I previously attended DDD Scotland in 2009 and 2010, but didn’t this year for some reason I don’t remember. I think it and the 2008 one clashed with Gennas craft fairs or something.

Session 1 – Data Mining the Social Web

@GaryShort

An old version of the slideshow exists here (he uses the Build conference in his current one and this has his old contact info at previous job on it)

Interesting talk about how you can data mine info from social networks. He used twitter as his example as the code for that is comparatively simple to implement (didn’t get to showing code and can’t see online). There are existing tools which do some of the things he was mentioning but he was custom building a lot more.

Some ways this could be useful are launching a product and seeing what the reaction is, if there is suddenly a lot of talk of your new product either it’s so amazing and life changing that everyone is keen to market for you. Or something you did in the launch has went wrong and it is broken/buggy. With the tools you could also (to some extent) track where people are when they mention you, so launch a new product and it is going down a storm in English speaking areas but your German translation is terrible etc. Some tools I already knew about can tell what way to structure your tweets (where to position links) and at what times people retweet or respond to them etc – essential to know when to maximise response for campaigns etc.

Session 2 – Philosophy of Unix Code

Craig Nicol

Mind Map of Philosophy of Code

The list of quotes is on Gary Park on DunDDD

Session wasn’t as advertised. Basically a slideshow of quotes, most of which I was already familiar with but when pulled together show a coherent philosophy for writing code. It essentially boiled down to write good code that is needed, when it is needed that is well tested and documented.

Session 3 – The Happy Developer – Is it a myth?

Andy Gibson

Explored ideas about what makes your job or work environment enjoyable or not. Lots of crowd interaction etc. Too long to fit in an hour and would have liked to have seen a longer version. Session was amusing for the peanut gallery in the back. One manager who came along made a series of contradictory statements in an attempt to nitpick almost every slide. For example complaining he paid for people to spend 30 man years on a terrible unfinished product that no one wanted then 5 minutes later that developers asking for specifications and testers were just whining.

Someone suggested that an essential to do your job is a comfy chair, nonsense he proclaims, I lie in bed and code and someone I know sits on a sofa in a coffee shop so doesn’t need a desk. Missing the point that the general was a comfortable place to be whilst spending 8 hours at a PC and that for that developer the specific was a chair, but for the guy at the back it was a bed etc.

The main case study/anecdote at the start of the presentation was Craig Murphy who was told to do a task and it would take 2-3 weeks. He looked at the task and said no – 2-3 months. With the feature creep that this project managed then allowed, 2 years later the project was still not finished. (paraphrasing, can’t remember exact details).

Apologies to Barry Carr for mistakenly saying it was him. I was wrong on the interwebs.

Session 4 – The real time web is shocking!

Presented by Phil Leggetter, a developer evangelist at Pusher a company making technology for the real time web.

It had interesting code examples showing how you can update your website using real time information. Not sure how useful this is right now but it’s good to know this is possible using html5 magic. The shopping example on his site was really interesting and might have potential. Really looks to be at a prototype stage right now though, especially with it relying on html5 which we probably can’t move anything to be using yet. The demo used Websockets which he said there are .Net CLR/Silverlight libraries available for so it might be interesting to play around with them at some point.

Session 5 – Jedi Mind Control 101, the art of ethical persuasion

@RobLally

This was probably the most useful of the sessions. Guide to how to persuade people to your point of view. I found it amusing and informative throughout. Some of the notes I took down (unfortunately the slideshow isn’t available online):

It’s hard to change people’s mind, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are wrong, hard to change mind of experiences people

When making an argument present new information early.

When making an argument present weaknesses in your argument early

Establish your expertise, or lack of, early

Ask for higher value items first when there are multiple acceptable widgets you want

Don’t diminish your efforts, when someone asks for a favour never say

All part of the job

No problem

It was nothing

It was easy

But instead make it clear you did a favour for them without rubbing their nose in it you owe me now buddy is also a terrible response.

Although all his content was based on reading about psychology and various studies/papers his personal belief was that teams really gel when people stop keeping track of favours.

During this session I made a comment and was amused to get a round of applause. There were loads of references to Star Wars throughout. One of the slides showed Yoda and Rob said something along the lines of Is this guy credible? He is a rag wearing troll who lives in a swamp and rambles incoherently? Anyone disagree with this? and I pointed out that the header should say Credible Yoda is not instead of Yoda is not credible.

So having got applause from a room full of nerds for making an obvious joke about Star Wars, a film aimed at 8 year old boys, I declare myself king of nerd comedy.

Some other write-ups

Craig Nicol on DunDDD

Chris Hillman on DunDDD

Gary Park on DunDDD

Craig Murphy has also published some pictures from the event where I appear about 5 times.

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He claims that his vanity site not appearing high in the rankings is censoring free speech. Of course his site still exists, so his free speech is not being censored. At all.

Google have previously removed BMW’s website from the listings temporarily for when they breached Terms of Service, and after buying a company also removed it from listings when it was apparant their SEO efforts were also not squeeky clean.

