The long awaited new version of Wordpress was released just over a week ago and I have got to say that I am really impressed with the new look and feel, updated user interface and the large amount of new and improved functionality.
Hats off to everybody involved in the new release! It has truly become a fantastic blogging platform and although I have always been a huge advocate for Wordpress, this release makes it much easier for me to convince people how good it actually is.
The usability of the admin interface is so slick and easy to use that I have completely fallen in love with it. So, if you’re using another blogging platform do yourself a favour and get Wordpress installed – I guarantee that you won’t look back.
Below is the screencast of some of the new functionality – it’s awesome!!
Tags: Blogging, Web, Wordpress.
I have been working from home by myself for the whole week and I’ve got to say that the novelty has definitely worn off. It is something that I don’t think is sustainable for long periods of time, unless you really enjoy what you do, have about as much self control as the Dalai Lama and quite frankly enjoy being a hermit.
Don’t get me wrong here, I do quite enjoy working from home once in awhile as there are less distractions and when I have lots of coding to do the less distractions the better. Also it gives you a break from the office and can be a good way to recharge. However, I think two days a week is pretty much my limit.
I am sure that their are some differences of opinion here, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s not my cup of tea. We are after all social beings and we do need interaction….and no, video skype calls don’t count…I’m talking about face to face human interaction. Even, if it’s just having one of your colleagues next to you listening to music in his earphones, at least you can have chat over a cup of tea every now and then.
As far as I’m concerned, if a company expects their employees to work from home, then they are going to have a few unhappy individuals on the payroll.
Tags: work.
Every once in awhile one comes across a project which turns out to be an absolute balls up…things take way longer than expected, everyone is shooting from the hip, no-one knows who’s really in charge, the main boss is domineering and never wants to delegate, basically in the words of the CIA agent (J.K. Simmons) in the movie Burn After Reading – “What a clusterfuck!”
So, here is my list of things which should to be done to get a project on the right track…most of them should have been taught in Project Management 101, but hey it seem that some people don’t know about them:
- When a project is started…please tell the project manager that he/she is actually the project manager.
- The project manager should ideally be involved in the project from the beginning and not just brought in when the shit hits the fan.
- Tell the project manager what the main priority for the project is. Is it time, features, quality, people, cost…and NO it can’t be more than one…NO!!
- Rank the features in the application according to priority, so that when push comes to shove, and it will, the PM knows what to concentrate on and what can be left to a later stage.
- Please try to tell the project manager what his responsibilities and what the project involves
- Don’t overrule the project managers decisions or undermine him…otherwise, you might as well hire a monkey from Primate Programming. Let the man do his job!!
- Have clear communication channels about who should make decisions…a project should be run like a tight ship with clarity about these things. We can’t have a monkey jumping on the band wagon every time they want to make a change or don’t agree with something.
- Listen to your technical staff about what they recommend and please take their advice on board…they do generally know what they are talking about – honest
- Never override a developer estimate and never force him to do it quicker than he originally said he could…this will result in bad and buggy code.
- If it could screw up, it will…oh yes it will, trust me!
- Don’t do testing in the evening and yes you do need to hire a tester…
- What constitutes project completion? What are the release criteria? And who will sign it off? Will that person be available to sign the project off, or will they be on holiday?
- Get a decent PM, decent designer, a decent programmer, a decent sys admin…you need these people, so just hire someone good and pay them what they want.
- Get a prototype out asap, so that you can prove the concept actually works
- Don’t skimp on infrastructure to save costs on IDEs, servers etc. This saving will bite you in the bum at a later stage
- And let us not forget…get the developers to use the source control in place…it’s there for a reason, so get them to use it damn it!
There are loads more points that could be added to this, but I think the post will become more of an essay then, so I’ve tried to include the most obvious ones. I have experienced most of these things and the question I keep asking is “What is this? Amateur hour?”. So, good luck to all the PM’s out there – Give it horns!
Thanks to Gareth and Drew for the banter – Nice one!
Tags: Projects, Tips, Tutorial.
Although there are loads more configuration options on Ubuntu compared to Windows, there are some things that just seem to take too much time to do. So, in order to make life easier I installed Ubuntu Tweak. It’s a great little application which allows you to pimp your ubuntu installation without having to follow long tutorials explaining how to edit configuration files etc.
Ubuntu Tweak is a tool for Ubuntu that makes it easy to configure your system and desktop settings.
Ubuntu Tweak allows a wide variety of customization and one is able to easily remove unneeded applications which just seem to fill up memory. It provides configuration for the following system sections: Applications, Startup, Desktop, System.
It’s maintained by a single developer who has a passion for open source software and he regularly releases updates for the application.
