Gold partner wall trophy
Originally uploaded by Simon Harriyott.


[Tags: eurotaxglass goldpartner]

...that I've even watched television!

At South by South West, Mena Trott from Six Apart was a panelist in a session I saw. It dawned on me that you never see Mena and Dawn French in the same room at the same time...

Met a few more interesting people, including Marc Canter at the free beer tent. I went off to the Google blogger, and met a few more people. The food was all gone when I got there, so I went for Mexican food, and sat with Holland Hofma Brown, one of the panelists I saw earlier.

I walked from the hotel this morning, which took just under an hour. I went to an interesting panel about what technology will be appearing in cars automobiles in the future. They were talking about wireless USB, which I hadn't heard of before. Something else to look into.

Oh, and I've just seen Mark Lamarr on the escalator.

There's been a lot of emphasis on side projects this week. Instead of using VC money and renting offices, buying furniture, hiring lots of staff and supplying free drinks, just start with a small web app and release it slowly, and see what happens.

I've had a website idea brewing for a while, and done some experiments, so I'm more positive about pressing on with it. I got a chance to speak to Robert Scoble today, and he would find the thing useful (if I wrote it), which is further encouragement to spend my spare time hunched over a keyboard.

I'm just going to get this all down before I go and see Craig and his list...

Yesterday in the free beer queue, I met Wright Sullivan, who runs a factory automation company in South Carolina. He was as surprised as I was to meet someone at SxSW who knew what a PLC was. He uses all the major SCADA packages, and uses FactoryLink for doing fuel systems for the navy. (Wright, if you read this, Mike's OPC site that I was telling you about is at opcconnect.com). We hung out for the evening, and went to the web awards (which weren't really my thing), and a couple of parties. Loads of free food and drinks. I asked for a glass of red wine at a bar, and was given a small bottle. No glass. So, I drank red wine from the bottle. I got another free book at the blogads party.

I wore my gaping void t-shirt yesterday, and Kathy Sierra stopped me as she recognised it - it had the same quote on it that she used in her session yesterday. (I mention this to make Hugh proud.)

Dave Seah sat next to me in one of the seminars this morning. I'd heard of him before, as I read one of his blog post about how he's often mistaken for Dave Shea. He said he'd prefer to be known for something he is, rather than someone he's not, which is fair enough.

Anyway, I'm having an amazing time, so thanks very much to Lee, Ian, Amy and Geek Dinner London for getting me here.

[tags: sxsw gapingshirt]

It's like the first week at uni being here. Everyone is really friendly, there's loads of parties, and I get to chat to people for hours at a time. It's just brilliant. I've met loads and loads of people. I went to two parties last night: the first was the Austin on Rails party, at which I met Scott Becker, who, like me, writes in C#, is a drummer, guitarist and singer, and is a little bit deaf too. He doesn't look like me though. We chatted about the problems of using Rails in a Microsoft shop, given that Rails doesn't work with IIS reliably yet, and guessed that it might we do before too long.

I went to the frog design party, which was really noisy, but I had a good chat with David Olimpio. I hadn't eaten, so I went off to find somewhere to eat, and came across "Tony's Southern Comfort Restaurant", which was completely empty, apart from a jazz / blues band. I ordered what I thought was a traditional Texan meal: catfish, fried okra and corn bread, and it was delicious. The band (led by Tim Curry) were really good, and unlike anything I've ever seen live before. I chatted with them during the interval, and they gave me three CDs (more free stuff!). It was a really mellow time.

This morning, while I was waiting for my cab, a lady called Julie saw my pass and asked to share a ride. She's a programme manager, currently working for BT, and she has to manage hardware people, programmers in Surrey and India, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I'm always impressed with people who can do that sort of thing, as I find it really hard.

Every time I mention George Bush, it induces a violent mood swing in the person I'm talking to, followed by profanities, and lots of frowning. One (otherwise bright) American I spoke to didn't know that the UK comprised England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, instead assuming that Wales was part of England (no comments from Welshmen please).

[tags: sxsw timcurry ]

So, I've been to some great panels. Yesterday I went to Jeremy Keith and Aaron Gustafson's DOM scripting session. DOM scripting, it turns out, is like DHTML, only done responsibly. Instead of using document.write() or innerHTML to add any old tags regardless of context, the DOM is used to find to correct node (as in HTML tag), and modify the attributes or text, or create new nodes underneath it.

