I have identified why. Being a bit of a perfectionist I don’t like leaving things incomplete. Whether that’s cleaning the house, the code I write, or a blog post. Heck, I’ve even rewritten tweets several times so that I can better maximize the 140 character limit. So what does this say about me? It says that I can’t let that first draft go until it is exactly how I want it. Spelling and grammar are checked. Links are correct. Styles are appropriately applied. Everything looks good in the preview. etc… etc… All of this until eventually I second guess myself and put off pressing the ‘Publish’ button for fear that I’ve missed something.

Of course the real irony here is that as an agile developer I’m trained to start each task by “just make it work”. After it works (and tested of course) I can release and move on to things like making it pretty or making it faster. If I can apply these agile methodologies to my writing, well then, all should be write with the world.

Thinking 140 characters at a time

poorgeek — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:06:54 +0000

I recently started writing a white paper for a client at work and realized that I was having a hard time turning my outline and bullet points into complete sentences and paragraphs. Part of this due to the lack of doing any serious writing in a while. Sure I’ve done documentation, use cases, and some formal E-mails, but to actually sit down and draft a multi-page paper on a set topic is just something I haven’t done in years. Writing is a skill that unless practiced regularly falls by the wayside and mine has fallen.

I also think that another culprit in the deterioration of my writing skills is twitter. With its 140 character limit, twitter forces you to think in statements, rather than complete thoughts. Its useful as a tool to get those statements out to friends, but after a while all your thoughts start to limit themselves to those 140 characters. As a tool, I sometimes need to put twitter back in the toolbox and use something else so that I don’t become too dependant.

My aikido sensei used to always say, “if you use a hammer long enough, everything starts to look like a nail”.

Someone back east is going, “Now why don’t he write?”

poorgeek — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:49:24 +0000

It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything here and I wish I had a better excuse than:

I moved half way across the country
Work has been insane
and the ever popular, I forgot

It really has been the perfect storm of distractions that has kept me from writing, but that’s about to change. I actually have a backlog of articles that I wrote during a recent flight that I’m going to be posting this weekend while the wife in in Michigan visiting family.

So sit tight.

I no write good anymore

poorgeek — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:31:33 +0000

I’ve been thinking over the past few days about some blog posts I should sit down and write. I’ve had the time (sorta) and the ideas, but not the drive. Until tonight.

I sat down with a beer this evening prepared to “put pen to pad” and what came out was incoherent non-sense. I just couldn’t seem to capture my thoughts in a meaningful way. In fact I don’t know how this is coming out so well. My ability to put together a string of words that was not only grammatically correct but also captured my idea as well as my “normal” conversational posting style was coming up short.

So after several drafts I eventually tabled a few outlines to be flushed out later this week and I’m hopeing that I can get them finished while they’re still relavent and while I still have the balls to post them.

Testing out the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5

poorgeek — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:43:33 +0000

Sadly the last post to this blog was in November of last year. That’s pretty bad, even for me. No idea why I haven’t written more since I’ve actually had quite a lot to say. I’ve even been going through the trouble of making sure that Wordpress stays up-to-date with the latest versions. Which is why I’m writing now.

I just upgraded to the newly redesigned Wordpress 2.5 and boy oh boy is it nice. I heard the rumor around SXSW this year that the guys at HappyCog were assisting in the redesign of the admin interface. I think most thought that they would be bringing their own style, but it is safe to say that they have gone far beyond that. So many other sites have reviewed the changes made to the admin interface that I won’t really go into that here. What I will say is that the new interface is not only pleasing to the eye but also so much more usable than previous versions. Even in writing this simple post I feel as if the workflow involved making a new post is substantially easier which I hope will in fact make me want to post more. Only time will tell on that.

Notes from IDEAS 2007

poorgeek — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 21:48:22 +0000

Thursday morning I ventured down to the DC Convention center for the IDEAS 2007 conference. For those that may not know, IDEAS is an annual two day conference presented by GSA that focuses on Section 508, a law that requires accessibility for all for products paid for by the Federal government. This covers everything from Web sites to copy machines. Of interest to me yesterday on the agenda was the “How Accessible is Web 2.0?” panel.