It’s really easy to install and one can install it using the following 3 methods:
- Download the actual source and then manually install with a batch script
ubuntu-tweak_0.4.3.orig.tar.gz
- Download the Debian installation file and just run it
ubuntu-tweak_0.4.3-1~intrepid1_all.deb
- Or, use apt-get in the command line. This is what I used and it installed quickly and without any problems
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak
For more information on Ubuntu Tweak checkout the site at ubuntu-tweak.com and for detailed installations go to the downloads page
Tags: Open Source, Software, Tutorial, Ubuntu.
I am always on the look out for new training routes to cycle and I recently came across the route finder on BikeRadar.com. Once one becomes a member of the site one is able to add new cycling routes which are then displayed publicly on the website. It seems to be a pretty popular as there are loads of good routes available, all of which have been added by avid cyclists…brilliant!
The search tool is easy to use and once you have entered a few keywords for a route, a list of possible results is displayed. I recently did a search for a ride from London to Windsor as this is what I got:
Once you click on one of the listed routes you get taken to a page which has a google map embedded in it with the route neatly mapped out. Here is a picture of the route:
Apart from being a great place to find new routes, BikeRadar is a great place to find out anything about cycling. The site has the latest cycling news, reviews, tips, training programs and loads more. It is just a great place for information about cycling and has been bookmarked in my delicious account.
Keep up the good work guys!
Tags: cycling, training, Web.
In one of my previous posts I compared the amount of calories in a pint of Guinness compared to an average lager.
Even though I have shown that Guinness is relatively low in calories compared to some other lagers and beers it is still pretty difficult to quantify exactly how this compares to normal food. So, I have decided to show the amount of calories in different types of bread compared to an equal portion of Guinness.
So this table displays calories for 100ml of Guinness compared to 100g of bread (according to http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/):
| Nutritional info |
Guinness |
Brown bread |
Granary bread |
White bread |
| Calories |
37 |
218 |
220 |
226 |
| Protein |
0.3 |
8.5 |
10.5 |
7 |
| Carbohydrate |
3.2 |
44.3 |
38 |
46 |
| Fat |
0.1 |
2 |
2.9 |
1.5 |
| Alcohol |
4.2 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
It is pretty clear that there are loads more calories in 100g of bread than in 100ml of Guinness. So, to all of those people who say that a pint of Guinness is equivalent to 7 slices of bread…Whatever…
Tags: diet, facts, health, interests.
Even though I am a huge Firefox fan, I am fully aware that the majority of internet users still use Internet Explorer. What makes this statistic even scarier is that about a third of these users are using IE6 or IE5.
Now as a web developer, I spend a lot of my time building user interfaces (UI) and if I am going to be taken seriously by anyone, my work has to look good in all browsers. So, this causes a number of headaches when trying to get a site looking good in IE6 because of its lack of support for certain CSS rules.
I have got two machines at the moment, one of which is running Ubuntu and the other has Windows Vista on it. While I was still on Windows XP I used to use multiple IE’s so that I could get my sites looking good in all the browsers. However multiple IE’s doesn’t work on Vista, so I have felt a bit stranded for the last few months and had to resort to virtual machines with Virtual Box.
There is however a new browser application called IETester which allows you to have multiple tabs open in different IE versions – just brilliant!! I use the IE Tab plugin for Firefoxwhich allows Firefox tabs to render like IE7, but with IETester one is able to view all the versions of IE, even IE8…which is pretty cool.
Although this is a pretty good scenario, it would be much better if everyone started using Firefox, but there is more chance of a global financial recession and a black American president…wait, those things have already happened, so maybe there is a chance
Tags: Browsers, css, Development, Firefox, Web.
With the onset of climate change, the credit crunch and the fear of concrete dwarfs I decided that in order to stay sane I should try out the latest version of Ubuntu as my operating system…hahahaha
Well, the actual reason was because we are closing down our office and selling the Fedora box that I have been developing on for almost 3 years now, so I needed a local development environment other than Windows.
I have found Ubuntu pretty sweet and I think that the latest release of Intrepid Ibex (8.10) has some great new updates and features, most notably improved support for dual monitors and wireless.
Anyway, this post isn’t really about Ubuntu, but more about VirtualBox, which is also free and open-source version of parallels. Woohooo – Nice one!! The process of setting it up was really simple and the only problem that I have got at the moment is trying to get sound working on my guest (Windows XP) machine.
The most important piece of advice that I could give to anyone wanting to do the same thing is that they should install the guest additions on the guest machine. In order to do so you need to mount the .iso image on a cd-rom in the Virtualbox control panel before starting it up. Then once the new virtual machine has started install the guest additions. This will allow better keyboard functionality, full screen and the use of USB and other hardware. There is a good tutorial for how to do this on seogadget.co.uk
As I mentioned previously I am just struggling with getting the sound working, so if anyone has any ideas here then please let me know
Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, Virtualbox.