True to form, I ended up with a free copy of Jeremy's book, DOM Scripting; it looks really good. The first chapter explains for loops, while loops and if statements, so obviously it's aimed at non-coding web-designers, but I'm a non-designer web-coder, so I understand the basic JavaScript. Later on in the book (this is a quick skim), there are explanations of how to use the DOM responsibly, so browsers with JavaScript disabled can still see the content, and the JavaScript is separate from the markup. There's also some good examples of how to do common things, like making stripy tables. Anyway, a really good panel.

I then saw Kathy Sierra's session on creating passionate users. I've been reading her excellent blog for a few months now, so I had heard some of the content before. Despite this, there was plenty of new stuff, and it's the sort of thing that needs to be heard several times. It was also good to put a face to the name.

Today. I started at a panel about decisions when starting a web company, which was really interesting. Interestingly, four of the panel had been approached by Google to sell their company to them. One said yes, and three said no. Evan Williams, who started Blogger (which I am using right now) was the yes, and it was the first company Google bought. Joel Spolsky said that Google now use acquisitions as a recruitment process to employ people who can clearly deliver products. I first heard about daily build machines from one of Joel's articles a couple of years ago, so it was good to actually meet him and say thanks. While I think of it, I've submitted a session proposal for DDDIII about setting up a build machine. Maybe someone will actually vote for it.

I've just left a panel about the future of small devices, which was really interesting, as it's an area I'm not involved in. There were some interesting suggestions, and an admission that improving battery life and standardising recharger interfaces is not high priority in the industry right now.

[tags: sxsw domscripting ddd blogger]

Well, I've found free internet access. My ticket included a press pass, so I get to use the press room, and the MacBook Pro laptops within. I've not used a Mac before, so I now know what all the fuss is about. They're great. Anyway, I don't have to pay for internet access at Kinko anymore. Paying for internet access certainly made my typing faster.

[tags: sxsw macbookpro]

There wasn't much on in the day yesterday; I went to a couple of the "screen burn" sessions, which were about gaming - a subject I studiously avoid, due to my addictive personality. As I know very little about it, I learned loads. The first session was about "red vs. blue", a series of machinema videos. Machinema is basically making films by recording action in games. Very clever, and extremely interesting.

The second session was about "lag" in online gaming, and a guy who started a company and got funding for researching and (hopefully) fixing the problems that cause lag. Lag is the thing that makes the characters jump about randomly, and other annoying things like that.

After that I met Jason Whitmore, who works for Apple, is a freelance photographer, and books bands for a new club in Austin. I hung out with him for a while, and we went to a party in a bar with free beer and food. I met up with Christopher Pollard, who I sat with on the plane. I met Erik Haugo at the party, and spent a couple of hours with him discussing tagging, the future of computers, and all manner of other stuff, before heading to Stubbs to the BlogHer party.

We met Kaliya Hamlin, who is working with inames. i-names seems to be like Microsoft passport, only better, and open-source. I'll check it out more when I get back.

Erik left about midnight, and I stayed to watch a really cool band who were playing downstairs.

This morning I went to a couple of panels - the first one was about how traditional media (newspapers, print etc.) and design is affected by the web. The questions from the floor were the longest I've ever heard. They were more like proposing a theory for a couple of minutes, and then asking a brief question about it. I think a couple of them would have preferred to be panelists themselves.

The second one was brilliant. It was about web design superheroes, and was presented by two Brits - Andy Clarke and Andy Budd, whose book I won recently. They had the best presentation slides I've ever seen - with cartoon superheroes on them.

[tags: sxsw]

As I'm here for free, and there's a couple of people who've asked me to, I'm going to blog as much as I can about South by South West.

The travelling was hard work. The first flight (Gatwick to Atlanta) was fine. I had to wait 6 hours in Atlanta, which I was dreading, as I thought it was underwater. It wasn't, so I guess they've drained it. It was only supposed to be a 5 hour wait, but we had to let Air Force One jump the queue. I got to see it take off from my seat, which was vaguely interesting. It's just like a normal plane, but with the stars and stripes on the tail. They've done a good job rebuilding it since it was shot down in 24.

I've broken some personal bests. In one day, I've been the furthest north, the furthest south, and the furthest from home that I've ever been.

There hasn't been much going on yet today. I've registered, and received a nice canvas bag full of flyers and magazines and stuff. I've used several of the Hilton's facilities, which is great, as I'm not even staying there. I'm staying in the "Best Value" on Interstate 35, which is good on value, but not so good on best. Still, it's all I need - bed (2 in fact - I might sleep in the other one tonight), TV (57 channels and nothing on), and breakfast.

