Plaxo pulse, blog integration is a bit dubious

I just noticed that plaxo now aggregates content from your blogs and displays it inside the plaxo system. At fav.or.it we operate in this space so we have some experience in what is considered good etiquette here. 

1) We automatically scan the blog feeds for creative commons licensing information,  and if the license is missing or specifically denies commercial use we publish an extract of the article and a link to the original blog posting. Plaxo does NOT do this at all. 

2) We never show advertising against a blog post, the rights to commercial exploitation of content rests with the site that originates the content, Plaxo is taking liberties with peoples copyright by showing Google ads that earn them revenue against each blog post, many folks rely on professional revenue from pro-blogging to provide an income. 

3) Plaxo invites comments on each post which it shows against the listing, but unlike fav.or.it, they don't post the comments back to the originating blog, Plaxo is basically fuelling thier engagement on other peoples content, without contributing anything back to the originator. 

Poor show plaxo, you should sort this out!!!!. 

Hacking the Aspire One

I recent acquired an Acer Aspire One, this little device is fantastic, but is severely limited by the default software it is delivered with. After spending an evening opening it up and dismantling it, in order to stick in a spare 1G ram module that I had knocking around, to take it to 1.5G,  I then spent a further evening loading it with the latest release of Ubuntu, and wiping out the linspire linux it arrives with by default. 

Software updates include hacking the VodaPhone linux 3G card driver to work with my "3" 3G usb modem, spending hours tinkering with the madwifi wifi driver until it was able to connect to the network at home and at work. and playing with compiz and the Intel 945 video drivers until i had the 3D effects working at full speed.  

The Aspire One is an incredible machine, fast, small and compact with very very good performance. Small enough to slip into the poachers pocket in my barbour jacket. 

But the best hack I did to this machine, the one that transformed the device from an interesting toy into a usable portable machine, was the simplest, cheapest and fastest to implement. 

Sticking two rubber "feet" strips salvaged from the bottom of an old hard drive enclosure onto the two mouse buttons on the trackpad, has transformed the machine, I can now accuratly contol the mouse and click and double click, without having to feel around for the right spot to press down on. 

The Aspire One weights in at about £220, and delivers near desktop performance in a small portable package, with good 3+ hour battery life. 

Spooks Code 9

Last night I watched the first two episodes of the new Spooks: Code 9 spin off series, and to be honest if this is the standard of british drama that we are to receive in the future then I am very saddened indeed. This series has felt more like the "K9 and friends" spin off from Dr Who, and should probably have been broadcast on CBBC instead of prime time on BBC3.  I realize that somebody probably has targets to meet on "youth programming", but this pile of £$%^ is not going to meet that demographic. 

This series has more in common with Hollyoaks and Big brother than the wonderful series we thrilled too for 6 seasons that bears its name.  As a long time spooks fan I was very very disappointed, and felt that the BBC should do all it can to disassociate this travesty from the quality brand that it had created with original series. 

Please BBC, rename this farce and do not cheapen the Brand you have spent so much on fostering in the main spooks series. 

The search for an agile, agile process

Agile is a great methodology, and applied right it can make your development process less like a black box, and more open to the stakeholders. It can do wonders for improving the reputation of your dev team with the rest of your org. 

However: 

There are a few things that make me nervous about the process, I have worked with it at Yahoo, and seen some the ways its original goals can become subverted. 

1. It can become the ultimate micromanagement tool, some aspects of agile are a PM's wet dream, being able to capture and track exactly the number of hours each team member spends on each each task in a sprint, gives the PM a unique view on progress etc. But it can also become very time driven, with team members feeling pressure to wrap up a task quickly to stay inside the timebox. It can make your team feel like a row of battery hens if not managed sensibly.  

I prefer not to assign tasks on a number of hours basis, rather on a complexity and resource basis, in reality the time element is only required to aid in the planning stage for sprint, to ensure they don't bite off more than they can chew.  Instead we will assign tasks to Tiny, Small, Medium, Large and Huge timeboxes. 