A couple of SEO blogs have detailed the kerfuffle as well as other commentators. They point out some reasons why Google might have lowered the sites credibility, mainly because his site is crap and has lots of duplicate content in it.

One of the interesting comments though is related to how the site deals with invalid URLs.

If you take the url http://www.briansouter.com/brian-souter-news/business-leader-accuses-google-n10150-s11.aspx

The important parts are : http://www.briansouter.com/brian-souter-news/articles.aspxbusiness-leader-accuses-google-n10150-s11.aspx.

It appears that you can change the non-bolded part and it redirects to the article. This could certainly be used for making much mischief.

Brian is rubbish at the internet.

Of course given, his well publicised views on homosexuality and his support for privatisating transport systems and support for the SNP that is 3 easy ways for people to mess with his site.

Brian Souter Buys Policy Change on Nationalisation With Boyfriend Alex Salmond to combine all three angles in one clearly not-serious story.

Of course the real reason the site will have been dropped from the search engines is probably because most of the content is duplicated from elsewhere on the internet. To Googles algorithm, his site isn’t the No1 important site about Brian, but no different to any other content scraper that duplicates articles from other sites. So it rightly bins it.

Of course being able to link to any article on the site with your own made up phrases mean that as well as duplicating keywords elsewhere, the site duplicates content on it’s own site.

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3

So the developer thinks he’s dead clever by allowing any keywords to be stuffed into the page. What actually happens though is googles bot looks at these links and goes briansouter.com has three copies of the same article up under different addresses, flag as spam low quality site

Edit: it appears they have fixed the website to not allow you to randomly change the seo path to be whatever you want it to be.

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Note: I fully expect to edit this for errors and clarifications when other former employees see this, especially as I can’t remember what each of the 20 function keys did so am making up the specific ones for illustration.

I started work in Virgin Megastore in Dundee in December 2001 and left in 2005. During this time I was at university so started off doing weekend work, more shifts during summer etc before being a supervisor (and the manager on duty Friday 4-6, Saturday 4-7, Sunday all day). I think one of the reasons I was initially kept on (apart from being brilliant, obviously) was I was able to pick up their bizarre computer system so quickly.

The core stock management system they used in stores was called ELVIS (EPoS Linked Virgin Information System) and used dumb terminals throughout the store. The other systems at the time I worked there were the intranet – a PC which had a mouse!, a Ticketmaster terminal and machine used to close and open the store for the day and return sales data at night.

Elvis had terminals at each till counter and in various parts of the back of the shop including the stockroom. It was used to check inventory or whether an item actually existed for customers and rough stock levels – sales were adjusted overnight although I believe it started using real time polling sometime after I left. In the back office it was used to adjust stock, add on deliveries and so on.

I did a variety of jobs in the store, from till duty, restocking, stock management, cash office, returns, customer orders and so on so can see how the system worked from a number of different angles.

The Basics

Your first interaction with the system was probably on the tills. You’ve just been taken on at Christmas thinking yay, some money and CV fodder little realising the sheer hell of the two weeks either side of Christmas in a busy retail store. You’ve had your till training and are confident that you can take a cheque, swipe a credit card with a broken magnetic strip and spot a dodgy tenner. With your encyclopaedic knowledge of real music (stuff you got into in the last year minus anything which later charted) as oppose to the drivel in the charts you’re pretty confident that you can help anyone with their queries.

Someone approaches the till and instead of having a pile of swag in their hand they ask you about the new single by FooBar and when it will be out. (In reality of course they will ask have you got that album by that band, that song by the guy and the girl – you know the one or the VHS of that film which comes out at the cinema next week, but we may return to crazy customers later.)

So someone else has logged in to the account limited to permissions that are safe on the shop floor and you move over to the terminal. So I don’t want to see what’s playing on the shitty in-house radio station I’ll go to the stock inventory search bitty using a function key (F4?). Good, now I can filter by categories, 200 is singles. If I’ve used the system for a while I might know that the band FooBar are in category 216 post industrial grunge funk unless some philistine at head office has added it under industrial grunge funk – 217 instead of course.

So you search for FooBar and you are sent to the index in the entire category starting at FooBar. You weave your way down the entire list of 12 singles on the page in alphabetical order. At this goes up to G and it’s a song starting at H you need.

So you page down by pressing either Page Down or a different function key – F6. You know this because at the bottom it says F1 is back up a level, F4 does something else and F6 is page down with F7 being Page Up. Notice the other ones missing. So you go to the second page and there it is in the second six. You press F9 to see more info and this refreshes the screen with 2 lines about each single instead of one. But you are on the first half of the page. You press F6 to page down and you see a new page with singles starting at S by that band. What was that did you press page down twice? best page up and find it. Ah there it is. You just found your first bug. Page Down always skipped page 3 when zoomed in.

I noticed this bug in 2001 about 5minutes after using the system. It was still there in about 2008 – the last time I asked someone in store to check for me.