America is such a foreign country. Nobody understands my accent first time, so I'm putting on an American accent to make myself understood: "water" becomes "warder", "coffee" becomes "cwaffee" etc. Everything is similar but slightly different. This keyboard has the @ where the " should be. I've had to ask how much to tip the taxi cab driver, and I'm going to have to ask about crossing the road.

Anyway, more to follow when I've actually been to something...

[tags: sxsw]

Here's another of those useful-but-dangerous features that I stumble across from time to time. It is possible to disable a warning for a chunk of code, thus:

public bool UsedExternallyOnly = true;

would generate a warning:

warning CS0219: The variable 'UsedExternallyOnly' is assigned but its value is never used

There might be really good reasons for not fixing this warning, like it's only ever going to be used externally, such as in a derived class in a different assembly. Rather than pestering everyone by showing the warning everytime, or hiding valid warnings by switching them off for the project, the one offending line of code can be ignored for this warning:

#pragma warning disable 219
public bool UsedExternallyOnly = true;
#pragma warning restore 219

Marvellous.

Which is precisely why he's leaving. Poor Rupert has been trying to spend more time with the rest of the .NET team doing cool stuff, but he keeps getting dragged off to fix the old SCLABE* system.

Any time a tweak is required, Rupert's manager gets Rupert to do it, because he's been here the longest, knows it the most, and can fix it the quickest. And he knows exactly why an extra column is added on alternate weekends - a previous customer was having problems with their invoicing, so this was introduced to get round it.

But now Rupert's off, all his manager can think to do is get him to document what he knows about SCLABE. The thing is, Rupert's motivation percentage is equal to the number of days left at the company; today there are 17 days left, so he is 17% motivated. So Rupert adds a table of contents to the document, changes the headers and footers, tweaks "Heading 2" so it has 6pt spacing before and 12pt afterwards. He writes about the objectives of the system, describes the main areas of the system as an overview, and spends the rest of the day trying to get Visio to draw something resembling a diagram of the system.

In other words, he's wasting everyone's time.

To be fair, he's asked what he needs to write, and the answer was "enough for someone else to take over from you". Well, to take over, they need to know what the thing does, right? But that doesn't really help the next guy (who had better not be me) when the next tweak is required. There isn't any documentation that will help. There can't possibly be. Why? Because it isn't Rupert's knowledge that needs to be passed on, it's his experience. And that can't be passed on in a document. I can read a document telling me how to do a backside footplant wallride, but that doesn't mean I understand it, let alone have any success with it.

So what to do? For Rupert's boss, not a lot, except learn for next time. Rupert's experience needs to be passed on, which can only be achieved by showing someone. Although I've never been a manager, if I was stuck managing SCLABE, I would find a volunteer or two (willing or otherwise) to learn from Rupert. When a tweak is required, the volunteer, let's call her Ingrid, would sit at the keyboard, with Rupert next to her. Rupert would tell her how to navigate through the code, what to look for, how to implement the change, how to test it, where to deploy it to, and everything else, without actually doing it himself. Rupert would answer questions, and sometimes withhold information to make sure Ingrid thought about what she was doing. She would either work it out, or have to ask the right questions.

In this way, Ingrid would actually experience the system, and start to understand it. After a few of these sessions, she may be able to fix some things by herself. This would free up Rupert to get on with the cool AJAX stuff. If Rupert spent time with others in the team, then it would seem fair, and people could take turns. If Rupert left, then SCLABE fixes wouldn't be a major trauma, as someone else could do it. Rupert would be less likely to leave anyway, as he's now a confident, successful mentor, and even has time to write some Ruby on skis.


* SCLABE is a fictional legacy system written in COBOL on an AS/400. Rupert is a fictional developer, whose resemblance to anyone you know is the whole point of this exercise.

I won a copy of CSS Mastery from Andy Budd's website a couple of weeks ago, and it is excellent. It's practical and useful, in that it shows the reader how to write the most common layouts; 2-column, 3-column, fixed, liquid, elastic etc. As well showing how to do things, it also explains why things have to be done a certain way, such as differences in box models, different browser versions and so on.

I tried out one of the layouts, and it took about 15 minutes, and just worked. I understood exactly what was going on, and knew why I had to do some of the stranger things.

It seems that CSS is like chess. Before reading this book, I knew the rules, what the pieces were and how they moved. After reading the book, I feel like I know how to use the pieces together, some standard openings, and how to actually win at it. Fantastic.

There's a free sample chapter on the book's website, so you can see for yourself.

I'm going to SXSW in Texas next week, and I'd really like to take a laptop with me. Only I don't own one. If anyone would like to lend me one (preferably with wireless connectivity), please let me know: simon [at] harriyott [dot] com. Cheers.