Gives new meaning to the term “ARMs race”.

Since my last post was a point-form update, I thought I’d follow suite this time around.

• I landed a position at an internet company based in Las Vegas, Nevada (and later Dallas, Texas).
• I jumped over that way for a short period of time to meet, greet, negotiate, etc in Las Vegas.
• I flew back to Australia, sorted out my E3 visa, and then flew back to Dallas with my little family beside me.
• The owner of said company turned out to be a convicted felon! That was unexpected. Company tanked, I can only assume because the investors found this out also.
• Dragged family back to Vegas.
• Found out about a serious illness in the family, which was devastating news when one is 10,000 miles away from said family.
• Got married in San Diego! (without a doubt, the best part of 2011 by a long, long stretch).
• Found out aforementioned illness was serious, but manageable and altogether surmountable. Much relief.
• Found out my wife and I are now expecting our 2nd child! (shares the podium with San Diego in terms of fantastic days in 2011)
• Put family on a plane back to Australia while I co-founded Dropbear IMG in the USA to encompass our future development activities.
• Flew back to Australia to a very welcoming wife and son and family overall.

So! Back on Australian soil after all that (temporarily) to see family, sort out the next opportunity in the USA and get the visa/immigration matters safely squared away. It’s been a… turbulent year to say the least.

While on Aussie shores, I’m carrying on with some existing dev work and a local client who has been supportive enough to offer a full-time gig while my feet are on the ground here.

In terms of what I’ve learned this year… oh boy, that would be a long list. I’ll be frank: what happened was terrible, and the individual(s) in question have blazed a trail of personal, professional and financial destruction through the lives of some very hard-working and talented individuals. I’ve never encountered anyone so bereft of moral fiber and common decency.

However, I’ll exchange bitterness for pragmatism, anger for optimism, and a desire for retribution for a commitment to dust myself off, move forward, and get back to what I was doing. There are some fantastic opportunities out there for someone with my experience, and I plan to make the most of it and make my mark.

To that end, I’m officially saying “goodbye” to the current blog template and starting new, when I manage to find a layout I like! And one thing that’s been indicated to me recently is that while I do spend my days elbow-deep in code, I really should write about it more (the problems and the solutions), something I intend to fully embrace.

Remember folks, sometimes there’s only one direction that matters: forward.

• I left a venture I was a part of. With my workload mounting up, it simply wasn’t viable for me anymore and I was putting too much at risk.
• My old work buddy Carl, in cooperation with a colleague of his, launched Dealush – a service designed to connect consumers with great local deals, and to help brick-and-mortar business participate in the online coupon deal wars.
• I moved back into my old New Farm office, where I was renting a desk from Salt Print. I am subsequently about to move out again, as the loft apartment above my garage is now vacant, and is 50sqm of perfect office space.
• I continued doing large amounts of work for Firstfolio, my biggest client.
• I started lending a hand in earnest to Holistic Page, who are about to take the book sales market in Australia in an exciting new direction.
• Egypt, Tunisia and Libya exploded into widespread revolt, apparently because the youth of the Arab world are, quite frankly, sick of their elder’s sh*t hangups baggage childishness. Perfect.

I’ve also found a brilliant new application (which has been around for a while now) that I use every day – Coda, by the brilliant folks at Panic.

Coda (image used without permission - hey, it's a free plug!)

Frankly, it’s brilliant. It combines the ever-so-indispensable usefulness of Transmit with the power and beauty of a top-notch text editor. Sorry, TextMate… you’re brilliant, but after 5 years, you’ve been trumped.

I’m also eagerly awaiting news on the next iPhone and iPad. As long as it comes with Angry Birds, I’ll be happy. If you don’t know what Angry Birds is and you have an iPhone or iPad, I strongly suggest you click this.