You select the singles row using the up/down keys and press F12 to see more info about it. Name, label, release date, price, cat number (on side of case, maybe, alpha/numerals), quantity in stock, grade and SKU (virgins 6 digit numeric code). When I started the SKU for new items was about 800,000. I was really interested to see what happened when they hit 999,999. Well they did a clean up removing loads of old Laserdiscs, Super Nintendo games, cassette singles and so on which were still on the system. Any new items started from the earliest available free code.

Seriously in 2001 they still had SKUs for D&D figures and master system games on the system, in case anyone you know, wanted to order one.

From an items screen you could also, using function keys, see the order history of it, including current orders, future entry into sales or offers (and could advise people, don’t buy this DVD for £19.99, it’s going in the 3 for £18 tomorrow, sometimes they would take the advice…).

So it says 1 in stock in the new singles bit and you wander along to find it, sometimes with the customer following like a puppy dog, sometimes waiting at the till for your return. You then get it from the place in the rack, unless it’s been stolen, or someone has moved it in a different slot, or into the albums, or it’s sold.

Hold up.

Yep, you could have 1 in stock at 9am, open the store and sell it at 9:01. All day long the system still said 1 in stock.

This was actually useful if you were trusted to do the manual checks of daily sales, popular stock etc, but for dealing with customer enquiries it was a right pain. Every day you would get a print out of everything in the shop which had sold. You sold 1 copy of an old Beatles album so go check the correct amount are in the store and if there is 1 in the stockroom and none on the shelf go check it has the correct price (it may have lain there a year) and put it out for sale.

Old Stock Adjustment

After Christmas Virgin in their great wisdom decided to keep me on as a part-time employee. In January or so I had some free time from uni and there was some overtime available through the week. I turn up and I’m being introduced to our stock adjustment system.

VHS is dying, we still have a whole wall of it – 8 metres or so as well as several metre racks for different genres and only 4 metres of racking of DVD but it’s pretty obvious where the trend is heading. VHS take up twice the space of DVD per item and our stock room post-Christmas is creaking at the seams. There are about 80 boxes of VHS in there which is old and Deleted, 20 VHS to a box makes 1600 VHS. That’s money paid to suppliers for dead stock which is stopping us fill up the back room with lovely pretty new things. This is the task that really let me get to grips with the ELVIS system and Virgins product categorisation strategy.

Each item had a grade, 1 was Chart, 2 and 3 were popular sellers. 4-17 were various grades of obscurity and the smaller stores might only stock up to grade 10 stock sending their bizarre shit to the bigger stores who had more space and more chance of selling that concept album by that band only wanted by collectors and so on. 18 was new release and 19 and 20 were deleted. These were the stock which was impossible to order from the makers of the items, that 10 year old follow up album by a shitty 1 hit wonder who got dropped by their label shortly after and whos singer works in the Fast Food Emporium next door – that’s a grade 20. Grade 20 was also pretty awesome cos it was where you would find such wonderful stuff and amazing prices – Luniz 12″ album for £3.99 and A Man Called E by E from the Eels for 99p were two such gems. The E album was also the last copy of it in the entire Virgin chain and it had been gathering dust in the stock room for who knows how long.

Generally anything in stock which was grade 10 or better had at least 1 copy on the floor, unless it was like a Beatles album or the like and you would probably put that out too. When Biffy Clyro played an instore gig I trawled the stock room for early singles which were now grade 20 and put them out – selling out of loads of old stock which would never have ever sold under normal circumstances.

So anyway, getting back to the task – I had to go through all these old crap grade 20 VHS, check they were on the system so we could sort them to go in the next VHS sale at 99p each. Should they all go that nets the store an easy grand and a half for dead stock.

So I had to go through each item in each box with a big print out of all the stuff we expected to be there. When you had a video you could find it in the system by title, Cat Number, barcode or SKU. Sometimes the cat number didn’t match. Sometimes the cat number of the box said X137 and it was in the system as X00137 etc. Warner Brothers DVDs were amazing they said Z1642 and what that meant was it was really D0642. Little things like that you picked up in the stock room quite quickly.

Sometimes the item had 0 quantity in the system. That’s weird, you have it in your hand, probably someone couldn’t find it before and had adjusted it down by 1. Then you check the back and it has a sticker over the barcode 0123 4568 – 1.99 sale. So you check the system and it says there are 100 of them in stock for that barcode. Great, someone previously made a store specific barcode as a dumping ground for old shit and didn’t reallocate things off. Probably because it hadn’t sold at 1.99 so why waste money on such a useless task. So I then got a list of all these generic sale barcodes and noted how many VHS were already moved to them as I went.

Once I got through the whole box we then adjusted loads of the stock onto these generic codes and made the adjustments for all the discrepancies. This was a logon with a higher elevation than the store front one, say DUNDEE_BACKOFFICE or whatever. This system also shows the price the item was bought for so you could see that the VHS selling for 99p was originally bought for £10.99. This was revealing towards the end of 2004 you would see chart album bought for £10.29 selling for £13.99. You’d grab a paper at lunctime and see Tesco selling it for £9.99.

