Todos / Task-tracking: Generic API

Was just talking to Garry idly about how we enjoyed both NoKahuna and Things and how annoying it was that there was no way of making them work together, and we started building a fantasy API – a generic Task-tracking API which all the task-tracking webservices (RTM, NoKahuna, BackPack, and Mingle, Trac, Mantis, Bugzilla…) might then implement, and all our favourite clients (like Things, Things.touch, but also OmniFocus and others) would also implement (or provide plugin architectures or (open)source-level  access to allow others to implement).

Wouldn’t it be nice?

Permatime update (and more than you want to know about the weird world of timezones)

Plenty of updates to http://permatime.com recently, partly inspired by the spike in new visitors, referred by the comments and updated posting to do with the recent 37signals-live online realtime video event: first-time visitor friendliness, links, samples and bug-fixes.

(Have no idea what I’m talking about? Permatime.com is a micro webapp aimed at making it easier to share a point in time with people across different timezones. A sample (all the bells and whitstles) permatime link might be: http://permatime.com/US/Central/2008-12-04/11:00/37signals_live?link=http://live.37signals.com. More samples on the homepage.)

No coding required?

Reading a thread on the mysociety list, which discusses a posting showing a mashup technique “with no coding required” and a subsequent critique of the specific mapping presentation to which this technique was put, led me to think about how screen scraping adds or removes value from it source data. My first response was that the two parts of the online discussion – technique and usage – were separate evaluations that shouldn’t be conflated.

Reflections on how an iterative attitude can reduce costs

As part of the process for trying to get Clever Plugs onto the BBC commissioning roster for on-air graphics, we had to reflect on how we would help the BBC reduce costs. So I wrote the following about why I thought our approach -  iterative,  tendency agile (see e2x’s article on sustainable software for an interesting differentiation here).

We work with the latest technologies and with only the highest standard of multi-disciplinary developers and designers. These are both ways of cutting costs, but can also present risks (latest technologies carry unknowns, highest standard of developers delivery quality, but are expensive). For this reason we find that risk is the highest factor affecting cost, and we dedicate our working practices to controlling and reducing risk within the project, aiming to have a smooth curve in the decline in risk over the course of project’s timeline.

To do this, we use best practices & methodologies from the agile methods of software methodology (see Martin Fowler on the New Methodology and The Agile Manifesto). Overall this means focusing on interactions amongst the team, working software, and collaboration with our customer to achieve the needs of the project over its lifetime.

This leads to practical impact on what we don’t do, what we do do, and then how this reduces cost…

URIs, URLs, Names, Locators and Links

I was about to write a quick post on why I’m fussy about what URLs look like (see below Locator + Name = Good), and thought there was an important distinction  between URI s/URNs and URLs. Then I googled to check my terminology and discovered that not only was I wrong, but it was hard to find a good succinct definition. I aim to clarify here the best-practice terminology of the basic building block of the web “URI” and the important notions of URI that are “names” (formerly URNs) and  URIs that are “locators” (formerly URLs).

writing gap, or, alt-control-delete

Hit ‘alt-control-delete’ to restart this blog, or at least show the running processes. (Actually though, I’m now on a mac, so mostly shouldn’t need to refer to those keys anymore).

I keep re-reading Joel Spolsky (whose last name is not, I discover, “on Software” – not, then, a member of some kind of minor german nobility) emphasizing that good programmers must be good writers. Well, actually when I google for him saying it, I find he actually says:

…years of experience working with programmers have taught me that programmers who can communicate their ideas clearly are going to be far, far more effective than programmers who can only really communicate well with the compiler.

and elsewhere goes so far as to say:

A use of linguistic analysis in design

Seeing a reference to Skinner & Behaviourism (about which I have to admit I know very little) in Animals in Translation, I began thinking about the notion that “all that can be studied is behaviour” and that any reference to internals is problematic. I find this a non-starter for any meaningful study or account of human behaviour. I wonder if you could try to argue that this approach is merely an extension of the attitude of Ethnomethodology (EM), which I respect, already has towards cognitive science and other forms of abstract theorizing – the rejection of up-front in-advance modeling of unstudiable phenomena like ‘mental processes’. However what you are doing with an EM-inspired approach to the study of human and social phenomena is (I think) to engage in a form of practical reasoning – what kind of an account can I give of this.