I was mostly curious to hear not only what would be said on this topic to the assembled group of government employees but to also hear the questions that would come up from this group following the panel’s talk. Unfortunately though I was a little let down by both. To start with the panel discussed Second Life as a Web 2.0 technology and I hypothesized how/if/when it could ever be made accessible. Interesting ideas there but not really what I was hoping the discussion to be about. It did occur to me during the talk that Second Life would be an interesting place to “test” disabilities, especially visual and auditory ones. I wonder how hard it would be to have your screen be displayed to appear as someone who has tunnel vision, is color blind, and any of the other forms of visual disabilities. Auditory would be a little simpler to mock up since you can just turn off sound, but how many of us would? With voice chat becoming ever more useful in Second Life, would those that text chat end up forming their own bonds similar to what we see among the deaf in real life?

Other things that were covered during the panel were the things that a lot of us who’ve been in the accessibility field already know; separate your structure, presentation and behavior layers, content is king, screen readers and technology are actually starting to catch up, etc… One quote that I did like was from a panelist from SAS (who must have been a late addition because she does not show up on the Agenda) was:

If content is king, then context has to be at least prime minister.

I liked this statement since we often loose sight that while content is what the web is all about if you take it outside of the context, or in the Web 2.0 case, change the context in the middle, then you’re changing the intended meaning of the content. That’s something I will definitely try to remember going forward.

The last big piece of information I pulled out of this panel was that the Eclipse project is in the early stages of developing an Accessibility Tools Framework that will eventually be available as part of the open-source Eclipse IDE. The goal of this project is to make accessibility testable from within an IDE. This was a huge “WOW” moment for me since I not only love the Eclipse IDE, but am always being asked to go and test something in [insert AT software here]. With an actual framework in place I could conceivably write unit tests that could be included as part of our natural regression testing. I will definitely be paying attention to see where this project goes which is currently still in the early proposal stage.

Not a bad chunk of information to think about for one hour at a free conference.

Blogging to GTD

poorgeek — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:34:49 +0000

I’ve been thinking recently about the role that blogging daily, or at least more than once a month in my case, can be part of the GTD process proposed by David Allen in his book, “Getting Things Done”. One of the tenants of GTD is to write down all of your tasks so that they are in front of you and not swirling around inside your head. This is meant to clear your head so that you can clearly and efficiently focus on the task at hand.

I think this is what blogging does for a lot of people. It lets them easily get down the complex thoughts they’re having so that they can focus on other things. I know that one of the reasons I don’t blog often is because I want my posts to be worthwhile and complete so I spent a few days working on a draft and eventually never come back to it (I currently have 5 drafts sitting here that go all the way back to my SXSW 2007 notes). Something I guess I should remember, or at least start to take to heart, is that nothing I write here has to be set in stone (although the search engines will make me think it is). Each blog post can be updated or new ones written to update new thoughts and ideas I’m having on a topic. The important thing that I need to remember is that I have to first get it out of my head so that I can get other things done.

Wowed by Ubuntu

poorgeek — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:24:33 +0000

Being a geek I’ve always been a Linux user at heart. I love the way it fits together and how I have total control over every facet of my PC. Unfortunately for the past few years I’ve only followed from afar the strides that Linux has made on the desktop and never been able to pull the trigger and actually install it. A few weeks I finally made up my mind to do the install on my Dell e1505 laptop because I was another one of those users that had grown tired of Vista.

After doing some research I decided to install a preconfigured version of Ubuntu v7.04 (aka Feisty) that was already tailored to work with my style and brand of laptop (since it turns out the default install would take some configuring to get my video and wireless networking to work properly). I honestly couldn’t believe how simple the install process was from that point on though. The Ubuntu install just lead me through what I needed to enter and then it was done. Best of all, it even allowed me to access Firefox while the whole process was going on. That in of itself was a huge time saver and one that Microsoft and Apple should take a lesson from.

Since the install things have been pretty great. I’ve since upgraded to the new 7.10 version of Ubuntu (aka Gutsy), which like the install, was painless. I’ve even installed a few extra programs that I was actually surprised to find had been ported to Linux. So far I’m very impressed with the polish that Ubuntu has put into their product and as of now I don’t intend to reboot back into Vista any time soon.

Mixing TAL and Conditional Comments

poorgeek — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:28:56 +0000

Ran into a problem today trying to get Zope’s TAL statements to evaluate inside the following conditional comment.

Of course the problem with this is that by nature, ZPTs don’t evaluate anything inside of comments. So my choices were to either hardcode the href attribute which I didn’t really want to do since I couldn’t guarantee that it would always be the same (though I’m 99% sure it would be) or I had to find another way.

My solution was to use tal:replace to write out my intended code as a string:

Which works except for the fact that tal:replace escapes the string converting all of the < into <. That is unless you use prefix your string with structure like in the following final version of the code.