In this higher permissions account you would also see some of those missing functions from the shop front. As well as that access to other areas of the system which used different keys. F12 as more info on all the screens and F1 as back – that’s crazy talk. Lets allocate function keys to different functions on different screen and keep those damn till monkeys on their toes.

The night before the sale arrived and the stock was put out. I went in the next day and it was all in strict alphabetical order (genrefication of stock happened and was undone all the time, I actually think it was one of the causes of Zavvis failure, having a Film A-Z instead of Sci-Fi, Horror, Anime, Kids etc). This was especially amusing as there were 4 copies of some gay porn VHS flanked either side on the bottom shelf by kids movies. One copy was still there the last time I saw back-stock of VHS in the storeroom.

Stockroom

I was later trained to work in the stockroom. I got my own logon for the system with even higher permissions and the username DUNDEE_AG. Brilliant I get set up and go to enter my password “PASSWORD” – Error. Oh it’s because I used the same character twice. Your password then went through rotations every 28-30 days and you couldn’t choose any of the last 9. This inevitably led to you thinking up some seven letter word and appending a number to it cycling through them all.

Now I had my till log on (2 digits, 42 obviously) and my 4 digit password to remember. The password and account for front of store and my own log on and account. Later I would also have the ticketmaster info, safe combination and the alarm code to remember too. As well as all my online stuff and uni passwords etc which was great fun. Especially when you went to work hungover. (not that I ever did of course as that would have meant drinking on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night which just so happened to be when all the rock nights and gigs were on in Dundee.)

In the stockroom you had barcode scanners. You would get a parcel or packet in and find it’s order number. Bring it up on the system, check the invoice and each item. If it was all correct you would enter the correct quantities next to the order details on the system and save it. If there was an item missing you would fill our a form to send back to the supplier. If there was a wrong item – they send 2 copies of 1 item instead of 1 of a different one you would mark up that mistake so that the item was still outstanding. Depending on the item and it’s likelihood of selling you might keep it or send it back. If they sent an extra item then you adjusted that on and robbed some small supplier whilst making pure profit for Richard oppose unionisation whilst giving a million pound to the Labour Party Branson, mwaahahaha, mwaaahah mhhahahahaa! etc.

Customer orders also came in and you had to faff around and find the paperwork and then phone or write to the person letting them know that the order had arrived. Sometimes these would be days after an order, sometimes years after an order. Later pre-orders were handled the same way and you had to shrinkwrap the order form to the Spiderman DVD and keep separately so that the fanboys would make sure they could buy it on the day of release.

Supervisor

Around a year later I was promoted to supervisor and had my account upgraded to the Supervisor level of security. Actually that’s a lie. It was upgraded to Assistant Manager which put a couple of the other supervisors noses out of joint now I remember about it. Especially when they couldn’t find the manager to do something 1337 and had to ask me to do it for them. This game me so much more power mwaha. To be honest I can’t remember much except now only 1 main option screen was out of action for me and I had pretty much full function permission on the other screens. This let me see the full extent of the weird UI decisions. Sometimes F1 would be back, sometimes F12 would be back. Sometimes F12 would be more info and sometimes F20 would.

It was truly bizarre and worst of all there seemed to be no way to feed back bugs about the system and so on. The fact that more functionality was added later shows it was being maintained at some level.

Where did Elvis go?

I really have no idea what happened to Elvis or where else used it. Zavvi still used it and probably Head as well. There are still some Head stores so perhaps it is used there. Was it made by Virgin or did they get the makers of some system to customise a core package with HMV getting a similar customisation made. I really have no idea but if you know leave a comment below with more info.

I also have no idea what language it was written in and so on. I remember seeing some old modems in the back which sent back the info and the whole kit looked pretty ancient. I first saw it in 2001 and it was apparently made in 1991. I would have no trouble believing some of the hardware (especially keyboards) had been in operation longer than that.

I probably also got some of the function keys wrong as it is 6 years since I used it so corrections are welcome for accuracy. A quick Google search didn’t reveal any images of the terminals either so I couldn’t check on them or include any for illustration purposes.

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More than likely though it is related to the large number of people who claim to be dissatisfied with First Search Consultancy.

No doubt the sudden appearance of First Search Consultancy shooting up the rankings in Google for the term First Search Consultancy Scam is related to this too.

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They claimed that they were from Google and could get her site to the first page of Google for £99 per month.

Having dealt with this sort of thing before she responded that this sort of claim was a scam and that her site was already on the front page of Google. Additionally companies claiming to be Google were scammers.

The response from the Sales Drone That’s not right you can’t get on the first page of Google yourself you need to pay a company to do that

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Doing a compare between an old and new version of two versions of a piece of software.

This is the last minor release before the next major version number release.

The developer has decided to update his address in the copyright section of almost 300 files. I am now having to go through each of these to find any real changes.