So, moving on… the new office. It’ll be fantastic to have so much space available again, and I plan on turning over a bit of a new leaf once I have all my hardware in there and set up… namely, fixing a few minor oversights with backups/redundancy, and adopting some solid (yet agile) development methodologies, specifically continuous integration. The problem is, I need a CI solution that’ll allow me to handle development, testing and deployment across a few different languages – namely PHP, Ruby and Python. I’m working with two frameworks in there as well, CakePHP and Rails, both of which have their own unit testing/deployment goodies, so I need something that’ll help everything work together as One Big Happy Family.

Anyway, once the new office is all set up, I’ll be refreshing this site with a new layout, and a section dedicated to my office setup and hardware/software deployment. It’ll be fun! I promise.

Exciting new developments though… I have an opportunity to dabble in SAP.

I’ve also set up shop in a shiny new office in the Brisbane CBD. It’s taken the better part of 4 weeks to get naked ADSL installed here (cable guy should be arriving….. 8 minutes ago) so it’ll be nice not to run up my 3G bill.

Probably the coolest thing I’ve seen all week is Panic’s status board. Panic make a brilliant FTP client called Transmit… amongst other products that I haven’t explored yet.

Panic status board

Seriously cool.

But is it really necessary?

YES.

A status board like that would make a such a difference in any development environment. Being able to see at a glance who’s doing what, what people are saying, live updates of a product’s uptime/downtime… given the opportunity, you could fill a wall with live data about your products, and it wouldn’t be wasted space.

I’ve seen the classical whiteboard setups, but you always have the problem of people not updating it because they don’t have 5 minutes free to run to the whiteboard, or someone accidentally wiped out an important note or somesuch. The whiteboard has had it’s day.

While flitting around the Panic website, Coda has caught my eye… I might have to look at that.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say.

VICTORY IS MINE!!

After much deliberation (about 7 seconds) I have decided to shift my voice services to iiNet, in addition to my data services. This is for a few reasons:

1) They’re cheaper.
2) Their support is great.
3) When I called, I spoke to Adrian from Perth, not Raj from Mumbai, and Adrian had an Australian accent and could understand what I was saying and vice versa.
4) I didn’t get cut off halfway through the call (I can no longer count on one hand the number of times that has happened with Telstra in the last month).
5) They understand what a “generous quota” actually is and don’t use the word “Liberty” in the same context as “10gb/month”.

In addition to that, Telstra also failed to note that I canceled my *original* wireless service within the cooling off period (over $300), and that Telstra’s lack of accurate information led me to make a purchase of a SECOND wireless service, for which Telstra now expects me to pay full cancellation and hardware costs (over $400). To add insult to injury, Telstra have just billed me for another month of wireless access (~$165) despite the fact I no longer have a wireless service.

In yet another display of blatant ineptitude and disorganisation, getting my voice service connected in the first place was a struggle as Telstra was not in possession of up-to-date cabling records, and insisted that my home address does not, in fact, even exist. A Telstra representative also convinced me that I would be waiting “years” for additional ADSL ports to be supplied in my area, but that could be shortened to “months” if I switched to a business service, because that sort of build-out tends to be expedited. Less than 2 weeks after getting my landline connected, after Telstra finally sent a technician out to install the line anyway and just not bill me the installation cost if he did, in fact, find an active line (which he did), I was able to order ADSL through iiNet and had it connected in less than a week… despite the fact that Telstra insisted there was no way I was getting ADSL anytime soon. So essentially, I was sucked in to hopping on a Telstra Wireless plan by a combination of outdated information and outright lies, omissions and exaggeration.

Rest assured I have no intention on paying a single dollar of the ~$1,240 aggregate bill you’re about to hit me with, save for any costs incurred by *actual usage of service*, i.e. phone line rental, and the minute period of time during which I actually used your wireless service.

I wish to receive an updated bill which takes into account the waiver of fees for the first wireless plan (which was cancelled within Bigpond’s cooling off period, as confirmed by the representative who processed the order, and for which the associated hardware was returned), and the waiver of cancellation fees for the second wireless plan and associated hardware costs. In return, I am prepared to post back (at Telstra’s expense) the Bigpond Elite network gateway.

