I've been having an email conversation today with my project manager, and I asked her what the term "commercial awareness" meant to her. Her reply was so good, I'm putting it here:

it's about knowing your market & your customers and what they want and need & how they work. Knowing what your competitors are up to. Mainly so that you can make the connection between what we could build and what we should build. There's also the time element - striking a balance between doing it quick enough to keep customers happy, but not so quick the quality is rubbish and the product either unusable or unsupportable or so slowly that no one is prepared to wait for it. It's knowing what corners can be cut without compromising the end deliverable or the strategy. Understanding how a few man days of effort translates into more man days of test, rollout, marketing, training, support....etc and consequently cost, all of which have to be recovered with a price tag. Understanding what is driving the business - what strategy we have to reach our revenue and profit growth targets and how that translates into the work you do each day.

A lot of that comes with experience, but if you just keep your head down and code, most of it can pass you by. You need to keep in touch with what's going on, and take all the opportunities you can to attend meetings, read trade press, understand what's happening on the business side of the fence - without of course impacting your ability to do what you've been tasked with! A lot of developers are happy to and in fact only want to code - head down with ear phones on is a utopian state for many :) which is absolutely fine if that's what you want. If you want more from your career I think you need to lift your head up regularly and find out what's going on.

Something about the word "agent", when applied to a person, is usually construed as negative. Estate, insurance, recruitment; they've all got a generic bad name. I have found a good recruitment agent, however.

I can't remember when I first spoke to Andy from Siptus, but I think he must have seen my CV on a job website and phoned me. Like most agencies, he asked what I did, what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to work. Unlike most agencies, he didn't suggest jobs that were inappropriate, or too far away, and I think he found only one that he was willing to suggest to me. He was really helpful when I had questions about the interview, personality profile, aptitude test, second interview...

I got the job.

Andy phoned me today, nearly two months after I started the new job, just to see how I was doing and to wish me a merry Christmas. He didn't have another job to put me forward for, and wasn't asking if I knew anyone that might be interested in a QNX job in Wakefield or anything.

He'd also phoned my new boss to see how I was doing, and to wish him a merry Christmas. I had a chat with my new boss a couple of weeks after I started here, and he told me that Andy had sent him only three CVs for the job. Most agencies mail-bomb him with what seems like every CV with the word "software" on it.

Andy hasn't asked me to write any of this, and as far as I'm aware, he doesn't know I have a weblog. I want to recommend him to you as a refreshing change from ordinary agencies.

Now that a couple of people seem to be reading my weblog, I feel that I should get better at it. I like words, and I enjoy writing, but I haven't got the patience to write a book, so a weblog suits me fine.

My first post was about grammar, and how business documents can be written badly. I'm currently writing a design document, which will be read by the development team and our bosses. I'm keen to avoid looking foolish by including basic English errors, but also the content needs to be accurate and relevant. Good writing, like anything, takes practice; I need to practise (I've just had to check which [practice/practise] to use), so a weblog suits me fine.

Today was so much fun. I fiddled around creating a sliding sidebar using JavaScript. It is most satisfying. To the right of the sidebar, a button-so-tall-and-thin-that-it-looks-like-a-slider uses setTimeout() to call a function that decrements the CSS width property of the <div>, which then calls setTimeout() again (and again...), until only the slider is visible. Another does the reverse, until the sidebar is its original width again. And I got it to work in Netscape.

Found a use for the Adrotator control in .NET. I haven't had to sort out ads on a site before (other than the Google AdWords), so I've never paid any attention to the control.

I was getting a little bored of the peacock picture, which was on the right of the main page, and I wanted to put some more pictures that Julia and I have taken on the site. I was going to write some sort of image rotator, but fortunately the word "rotator" grabbed me enough to realise that I should at least see if the Adrotator would do it.

It did. Just put the control on the page, upload the images, and create an XML file to hold the image location details, and that's enough. No coding at all. That's the best sort of coding.

There's been a few new Google things recently, with the desktop search, and Froogle now in the UK. I quite like the frugal pun, and I reckon there are some more specialist applications they can go for:

• A magic roundabout search
• A brass instrument mp3 player
  
• A cricket news site

OK, so I'm not funny.

I like it and everything, and it's going to make life easier, but it's such a shame about the editor. I've been using the Google translation tool to generate some strings in French, and I was hoping to paste them into the resource editor. The strings get pasted into the resource ID column, even if the text is selected in the string column. Fortunately the resource file is XML, so it can be done "manually".

Today I broke my previous personal best. It's quite an achievement, as the current personal best is long standing, and I broke it by a considerable margin. I'd like to thank all the people who made it possible, and helped me to achieve this. Hopefully with the support of people around me, it won't be too long before I exceed my best again.

I should say how much I attained: 4.75 hours. Quite impressive. I think I'll aim for a nice round 5 next time. 5 hours in meetings in a single day. Yes, I'm sure I can do it.

We've finally got it working. It's based on something I eventually found on the web, and a little trickery to get it to work on Netscape / Firefox. There's so much stuff about 2- and 3-column layouts, but so little about rows. If I get time, I might even write a proper article about it and submit it somewhere useful.

For the first time ever, I'm running two monitors from my work PC. I've been testing CSS on four different browsers, and alt-tab was becoming really annoying. I'm writing the stuff on the left, and testing on the right. Lovely.

Have spent far too many hours this week trying to get IE6 to allow a <div> tag to scroll nicely. It worked in an HTML page written by hand, but not in the equivalent generated by a .NET 2005 aspx. The difference was all in the very first line:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

Took this out of the aspx and it worked fine. Doesn't work in Firefox or Netscape though.