Questions:
1. If you have an address change why do at 1.9.9.9 when you are currently testing 2.0.0.0?
2. Why not just say Copyright as per file /copyright.txt if you are making this change?
3. Why not release a version of the update with actual real changes instead of cosmetic details which is in a comment?

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Firstly I had forgotten to pick up the directions so couldn’t remember exactly what building it was in. I bumped into someone I recognised from the TechDay event in Edinburgh and having walked further passed the wrong directions I had been given we found the building. There was a slight confusion over badge as one of the many other Alan Grahams had registered too. Got a wee goodie bag which included a DevExpress t-shirt. There is a competition to win a Sony Flipcam for anyone wearing the t-shirt in a funny or unusal pose and tweeting it using #DDDScotPic. So far Gavin has the only entry so he’s a shoe in.

Session 1 HTML5 : The Language of the Cloud?

Craig Nicol gave a talk about HTML5. The takeaway for me was basically to wait until things have settled down a bit. All browsers implement different things so I would be driven mad doing anything yet in my spare time. The video demos were very cool though.

Session 2 T4 and how it can be used for code generation in Visual Studio 2008 / 2010

I was looking forward to this. We have a small number of classes using this in one of the projects at work but I haven’t even looked at it yet. The area I was interested in using it was generating enums from a database and this is pretty much what Rob Blackmore promoted it as being good at.

Session 3 Web standards are broken, and it’s getting worse

I went to this session by Sebastien Lambla to find it had turned in to a talk about OpenRasta. If I had known in advance I might have popped to Defensive Programming. As I was in second row and the largest room had a dozen (at most) people I decided to stay. Having not known anything about it beforehand I didn’t really take too much in and the small bit at the end about OpenWrap probably got me more interested.

Grok Talks

A really good grab bag of stuff. Colin MacKay on SQL Injection. Someone on Code Dojos. A talk on ways to learn. Seb on his OpenWrap promo. I can’t remember the other one. Something about loving users maybe?

Session 4 Get Started with Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) using Cucumber

This was a really thought provoking talk by Steve Sanderson on Behaviour Driven Development. He gave a bit of background on some of the problems with TDD and what BDD set out to solve. His demonstration of writing specs then tests to pass them was really interesting. We are using SWEA at work but it is so fragile and such a hassle to work with we had been thinking of switching to Selenium. Having seen this I want to play around a bit with SpecFlow. I think it might be more suitable.

Session 5 Enforcing Code ‘Beauty’ With StyleCop

Or as Guy Smith-Ferrier referred to it How to start a fight. I felt slightly out of place as when he asked who had used it one other person had for 6months. I said it was from before it was called StyleCop. I did get a TekPub 30 day trial for making some comments/questions during the session. It was an intro to but I managed to pick up some tips on working with Legacy code and had a further spur to dig out StyleCop happy templates for new files.

Afterwards I popped to Bar Republic to get an amazing pizza then grabbed the train home. Really enjoyable day. The only session I didn’t get what I had wanted was the one which had changed and if it had been as intended it was my preferred session of the day – so I look forward to seeing it next year! Having seen everyone tweeting all day I dug out my tablet but couldn’t get it to log into Twitter. That was a bit dissapointing so I’ll need to investigate what’s up with it.

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I mucked around with the samples throughout the book and think that Gennas Jewellery site is probably ok for layout and style. I will probably tweak it a bit – definitely try to do something with the logo section to be laid out a bit better.

I have the idea in my head of what to do with the amount of content – move from 11 top level pages down to 6 and re-write most of the content there. The catalogue I am still not 100% on.

Just started reading Building Findable Websites so that I have a better idea of what to do with the content I write for it.

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I went last year and thought it was excellent so was looking forward to this year. Only one clash and one empty slot for my preferred items I voted for so a good result for me.

Right now my plans would be for:

1. HTML 5: The Language of the Cloud
2. T4 and How it Can Be Used for Code Generation in Visual Studio 2008/2010
3. Web Standards are Broken, and it’s Getting Worse OR Defensive Programming 101
4. Decide on day
5. Domain Specific Languages – What Are They and Why Should You Care?

I was wanting to dig into HTML 5 soon anyway. We use T4 for part of one project at work but I haven’t even looked at it. Web standards is obvious but I tend to code very defensively so am interested in the other option in that slot too. Any of the slots in 4 apart from Silverlight would be both of interest and something I wouldn’t normally look at. I had been interested reading Ayendes posts about Boo but know nothing about it so good chance to get an introduction into them.

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To celebrate, rather than record the usual show of about 1hour the hosts organised a 12 hour spectacular pulling together some of the brightest and most interesting people in the web industry. There were experts on coding and design, CSS and CMS, useability and social networking etc. There were also girls. OMG!!!!!

Suffice to say the mouth breathers in the shows chatroom went ballistic. These women couldn’t have been invited on because they were experts in their field, oh no. They were invited on because they were women. The fact they dared to be attractive women, intelligent women, confident women was just too much for them to bear.

