If I were a creative non-profit, I’d start marketing alternative gift cards. They would consist of PDF files you could print out and hand over to people when you give them cash. It could say,
“Merry Christmas. Here’s your present, go spend it on what you really want. AND, just to make sure we’re in the right holiday spirit, I made a donation in your name to Aworthycause.”
Stories come and go. It’s up to marketers to spread the good ones.
[Right on! Spread the meme: Gift cards are for chumps!]
Source: Seth’s Blog
In my “Standards Heresy” talk I noted pretty bluntly that CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps. If the preponderance of the working group did, we’d already have useful things like behavioral CSS being turned into recommendations and not turds like CSS namespaces and CSS Print Profile. And I’m not even sure if the “Advanced” Layouts cluster-fsck should be mentioned for the fear that more people might actually look at it. You’d expect an “advanced layouts” module to give us hbox and vbox behaviors or a grid layout model or stretching…but no, the “answer” apparently is ascii art. No, I’m not making this up. It’s sad commentary that you can propose this kind of dreck at the W3C and get taken seriously.
Beyond what’s obviously wrong with the avenues being (inexplicably) pursued, there’s a lot to read into what’s not being worked on. Namely the serious and myriad problems with the basics of how CSS rules are written and applied.
[We were discussing this just yesterday… CSS is really a mess. I wonder if the browser folks could be talked in to supporting something more grounded in people’s needs?]
Source: Continuing Intermittent Incoherency
Chris Chabot has been doing a lot of experimentation with the new OpenSocial APIs. He has written up his experience and created two prototype wrappers.
The first short article has some general information and background.
The second article includes the first library you can tell to load (owner, viewer, ownerFriends and/or
viewerFriends) information, and presents this information in an uniform way (instead of having to do different type of calls for different information fields) and with proper consistent error handling. With it you can very easily create your first OpenSocial container application in a friendly prototype style environment. You can take a direct look at the library itself.
The third article contains a Ajax.Request implementation, since Prototype’s version won’t work well or even at all in the cross domain environment of open social containers, it allows you to re-use your current Prototype based programs by trying to mimic Prototype’s Ajax call as well as possible given the constraints of the situation. Under the hood, _IG_FetchContent is used to talk back to the server.
It is good to see people take the raw APIs and make them feel more like their library of choice.
[Hmmm.]
Source: Ajaxian
At one point in his writeup, Chris notes that this was the “YEARS MOST IMPORTANT deliverable for many, many people”. This is a big neon warning sign. Part of the strategy of iterative delivery in Scrum is to avoid this situation. In a well-functioning scrum organization, releases are a non-event. In fact, Jeff Sutherland was recently telling Ken and I about his weekly releases at PatientKeeper, where there is little fanfare, just an automated deployment, and if the phone doesn’t ring from the customer, the release was a success.
There are plenty of reasons why iterative delivery might not have been viable in Chris’ particular situation, of course. Still, when a situation causes you to re-evaluate your approach to building software, it’s a good idea to look again at the decisions where you strayed from the ideal and ask yourself what you can do differently moving forward.
[My addition: One of the reason’s for “constant releasing” is because releasing is often hard. The only way (IMHO) to make hard things easy is to do them over and over and over again. You slowly (and iteratively) get better at them. In fact, it is a favorite technique of mine for places that can’t seem to grasp iterative development. Say something along the lines of “This is really hard and we’re not doing it well. We’re going to do it once a week (or whatever) until we have it down.” After that it’ll take care of itself… So while this may not have helped in this situation, which I know next to nothing about, stick in your pocket as a technique for when it can be applied. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get it workin’]
Source: Luke Melia
turnings :: daniel berlinger 