In essence, this leaves the line rental, call costs, and actual pro-rata usage of data services. I am happy to pay for these, as they represent what I actually used.

A copy of this letter is also going to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

Kind regards,

Richard Walker

My first impression was that it was going to be a pain to learn the ins-and-outs, and that I was in for a steep learning curve as I had to both learn the Ruby language, and master the MVC framework Rails at the same time. Coming from a PHP background I knew there was a lot of stuff I would have to learn (and unlearn, in a manner of speaking) in order to program effectively in Rails.

In truth however, I found it easier to get up and running with Rails than I did with Symfony, which is basically a PHP MVC framework that mimicks Rails in terms of its functionality. Symfony is itself, however, a brilliant MVC framework and probably the closest thing to Rails I’ve found for PHP.

With Rails and Symfony, you start out by designing your database schema, and then can use a number of command-line tools to scaffold your application, either by creating just simple controller classes or going all the way and letting the framework build pages to provide full CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) functionality, which you can then go through with a scalpel and paintbrush and customise to your liking.

In essence, these two MVC frameworks provide all the functionality and libraries needed to instantly turn a YAML database specification into a working application in a matter of minutes.

Why is this SO AWESOME? Simple: it allows developers to focus their attention on delivering a product based around their core business model, rather than wasting time dealing with fundamentals. Think of it as building a beautiful house out of existing materials…. plaster and timber for the structure, concrete for the foundation, paint for the walls etc. as opposed to building a house by heading off to the nearest timber forest, cutting down trees, cutting the wood to shape, treating the timber, mining limestone and other minerals to create plaster, concrete etc….. you get the idea.

Software development has always worked like this in a way… frameworks get more and more sophisticated, common controls and elements are packaged with development environments to make rapid application development simpler and more effective etc, but it seems that frameworks such as Rails and Symfony go one step further, because just about *everything* you could possibly need for an application is already there, or readily accessible as a plugin, and you can turn a nifty idea for a SaaS application into a reality in no time at all.

Both Rails and Symfony are supported by a fiercely evangelistic community of developers who provide plugins for free to solve a whole host of common software development conundrums, and both are supported by terrific documentation… I have been able to assemble a basic Rails app from scratch simply by following the Ruby Guides. Not bad for somebody who’s never written a single line of Ruby code in their entire life.

There’s one framework I haven’t mentioned yet: Zend. There’s a good reason: I don’t think the Zend framework deserves the title “Framework”. I don’t like Zend. It feels bloated. It feels poorly documented. It feels badly coded (and I’m not the only person who feels this way). To me, it feels like the Microsoft of MVC.

Everything about Ruby and Symfony screams “simplicity” to me, like the creators intended to turn programming back into a graceful art, and to make people truly passionate about web development. Symfony and Rails are the Zen gardens of web development: minimalistic, spiritual, beautiful and closer to art than software development.

Zend doesn’t really “scream” anything, so much as make developers scream at how frustrating it is to use and develop applications. I’ve seen Zend code… it’s like looking into the gates of hell.

I’ll stop bad-mouthing the competition now, and simply close by saying: if you’re passionate about web development, and want to learn a framework that makes developing web 2.0 apps feel more like art than simply cutting code, I implore you to give either Symfony or Rails a decent try. Take a weekend to run through one of the guides. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Unfortunately, developers are terrible at managing the expectations of the boss, and managers are typically not quite as clued in as their technical subordinates with regards to technical limitations. What usually results is a solution which was either a) done within the timeframes required but falls short of expectations, or b) meets expectations to a degree, but took twice as long as intended.

In a larger business this unfortunate phenomenon is mitigated by two things. Firstly, timelines are paradoxically both more expanded/lenient (read: realistic) and also very inflexible… perhaps not so much a paradox, as the longer timelines may be designed specifically to prevent deadlines slipping… allocate more time than you need and all is well. The key however, is that while there’s plenty of time allocated to meet that goal… The Deadline Is Not Arbitrary. It must be met, on time, every time.