IT is a bad enough field as it is for being male dominated. From university to workplaces the vast majority of people involved are male. If you want to question if this is self-perpetuating or not you only have to have seen some of the reports of comments being made by these people.

Two of the women involved in the show Sarah Parmenter and Rachel Andrew have written brilliant pieces laying into these Neanderthals which I would highly recommend reading.

Take small comfort from the thought that this morning most of those who disgraced themselves will be waking up and falling asleep alone, with only Warcraft to take their frustrations out onto.

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I had thought about throwing together a wee 3 page site or so in a variety of formats – XHTML1, 1.1, 2, HTML5 with liquid/fixed/fluid layout etc to try and clean off the rust.

Rather than just flail and read random bits I bought a decent looking book and intend to go through it working through the examples from everything from the most basic things to the most advanced.

No idea how long it will take but the experience should be worthwhile as I would then have a more realistic idea of what can be done in CSS to then re-look at Gennas site afresh.

Gennas site

When I first made Gennas site she wanted it small and with a well-defined number and variety of pages. If WordPress or a similar CMS had been readily available at the time I would have used it. As it was I had tried to manually create a kind of category/tagging system for the jewellery in static HTML. It seemed ok with 20items, at the current 200+ it is unmanageable.

I had had to manually add each page for each new item Genna added – which when making one-off pieces the majority of time is a lot of wasted effort compared to someone who makes 30 of something and adds it to a shop once. I gradually managed to show Genna how to do some HTML editing which is really good – she learned the basics of a skill in a field totally unrelated to what she does.

Unfortunately Notepad has no spell checker so it was easy for mistakes to creep in.

The other pages were added to the top level of the site over time and now number 11, most of which have sub pages.

When it came to add a shop I threw on an off the shelf package which I haven’t even taken the time to modify. When I realised the amount of time wasted maintaining a new page I threw on a blog which has been far better.

Both of these are great as Genna can write copy like in a word processor and I can switch tabs to code for clean-up/doing anything more complicated.

Near term work

What have I been doing lately

Adding her blog to directories etc.
Set up twitter account
Set up Facebook Group page
Linked blog to Facebook and Twitter so messages are automatically sent to each service.

So what has to be done in the near future:

Reduce duplicate content
Review each page for keywords and make sure we are not doing anything stupid which for a small amount of work would give way better performance in search engines.
Reduce top level pages – I have already identified some to go.
Review catalogue (Genna and I disagree over what to do, see below).
Give site a complete once over for code-validity and useability. Re-review in all browser strains and new ones since I last did it.
Design new WordPress template for blog.
Look at new template/add ins for shop.

Catalogue

Genna makes lots of one-off pieces. How do we best manage this. In the near past each item was given a new page inside a category (rings, bracelets etc). When pieces went to galleries each price had to be changed to Currently on display at X gallery etc.

With the addition of the shop this was easier as it would be marked as out of stock.

This posed an additional problem though. Add 20 rings, sell 18 and you have only two in stock. We solved this by paying a tiny amount for an add-in that hid out of stock items.

Brilliant, except now items that had sold no longer appeared on the site. This posed two more problems.
1. Someone buys an item and can’t then review it.
2. We spend ages building up a keyword of a type of item and then have no page to link to say none in stock, order one to be made for you.

It’s a pickle and once I have not had the time to sit down and think long and hard about. I think the best solution may be to write a blog piece about each new design then add into the shop so that it is there for historical purposes but am not 100% sure.

This is in the future though, I need to re-learn what I might have forgotten about HTML/CSS then after that work through the list, then learn enough PHP to modify her shop code.

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Woo.

Technorati claim code: WBJWEAQ95M8P

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For £149 per year she can have a site with a shop. A quick scan of their site shows that that package is £199 per year. The £149 one is aimed at people with no website at all. On the phone the Web Consultant (sales rep) also asked her what her website address was. Nice research there bub. A quick search for teh number they were calling very quickly shows that.

A quick browse round their site was quite telling. News from 2007 (we are a popular company, see this non-existant report that you would have to pay for anyway), a blog (link dead) and vacancies. The vacancies at these places is always interesting, multiple telesales positions, 1 web developer position. The web developer ad language is amateurish at best, not what you would expect from a really big web design company which has been going for years.

A search on the company finds almost no mention of them anywhere, not helped by their name being made of two common words.

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I added a thing to the blog which should integrate, testing it now.

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He was really, really funny. Lot’s of nerdy material, references but also stuff non-geeks could get related to his attempt to appear on Britain’s Got Talent (but not the drivel on this show).

I did a search and eventually found his MySpace page. So he loses geek cred for having that as his only online presence, obviously. Was highly amused by a review I found.

Read what this cock has to say.

I could just imagine similar.

As a feminist, mother in law and lesbian I did not appreciate the comedy of Roy Chubby Brown.

Or the like.

