What’s a blog for, if not to toot one’s own horn, or at least the horn of the company for whom he is a spokesmodel?
Tucows, where I’ve worked for four years and where I hold the title of Technical Evangelist, is on Canadian Business’ 2007 “Tech 100” List, their annual listing of Canada’s 100 largest publicly traded companies. We’re right by the median, ranked at number 49 on the “Performance” list.
I like to think that at least a little chunk of that was my doing.
Expect to see more maps embedded in blog entries shortly: Google Maps are now embeddable, YouTube-style. No longer do you need an API key or JavaScript know-how to add a Google Map to your blog entries and web pages — if you know how to embed a YouTube video, you also know how to embed a Google Map. Congratulations to Google on a job well done!
I decided to try it out by getting the code to embed a map showing the location of the Tucows head office, shown below:
At our end of iteration review, like all good agile shops, we go through what’s good, what could be done better, what still puzzles us and what we are going to do next time (but details on this are for another post). We also have The Exceptional Cow™.
Whoever has the cow is responsible for triaging all incoming exceptions for that iteration. At the end of each iteration The Exceptional Cow is ceremoniously passed to the next bovine herder. As the cow herder, you have the responsibility of examining all incoming exceptions and fixing it if it is a no brainer or writing it up as a bug for someone else to fix if you don’t have the time or if someone else has a much better grasp on the issue. Quite often all exceptions for the week are attacked in the final hours before we close off the iteration as we don’t want to start new functionality at that point.
Simply put, whoever currently possesses the cow is responsible for handling any bugs, whether it’s by fixing them or writing them up in a bug report. It’s rather reminiscent of the “talking stick” tradition among North American natives or the conch in Lord of the Flies.
It’s the most interesting and practical use for a Tucows Squishy Cow that I’ve seen yet.
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I suppose my playing the accordion is a development resulting directly from my dislike of being tied down behind keyboard stacks. That’s why, prior to my getting my first accordion, I was an aficionado of the uncoolest way to play keyboards: the keytar. I’ve rented a number and owned two. My first was the Yamaha SHS-10, pictured below:
The next keytar was the one pictured below, the Yamaha SHS-200. I’m on my second one of these:
These two keyboards were released in the late 1980’s and were among the first wave of synthesizers to come with a “demo button”. The first affordable “workstation” synths were appearing on the market around then — these were synths that had enough sounds for pop songs, from keyboards to strings and horns to guitars and drums — and many of them also had sequencers, which could record “perfomance data” (that is, the keys you pressed and also how you pressed them). Pressing the demo button would start up a built-in song that would demonstrate the sound and recording capabilities of the keyboard. In the case of the SHS-200, the demo song was an obviously Japanese jazz fusion number, while for the SHS-10, Yamaha had somehow managed to licence Last Christmas by George Michael’s old group, Wham! I recall that the Roland D-5 synth had a pretty good intro to its demo song — so good that the Happy Mondays sampled it as the intro to one of their numbers.
Although these demo songs were cheesy, they were still useful in the showroom, as they gave the synth shopper a decent idea of a given keyboard’s sonic capabilities. It’s been a dog’s age since I hung around a keyboard showroom checking out the latest models, but I’m pretty sure that many synths, especially the ones aimed at hobbyists and amateur musicians, still have demo buttons.
I found the html2wiki page by way of Reddit. It takes HTML that you type or paste in or HTML from an URL and converts it to wikitext, which you can then copy and paste into a wiki:
Click the screenshot to go to the html2wiki page.
When I thought about giving it a try, I thought “Well, I’d better go look around for some suitable HTML to try,” when I noticed the Use Sample HTML at the bottom of the form. I clicked that and a moment later, I had sample HTML as well as its conversion to wikitext.
There’s all sorts of research as well as personal experience that suggests that web users are an impatient sort. A lot of people might have navigated away and never seen html2wiki in action had it not been for that sample button. By providing that “demo button” at the bottom of the form, the creators of the page removed a small but not insignificant barrier to taking html2wiki for a test spin and provided a moment of satisfaction that users will remember.
It’s got me thinking about the software and services that I work on — are there places where a demo button would come in handy?
I’d be willing to bet big money that the owner of this car is a developer or some other high-tech type:
Over at the Tucows Developer Blog, I have yet another installment in my series of articles on developing Facebook Applications using their PHP 5 client library. In this article, I look at the FacebookRestClient class’ groups_getMembers method.