2. What is it with the obsession with statistics and graphs that most agile implementations seem to spawn?, if the process is consuming considerable time in itself producing statistics on a continuous basis, then it is not full-filling its aim. If we are spending more time on documenting the process and its progress than actually doing the work, then something is amiss, so for small teams with good internal communications, you should reduce the stats produced to the bare minimum. 

A good ticketing/issue tracker is an absolute essential, and if configured right should produce all the reports that are needed without the need to generate any by hand. 

Especially if the PM/SCRUMM master is themselves a productive team member producing work towards the sprint goals.

So i'm currently designing a bare bones, pared down, minimalist SCRUMM agile process for fav.or.it, one that hopefully wont hit the pain points listed above. 

I'll let you know how we get on......... 

Working on fav.or.it

Wow, all i can say is that I haven't had so much fun for years, despite the shock of having to do a two hour commute each way, working at fav.or.it is turning into one of the most interesting episodes of my life. 

Im actually writing real code again, and you would not believe how good that feels. The crew at fav.or.it are great, and seem to take challenges in their stride, that would have other teams I have worked with scratching their heads, their enthusiasm for what they are doing is infectious. And they are all defiantly "can do" folks.  Nick has a great vision of what and where he wants to go, and we are working flat out to get there. 

And the product is great, in the two weeks I have been there, I have been thrust into the middle of a transformation of the site, what is going to come out the other end in a few weeks will be a top notch enhancement to an already top product. 

I am lucky having just come into the company after everybody has worked so hard to get the initial beta product launched and running, I can now help to shape the next set of iterations of the design.  Already we are adding some very cool features that will give our competitors a run for their money. 

Fav.or.it is kind of unique, on the surface it looks like any other blog aggregation product, but scratch the surface and a whole load of good stuff bubbles up, in fact the biggest challenge we will have is educating people that just because the product looks like other sites, that it is not, fav.or.it's big secret is its a two way portal, it does not just gather-up content for you to read, but it allows you to interact with that content, and distributes your comments back to the originating sites.  No more jumping around using different blog commenting  systems to spread your opinions and observations, you can do it all from one place, and there is more, fav.or.it will track conversations you are having on a host of sites and present them all in one easy to use reader/commenter. 

I used to be an avid digg reader, but since coming to work on fav.or.it I have hardly been anywhere near digg. 

Anyway stay tuned and I will describe some of the cool stuff we are doing with semantic analysis over the next few weeks. 

Mashup 08

So here i am again at Alexandra Palace, at the BBC/Microsoft mashup 08 event, the 48 hour homage to all things techy and geeky. There is a certain sense of Deja Vue, having been here before at a simular event in 2007. However this time the flavor is different, the presentation a little more polished.

This year there are some fantastic hacks, Ewans "virtual round the world flight", using a marvellous lashup of Google earth, some gaming controls, twitter, and not one but two projectors, coupled with a brave attempt at airframe construction on a grand scale, gave us an intriguing project to marvel at. 

The guys from ARM, converted their table into a makeshift electronics workshop, and slaved away all night to create a standalone system for displaying location sensitive webpages.

Finaly I ran into an old friend Toby who I had not seen for some time.

Stay tuned and i will cover some more highlights from this event as it unfolds tomorrow. 

Talk on scalability, the cloud and virtual startups

I gave my talk at barcamp yesterday about scalability, startups and using the cloud to completely operate a new company, which seemed to go down well. Whilst running around networking, and having lots of fun meeting up with old and new friends, I also managed to put our new development and staging environment for bejant live (thank god the wifi got fixed :-) ). And later this week we will be shifting all the final pieces of the organisation into the cloud. So we are practising what we preach.

Barcamp's event page is on backnetwork keep checking back on there and I will make the slides available, I also understand that the presentations where being recorded, not sure if mine was, is so i will track down the podcast and get that up too.