Guess what, comedian is targeting his audience by saying it will be lots of geek humour, if you don’t know who Captain Kirk is you probably shouldn’t go along as you will probably be sitting there with a glazed look on your face you numpty.

Rob mentioned overhearing some people looking at his flyers and saying meh, it’s probably about capes n’ shit.

So hopefully he will still be kicking around next year and I can see him again.

Before Rob I also saw two other comedians.

The first, an Australian was ok, he had some good material but a lot was related to lols England sucks at cricket compared to Australia etc. Not only has it been done to death before but no one really gives a shit about cricket in Scotland. His other material was enjoyable though with his sperm test tale being very funny.

The second of the pair was pretty good. His stage persona was just verging on being more enjoyable than funny but his material was really good. Excellent on stage, ditching the mic and just going without.

These were free shows so at the end the comics had a whip round to pay for extravagances like food, rent and the like.

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She wanted the palette changed to blues though so I made modifications. I couldn’t see any licence, but assuming it was GPL‘d I’ll put the modifications here.

I changed the following files:

Footer.php

Added text Colours modified by Alan Graham to show I had modified it.

Style.css

#left ul

border: 0px solid #00CCFF;
background-color : #00CCFF;

#left ul li.backLava

background-color:#0099FF;

#left ul li a:hover

background-color : #0099FF;

#sidebar ul

border: 0px solid #00CCFF;
background-color : #00CCFF;

#sidebar ul li.backLava

background-color:#0099FF;

#sidebar ul li a:hover

background-color : #0099FF;

#header

background-color: #00CCFF;

#footer

background-color: #00CCFF;

h3

color: #66CCFF;

h2 a:hover, h3 a:hover

color: #66CCFF;

.post

border-bottom: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#sidebar #searchform #s, #sidebar2 #searchform #s

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#searchform2 #s2

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

select

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#commentform fieldset

border: 0px solid #66CCFF;

#commentform input

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

#commentform textarea

border: 1px solid #66CCFF;

.commentlist

border-top: 0px solid #66CCFF;

.commentlist li, .commentlist li.alt

border-bottom: 0px solid #66CCFF;

blockquote

border: 1px dotted #66CCFF;

.day

color: #66CCFF;

ol.commentlist li

background:#00CCFF;

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Beta just now, posting purely to show here pingbacks.

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I had heard great things about both Drupal and Joomla so figured they would be top of my list. Looked at the install for Drupal, looked simple enough. Tried to install on my machine and got no end of problems.

Hey let’s create an “install.php” but not make it do a complete install, sod that we want our users to learn loads of unix commands to set it up, too hard for the authors to script.

Fuck that noise.

WordPress and Cubecart being the two other applications I have installed both had this facility. I don’t mind editing a config file or anything but that was a step too far. When I install an application on Windows you follow the options and click appropriate sections. You don’t have to hand edit the registry. Why? Because you shouldn’t have to.

I then downloaded Joomla, waited and age for it to upload to server and then went to the directory. Redirected to installation directory where it checks my requirements. It tells me I have a problem, the help file with the handy screenshots tells me exactly what I need to do to fix it. It then checks again. It asks for FTP and MySQL usernames etc. Installs and is all set to go.

I have no idea yet if it does what I want it to do but unlike Drupal it has passed the first hurdle of making it possible for me to find that out. It could be that WordPress would do but I think the option to easily integrate forums etc is a good bonus. I have to have her shop in it too which will be another hurdle.

Lesson: you may have the greatest web application in the world but if you make users jump through hoops in order to test it you will get nowhere. If I cared enough to look into it I would have managed to set up Drupal, I just didn’t give enough of a shit to. My time is too valuable to me to waste learning how to do stuff your install should script for me. How you expect Joe Bloggs to do so is a mystery.

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So with the menu:

• Home – static
• Menu Top – static
  • Sub Menu – loads dynamically
• Another – static

Very frustrating. It would mean doing a search/replace every time a new top level menu item is added, very annoying. I can’t see why it would be happy to load the sub items but balk at the top level items.

The reason for experimentation is Gennas site. It started with a catalogue of around 40 pages and quickly grew to about 300 static pages. She then wanted some top level menu items added – argh. I figured if I can get this done I can change every page once and then update the external sitemap page when necessary. This is only a sop until I have the time and inclination to install a more appropriate site for what she is doing with it now. Spending spare hours here and there make an overhaul slightly difficult and drag over weeks though.

Edit:

The closest I could get was:

• Root – loads dynamically
  • Home – loads dynamically
  • Menu Top – loads dynamically
    • Sub Menu – loads dynamically
  • Another -loads dynamically

This of course means you only see “Root” on the page and the submenus when you select the menu. With the added bonus that it only works with JavaScript loaded. A colleague has it working on his Asp.Net site loaded into the MasterPage but plain HTML doesn’t have that luxury.

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Bah!

Edit: Although my copy/paste of WordPress installs did bust stuff it was actually the latest version and plugins which did. All sorted after much hair being torn out – and I can’t afford to do that much more!

