Archive for 2008
Haha I wonder how many IT folk this actually rings true for…
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Ha, George (the web designer in our team) took some photos of the “Web” work area today – my office and his cubicle (Phil and I have been tandem coding so sharing my office at the moment).
My Office - overview
George's Cubicle
Our spare propeller hats
The Web Team Mascot -"LOL"
The web 'NOM' supply shelf
George's Design Desk
Finally the Craftfest site is live! Craftfest is one of the major projects that George, Philip and I have been working on at Expertise Events for the past two months. It’s the first of many sites to be launched on the new Xerxes² platform that Philip and I have been churning out for the past few months, the next evolution of our in house development framework and CMS, EMarketing, CRM and Ecommerce platform. This is the first major project that we’ve done as a team since I’ve rejoined Expertise and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with another passionate developer and designer.
We had a couple of hitches late last week which unfortunately delayed the launch until today, but the new site is humming along nicely. If you are at all interested in Craft shows and events, or want to shop for craft products from multiple retailers at once easy to use website, definitely check it out!
Anyway, this launch is phase one of the new Xerxes deployment. Stage two will come online towards the end of next week (The exhibitor portal which allows retailers to manage their products, projects and coupons online) followed shortly by our final phase – the staff system to allow the entire thing to be managed by our in house sales, marketing and co-ordinator staff members (rather than currently the three of us making ALL changes and updates). Craftfest is the first of many exciting projects the Expertise Web team are working on at the moment, so stay tuned!
Hahaha oh so scary
Check this out:
Phil (Developer friend I work with) has just set up his new blog on http://www.ph1l1p.net
Fantastic podcast by Joe Stump (Lead architect @ Digg) about scalability and performance of php applications.
Well worth listening to if you work on any large volume web applications
The secret has been finally unveiled and so I’m now able to let my friends know 
Tomorrow I return to Expertise Events as the new Web Manager, to work on some very exciting projects! I’ll be working alongside two brilliant designers and developers on some serious and meaty projects which I’m chomping at the bit to start 
Also looking forward to working with my friends from Expertise again (Tim, Di and Lyndal especially!).
PrecariousPanther.net has been somewhat quiet over the past month whilst I’ve been wrapping things up at my previous position. I’m hoping to give it some more love in the next few months after things settle.
Still – stay tuned as these projects are very exciting and have the potential to have a major impact across many industries.
Looks like Jerry Yang is being hung out to dry…
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/15/nytimes-article-reverberates-through-yahoo-whos-their-next-ceo/
Quote Michael Arrington from Tech Crunch
When blogs and regional newspapers trash Jerry Yang it’s one thing. But when the New York Times does it, people really notice. Public lynchings like this are few and far between from that bastion of traditional journalism.
Yesterday’s article by Joe Nocera, titled “Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby” was a stinging condemnation of Yang. It’s presented as a memo from Nocera to Yang, with the subject “Shafting Yahoo’s Shareholders” and outlines the many ways Yang has failed Yahoo’s shareholders and employees.
Yahoo actually did a deal with Google – their BIGGEST competitor just because they didn’t like the vibe of Microsoft; which demonstrates their reluctance has nothing to do with thinking their company was worth more – but that their CEO just doesn’t like the idea of Microsoft running “his” company. What he failed to see is it stopped being “his” company when he sold swathes of it off to investors for billions of dollars.
Jericho fans are working hard to save the series… again – this time producing a “Save Jericho” TV commercial and raising the funds to have it broadcast during prime time over two hundred times. See the video after the jump.
Haha – love it. Seriously though – Facebook valued at $15 billion and people claiming there isn’t a tech bubble? The job market has gone nuts with designer and developers over the past few years and now the only candidates we get want North of $100k with less than a years experience “reskinning wordpress”. I was the *only* web developer when my IT crowd went into tertiary education; and now next to all of them after finishing their Computer Science degrees are switching across to web dev as it’s where the money is.
