09.10.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:30 pm by JohnB
Last night’s Tech Nation program had an interview with Rob Levy of BEA. He had some deep insights into dealing with outsourcing companies. In essence, either make them as peers or at least treat them as peers. This is a refreshing change to what I’ve seen, not only when outsourcing, but when purchasing companies outright to be “business units” within the greater company. In the words of one friend who works at one of these subsidiaries, they feel like the “red-headed step child”. It definitely puts the sub in subsidiary!
Rob Levy made the point that once these places become free-standing entities, with enough work and resources to work independently, then its perfectly normal for them to treat the company headquarters as an outsourcee instead of a parent. I can’t imagine a lot of C-level executives (especially in my company) giving this type of free rein.
Whether you agree with him or not, its worth a listen…
[editor's note: when jotting down my initial notes for this post I found myself writing that they were treated "as if they were peers" - which just goes to show how deeply engrained this sort of thinking is. The headquarters has the illusion of control, but its only a offering from the employees - if you make the company too difficult or unstable to work at you just may find you've lost all your employees.]
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08.22.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:00 pm by JohnB
Just thought it would be a good time to post an example of
my javascript code – ugly and insecure, but sufficient for this game among friends.
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08.07.07
Posted in ruby at 3:04 pm by JohnB
Have you ever loaded a file into irb, only to find that it scrolls endlessly? Its easy to do by accident:
log = File.open('bigger_file_than_you_expected.log') { |f| f.read }
But a simple trick can limit the output to a single useful line:
(log = File.open('bigger_file_than_you_expected.log') { |f| f.read }).length
=> 5066612
Now you can happily slice and dice your data without all the useless output. And yes, it applies to any operation that would spit out more data than you really want to see.
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08.05.07
Posted in ruby at 11:41 pm by JohnB
I recently came across Davey Shafik’s nice little Tooltip.js script – and I love it. I love it so much that I’m adding it as context-sensitive help all over the site I’m building. My needs are fairly simple: just some sort of pseudo-icon I can use next to any visual element to show that help or warning information is available. Every aspect can (of course!) be styled any way you want it.
To gain consistency and ease of use I wrote something that isn’t an actual Rails plug-in but is more of a… drop-in. Just drop in three files and you’re ready to roll. There are a few ways to add the tips to your views, but the easiest way is to just add
<%= Tooltip.help name %>
or
<%= Tooltip.alert name %>
to show a highlighted icon. The ones I currently use are html pseudo-icons (? for help and ! for warnings) but they can just as easily be image tags (and will be, as soon as I can find some appropriate icons).
Finally, to get the tip data to be formatted into hidden divs you need to add this to the bottom of your view (or, ideally, your layout):
<%= Tooltip.content %>
Thats nearly all there is to it. The only remaining task is to add these three files:
Eventually I’ll make it publicly available, but if you’d like a copy sooner just send me a note at my gmail address: john dot baylor.
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08.03.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:52 pm by JohnB
Sites like slashdot post articles for users to comment on. On a regular basis someone posts as soon as they can, just so they can claim the position of first post. But I’m above all that. I won’t sully such sites with my one-upmanship – I’ll do it on my own blog! So there.
First!
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