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protected void CheckBulletHits()
{
// Check to see of any of the players bullets have
// impacted any of the enemies.
for (int i = 0; i < iMaxBullets; i++)
{
if (bullets[i].IsActive)
for (int x = 0; x < iTotalMaxEnemies; x++)
if (Enemies[x].IsActive)
if  (Intersects(bullets[i].BoundingBox, Enemies[x].CollisionBox))
{
DestroyEnemy(x);
RemoveBullet(x);
}
}
}

Curly braces exist for a reason. (also WordPress displays code blocks crap, had to nest them, time to look for a plugin). Edit – found.

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I did a review of most of the databases around and what I wanted to do with them. I spotted Firebird. Downloaded it and a GUI. A GUI with the only option to hand edit the SQL. I then downloaded two others, one of which had a trojan in it the other didn’t work. Ho hum.

Having tried to experiment I settled on Access and XML.

Before delving into the shell of code I have sitting there I figured it would be more worthwhile to make a couple of wee demo games to re-familiarise myself with the process. Downloaded Microsoft XNA and the RPG Starter Toolkit. I figure I can do a tutorial on a space shooter (the hello world of games), then a micro RPG with say one dungeon and a couple of baddies or something. I can then think of the best way to implement the wee isometric RPG. I haven’t looked at the RPG Starter kit yet so don’t know if I should also attempt something a wee bit more ambitious after the initial run.

I think Cliché Quest could be quite fun – making fun of most of the RPG tropes.

In other random code stuff, the best two snippets of code I have come across lately are as follows:
(Obfuscated but not changing what they did, and no they weren’t written by me).

void Foo()
{
    int a = 0;
    a = a + 0;
}

and

String Foo()
{
    StringBuilder theBuilder = new StringBuilder("a" + "b" + "c" + "d");
    return theBuilder.ToString();
}

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Now bear in mind none of these installers actually mentioned these as prerequisites in the installation process.

I started working on a little game about 2 years ago. I dug it out, spewed when I saw the state of the code and upgraded it to .Net 3.5. Once it was all updated in content and style I looked at it again and realised I should really split up into a data layer to properly use as a demo/project.

I realised I had removed SQL Server 2005 and the 2008 developer pack came with a trial rather than a full version. I remembered about Compact Edition which you are supposed to be able to ship with your code.

I go to install it and it fails as I don’t have Windows Installer 4.5 installed. So I go install that, and then Compact Edition.

Still can’t do anything, need the tools for it.

I go to install the tools and it barfs complaining I don’t have Powershell installed.

I find Powershell and install it.

I then proceed in the 10stage or so install, it seems happy enough.

Fill in all Database account details, carries on.

Boom – you need Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 installed.

This wasn’t pointed out earlier in the requirements section? I also thought I had it installed as it doesn’t appear in Windows Update.

I download the Service pack or should I say the installer for it. Run it and it complains as I have no space. I only have 2GB on drive C. Drive D has about 20GB free. It is also where I have Visual Studio installed. There is no option to change the download location.

What the hell is this crap.

After installing 4 things when installers barf it is still barfing and refusing to install. It shouldn’t be this hard to install a sodding database server. I tried looking for what other databases are usable in Visual Studio but had no luck yet. I was hoping to use Compact as it is usable by the database tools I am used to using in work and I wanted to experiment with Linq a bit.

In work I have the full service pack on a DVD, may have to copy that if I can’t find it online.

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Current software I am using include WordPress, OpenOffice, Linux (Tablet PC), Firefox (and Phoenix before that) and numerous other bits and bobs including at work.

It is one of my goals for the year to find time to contribute towards at least one open source project. I have been unable to donate hours so today donated $2 to Google SiteMap Generator. This plug in automatically generates a site map for you as frequently as you wish. Really useful and has saved me more than $2 in the time to manually generate one using Audit My PC or similar.

What Open Source software do you use and have you contributed anything back – from cash to code to bug reports?

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It was quite interesting. Some of the information I knew already. Some I did not. The stuff I already knew I have put into place on blogs/sites etc. The stuff I learned I plan to prioritise and work into sites in the near future. He pointed out some of the things squirrelled away in Googles Webmaster Tools. I had previously used it for adding site to directory and adding a sitemap. Some of the stuff I hadn’t noticed is very cool though.

Over the past few days I had already been working on Gennas Jewellery site so was in the right frame of mind for taking it all in. I hadn’t noticed where all her links were coming from though. Her main site is her name GennaDelaney.com. We also registered GennaDesign.com as that is the name she trades under. I just had that pointing at the same directory but that is where a huge amount of the inbound links are coming from. Being on the same server and having the same content it probably makes her look like a linkfarm. One of the top priorities is to sort that into a proper redirect. I tried last night and it failed to work properly.

I also realised something about ping servers so added a load to the blog and am away to publish the first post to loads of them. Lets see what happens.

Disclaimer: one of the things he talked about were valid mark up and his site does not have this (probably his blog theme to be fair, something I have wrestled with).

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