So I just finished watching the second season of “Jericho” today – a fantastic (at least in my opinion :p ) series surrounding a small town in the US of A (or is that AS of A? – Subtle reference to season two ) post a nation-wide nuclear attack on various US cities. It is a witty post-apocalyptic drama which explores some very interesting concepts and philosophies in a post terrorism world; and it’s setting (small town called Jericho) brings an emotional warmth to the series without sacrificing its provocative and challenging ideas and situations.
For those of you who aren’t aware of Jericho’s history, it was originally cancelled by its network in the US (CBS) at the end of its first season due to poor Nielsen ratings (More on those later). By that stage the series had picked up a significant fan base which didn’t appreciate the sentiment. In the final episode of Season One in a very dramatic scene one of the characters responds to another town that has declared war on Jericho “Nuts to you”. So what did the fans do in response to its cancellation?
They rallied together and sent more than TWENTY TONNES of unshelled peanuts to the CBS head office. See the video below for day three of the deliveries:
Seems to be a lot of hype in the media lately re the collapse of Microsoft Windows to its “foe” Apple MacOSX. Apparently Vista has been a complete failure.
Wow…. If Vista is a complete failure – with triple the market share of OSX – what exactly does that make Apples flagship product?
Seriously though – I hate big evil money grubbing corporations as much as the next guy. Problem is – the company many of you have chosen to rally behind under this banner is no better (and in many respects a lot worse). That’s not to say Apple is rubbish compared to Microsoft – but at least get the facts straight if you’re going to try sell me on them being such a better company than MS.
The funniest thing about it is that despite not being a fan of either platform – I manage to see the actual advantages Macs have over Windows boxes; they are nice to look at and you get to belong to a clique – somewhat akin to the alienware gear in the “PC” world (although you do know that Mac’s are “Personal Computers” right? And you also know that the reason windows can now run on them is because they are identical in hardware?). That doesn’t mean I don’t think Macs should exist – far from. I think there are lots of niche markets for various platforms and that for anything in life there is no single solution to rule them all. But – you mac people need to stop feeling so insecure about the rest of the world not using Macs. Enjoy your niche clique for what it is and stop feeling you need Windows to collapse to prove that you were right all along.
Frankly I have no idea what the future holds for the windows platform – Linux is coming in leaps and bounds towards being a solid all-round platform and who knows if the king will finally be knocked off its high horse. I do promise however that if any operating system manages to take that crown – it wont be MacOSX. Why would people replace one “evil” organisation for another? And whether you like it or not price vs performance will always be a key factor for majority market share – something that Apple’s core philosophy is against competing in. Apple is reaching market saturation of its niches – a fear that most investors of APPL stock have started sharing over the past 4-5 months.
At least the Linux crowd aren’t hypocrites.
Fantastic article that Charl sent through to me today that ALL web designers and developers should read so they get an informed idea of both how the industry works and the reasoning behind the decisions from the web giants – Martian Headsets – Joel On Software.
Quote the article:
The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.
So you see, we have a terrific example here of a gigantic rift between two camps.The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You’d think they’re the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn’t, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America’s Toughest Sheriff. “YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don’t care if 80% of your websites stop working. I’ll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don’t care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law.”
On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. “Can’t we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code … Zip! Solved!”
Without the standards Nazis the web would still be as it was in the 90s – but they also need to understand that the web for the most part is by the people for the people and nobody will get any traction with breaking the web for the sake of “cleaning it up”. *IF* the browsers decided to be strict with standards by default – all that would happen is the average user would download the new browser, test their favourite sites, see it all broken – and BLAME THE BROWSER; not the site – for the resulting ugliness. At which point they would revert to their old browser and the standardists would be back to square one.
The only way to approach this from both sides is transitionally. Provide a token for standardists who want full features to enable them for their sites and default to non-standards for all other sites. Whilst standardists might not like this approach – it will give them the full featureset without breaking the web; and they will find that EVENTUALLY more and more developers and designers will get sick of not working with standards and create all new sites with this standards friendly approach. Once the overwhelming majority of sites (at least all the popular ones) have been written this way the default behavior can be at this point switched without the average joe wondering why the majority of sites they visit on a day to day basis all of a sudden dont work with the new browser.