Posts

Challenges You Will Face When Working With Remote Teams

For a number of reasons at a number of times in my career, I’ve found myself working with variously-distributed teams of one kind or another. Perhaps the “office” is a building that spans 2 square miles, perhaps someone was working from home for a day or someone was on a 2 week “vacation”, or even working for a distributed company with no real office. These were all different situations, but they all suffered from simliar challenges. I want to take a look at a couple of those challenges and some ways that you can help mitigate them.

I’m looking at this mostly as a member of a technical team of some sort, but I’m sure a lot of it would apply to pretty much anyone who’s not working face-to-face with their colleagues. Apologies in advance for this being kind of rambling (and very long). It’s a collection of all sorts of observations, links and ideas that I’ve collected over time. (more…)

Managing Your WordPress Install With Subversion (Safely)

There are a number of different ways to manage a WordPress installation, everything from not actually managing it yourself (WordPress.com can take care of it for you if you like) through to manually managing things via FTP. I’m going to look at my preferred method, which I think provides a few things that other methods don’t necessarily give you.

  1. Control: this method puts you in charge (which also means it’s your responsibility to keep things up to date).
  2. Safety: if you consistently manage your WordPress install using this method, then you’re in a pretty good position to avoid a lot of problems.
  3. Simplicity: WordPress updates quite often (minor releases at least every month generally). This system means that you can generally update when a new version comes out in a few minutes at the absolute most.

What is this magic system you ask? In a word: Subversion.

(more…)

Nokia E71 NAM First Impressions

A few weeks ago, I got an email that I almost discarded as spam, asking me if I would like to try out a Nokia phone for a few weeks. As it turns out, the email was completely legitimate, and the offer was genuine. The good folks over at WOMWorld Nokia wanted to send me a Nokia E71 NAM (the NAM is for North AMerica, since there’s a slightly different European version) so that I could try it out and see if  I liked it. Either way, I was welcome (encouraged) to write about it, talk about it, and generally let people know what I thought of it. This is the first of 2 posts that I will be making about the phone and the experience I had with it. I wanted to do one as a “first impressions” post, and then one at the end of the test period (unfortunately, I have to send it back 🙁 ) with more detail on my experiences.

(more…)

HOWTO: Implement Facebook Connect on WordPress (in reality)

2008-12-23: There were a number of problems with the code samples in this post previously due to some WordPress formatting problems. They are all corrected now, and you should be able to follow through this post and get this working on your own blog quite easily.

2008-12-26: Fixed a bug that caused the JS to overwrite details on a non-FB Connect comment as well. Also changed the fake email address that’s stored to include the user’s FB user ID.

In case you’ve been living under a no-technology-news rock for the last few weeks, you’ll know that Facebook Connect was released recently. I had been seeing/hearing a lot about it, including this video at Mashable, showing how to implement FB Connect in 8 minutes. So when my friend Morgan from BlownMortgage asked me if I’d be able to help him implement it on his new resume-editing site ResumeDonkey.com, I figured “how hard could it be” and said yes. Although it definitely didn’t take 8 minutes, I got it done, so I thought I’d post some details on the specific approach I used for ResumeDonkey.com.

(more…)

2 New Projects

I forgot to mention that I have 2 relatively new projects launched in the Projects section of this site:

Check them out and let me know what you think.

symfony “not” Validator

One of the projects that I’m currently working on for a client is being built in symfony, the PHP5 framework. I am working in version 1.1 of the framework, which has a new Forms handling system that uses the concept of widgets and validators to handle interacting with most form elements. I had a need to ensure that certain fields did not contain certain values. Although this could be done with the regular expression validator that comes bundled with symfony (sfValidatorRegex), I decided to write my own validator specifically for this purpose. (more…)

Dented Reality v5.0

You’re now looking at (I think) the fifth major revision of this website.

It’s been a (long) time coming, but I finally got it online today. I thought it would be fitting. It is a day of change after all. It’s definitely time for a change here at Dented Reality — the previous version was online for around 5 years (April 20, 2003 according to the WayBack Machine). I think it stood up quite well considering the changes that took place in the browser landscape in those 5 years.

Dented Reality v4.0

Dented Reality v4.0

You may notice that there are a number of new posts here, which just magically appeared. That’s because I was posting while I was developing this site on my laptop, but I didn’t want to post to the old site. For the record, here are all the posts that are new as of today (oldest to newest):

There are going to be a lot of small tweaks to be done still, and I’m sure there are some broken links etc, but I think this version is quite a step up from the previous one. It reflects a change in direction for the site and I think does a better job of showing who I am and what sort of projects I engage in.

Dented Reality v5.0

Dented Reality v5.0

Comments are now open (and powered by IntenseDebate), so please feel free to leave a note on what you think of the new site on this post!

Idea: Amazon Music Exploration Application

Music is important to me. Not because I have any musical talent (at all), or because I work in the music industry (or ever have) or even have friends who are musicians (although I do have a couple). Music is important to me because I listen to it almost every waking hour, and need it to concentrate while I’m working.

According to iTunes, I have just under 6,000 “items” in my music library. That’s 16.5 days of music, playing 24/7. I like to find new music, and have pretty eclectic musical tastes (literally everything from The Corrs to korn appears in my library). I’d like a tool that helps me do a few things: (more…)

Amazon’s Start-Up Event Tour 2008: San Francisco

Amazon held another event focused on educating start-ups and existing tech companies about their web services offerings and how to integrate them into they current (or new) businesses. I attended a similar event previously at Mezzanine in SF, but this time around we’re in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel (near Union Square).

So far I would estimate around 90 – 95% males, and perhaps even a higher than SF-usual ratio of about 90% Mac laptops in use. (more…)