Secondly, an all-important position within the company becomes viable (even essential): there could be a dozen different titles for the position, but what it boils down to is that you have someone who is technically savvy and understands limitations, and has enough experience dealing with/participating in management to effectively manage the expectations of the top brass. Essentially this boils down to having a mediator, a translator who can take the requirements of the business, turn it into a specification the tech guys can understand, while at the same time effectively communicating the technical limitations (and the workload of the tech team) to the boss(es) and keeping their expectations within the bounds of realism.

If you’re dealing directly with tech staff, you may be inclined to put on your Leader Hat and rally them to nail a deadline they just can’t manage, whereas dealing with a single person who acts as an authority over your technical assets means you’re more likely to delegate the management of the project to them, instead of doing it yourself. This means managers can do their job more effectively and not worry themselves with the details, and the tech team can work under the leadership of someone who was once in their shoes.

So how do you fill such a position in a small business? From experience it’s pretty difficult… either you get someone who’s happy to occasionally step over from another role (say, marketing manager or business development manager) or you get a tech guy who can both do the hard work and manage the “team”, even if the team is just him/herself and one other.

It’s a no-brainer that having a separation between management and tech is a good thing, unless you’re lucky enough to build a team made up of a mixed bag of ex-tech, management etc. where the manager(s) has/have a keen understanding of the tech side of the business that they’re directing. This is surprisingly rare.

Well, that’s all I’ve got on that subject… I’d love to hear from you if you have any insight as the “ultimate solution” to the problem of communication within a small business still eludes me!

While you’re at it…. explain what sort of impact this has on perceived conversion rates when the conversion:impression ratio ends up being a million miles apart.

Here’s a handy piece of code for your stats install (if running inhouse or AWStats or something similar):


<Directory "/path-to-stats-stuff">
Order deny,allow
Deny from 65.55.0.0/255.255.0.0
Allow from all
</Directory>


I bought a Runcore 32GB 1.8″ ZIF SSD from Solid State Central for $159 and waited a long and painful 14 days for it to arrive (out of stock, had to come in from overseas).

When it arrived, I obviously tore the box apart like a kid at christmastime.

Anyway, a few words on the package itself… it comes with a handy external caddy for mounting 1.8″ ZIF drives, as well as coming with a curious USB cable that plugs straight into the SSD itself using some sort of proprietary port up the other end of the drive…. strange.

Now the bit that REALLY got me was the connector… ripping the Vaio apart is a piece of cake in itself, but one thing that needs to be noted is that the ZIF connector on the original drive IS INVERTED… so if you’re looking at the original drive with the ZIF connector facing up, the conductors are on the bottom edge of the socket. On the SSD, they’re on the top edge, despite the fact the connector looks extremely similar and is in exactly the same position. EDIT: Apparently some drives ship with the ZIF connector in the correct position… so look out for this (Thanks Lars).

This wasn’t really a huge issue, except that a) it took me hours to figure it out while I scoured forums for evidence that the drive was actually incompatible, and b) once I had the damn thing in, the Vaio’s ZIF cable is a little bit squeezed in by the new arrangement, as the hard drive has to be installed essentially flipped over from the original spec.

The whole thing went back together just fine though, and the install etc ran smoothly… and damn this thing boots up fast. Easily as fast as my desktop, which is good considering we’re talking about a 1.3ghz Intel Atom vs a Q6600 Core2 Quad.

Obviously this is due to the awesome seek times of SSDs… the actual throughput of the drive is obviously improved but its the seek time that accounts for the awesome boot times. With no moving parts, SSDs will always outpace mechanical drives in that regard.

So if you’re ready to drop $950 on a Vaio P and want a relatively cheap performance boost… GET AN SSD. I went with the cheaper 32GB because I didn’t really need the space… I have an external bus-powerd 120GB drive for that… but the SSD is well worth the money, and you might even get a bit longer battery life out of the P as well.