Archive for February, 2005

I am bor­ing and I don’t know any­thing about you, so here is a cliché.:

Umbraco 2.0 is out — go down­load! Hartvig and Bum­bech put in some great work and Umbraco is now bet­ter than ever. 

Dis­claimer: I share office and a bit of Umbraco com­mit­ment with these guys, but I’ve been using Umbraco for a while now and I’m really happy with it! The new ver­sion is more stream­lined, a lot of stuff has been fixed and the UI has been adjusted. I’m look­ing for­ward to using the new ver­sion for new sites and to — hope­fully — help get­ting struc­ture on the doc­u­men­ta­tion process. 

Good job, guys.

Trans­mit 3 is out and now sup­ports Text­mate which is worth the $18 upgrade alone. Yay.

So, Microsoft appa­rantly — almost by them­selves — fig­ured out that wait­ing for Long­horn won’t cut it; IE7 is coming. 

The guy talks most about secu­rity, though. And while impor­tant, that part mostly has to do with not hav­ing done a decent job in the first place, not com­mit­ting to deliv­er­ing a prod­uct that sup­port web stan­dards prop­erly. How they think they can turn pub­lic bug fix­ing into “we lis­ten to our cus­tomers, you may now clap your hands”, I just don’t understand. 

But let’s see. Maybe they’ll just do some iframe-magic and load up Fire­fox inside…

boxtalks.com, greet­ing cards are so flat. 

Yo. what you did… it ain’t right… Say you’re sorry!

I sug­gest we send a shit­load of these babies to Ven­stre, Dansk Folkeparti and Kon­ser­v­a­tive. Part ’ I could do with an apol­ogy’, part pretty boxed greet­ing — a bit of love will prob­a­bly con­fuse ‘em.

Remem­ber, if you don’t want to pay for your cds, steal them — don’t down­load them. It might feel uncom­fort­able when you get dragged out of the store by the local police, but it should pay off in the long run. 

Related: I always feel like shoplift­ing tag­ging in Copen­hagen — more on that story at Flix (in Danish).

The guys over at 37signals are spot on again; Get­ting Real, Step 1: No Func­tional Spec (Sig­nal vs. Noise).

The “specs are really hard to make until you’re sort of halfway through the project” is a clas­sic, and while the ‘just don’t do it’-idea sounds attrac­tive, I’ve often expe­ri­enced (as men­tioned by oth­ers in the com­ments) that clients often wants some idea of scope (and espe­cially price) pretty early on in the pro­ces. So far I’ve man­aged to basi­cally just drag the spec-writing by div­ing straight in to build­ing inter­faces and func­tion­al­ity that I know is going to be there any­way, which usu­ally ends up being a far bet­ter way to start dis­cussing the final details. On the other hand, not all clients allow this to hap­pen. Either because they’re trigger-happy, basi­cally not smart enough to be in the software-buying-business or what­not. And while I usu­ally have a pretty good idea of what not to accept with regards to the final pric­ing, I kind of like get­ting some­thing down on paper so I don’t end up in the “well, we thought this was included in our agreement”-problem. Most clients accept that at some point, there’s sim­ply not more money — but again, this is quite nice to have on paper… 

Part of the prob­lem defi­nately has to do with the fact, that I’m a small player, work­ing with clients more con­cerned with price and launch than a good, con­struc­tive process — and/or work­ing on projects where the actual spec work takes up a sub­stan­tial part of the total amount of work because of the project size. A good dia­logue goes a long way, but what to do when you can’t aim for the ideal solution? 

I really like the idea of ‘mov­ing tar­gets’ as men­tioned in the com­ments; it’s the agile approach and often what every project ends up being any­way. Only prob­lem is, how do you struc­ture that process so every­one is happy and under­stands what’ going on? 

I’d like to write more about work-realted issues as a free agent type of busi­ness; this is what this com­mu­ni­ca­tion thing should be all about. And who knows, maybe some day I’ll even sug­gest solu­tions instead of just ask­ing ques­tions. What do you say, how about mak­ing it a bit more per­sonal, share some of your expe­ri­ences, see if we can become bet­ter at what we do by, well, doing some of tthe other stuff we do? 

Also, White­space men­tions another clas­sic; free­lancers tend not to spend any real amount of time on mar­ket­ing. Which, when I come to think about it, is stu­pid. And bor­ing. And I don’t like doing it. But I like when I have nice projects. Go figure…

Two things I really enjoy; Lego and iPods. And now it’s a lim­ited edi­tion art piece as well. And while pretty cool, I’m feel­ing that maybe the Apple craze has gone a bit over the top. Sure, we keep telling each other that once you get peo­ple to talk about your prod­ucts you’re there, you’ve made it. And we try to sell them weblog solu­tions to make the dia­logue hap­pen and mar­vel at their cool­ness. On the other hand, we are sup­posed to be crit­i­cal con­sumers as well — and maybe we’re not doing our selves any favours by wor­ship­ping every piece of well-designed plas­tic to come out of Cuper­tino. I don’t know.. 

But, it’s not all fun and games. This cute-looking piece of art might fuel an Apple-craze among some, among oth­ers I’m sure it’s just a mat­ter of “yet another black guy steal­ing some portable play­ing device and parad­ing it around in a park that used to be ours”.

I dagens Børsen kan man læse en anmeldelse af Dansk Industri’s På jagt efter iværk­sæt­ter­genet. Anmeldelsen og bogens ind­hold er ikke emnet her, det er der­i­mod bogens titel. Jeg er træt, så umådelig træt, af at høre ‘gener’ lem­pet ind over­alt. Det er udtryk for sprog­ligt armod, mis­visende og irriterende. Og selvom det sikkert er opstået i et vel­ment forsøg på at inklud­ere nyopdaget viden som vi alle sam­men jo ved alt om, anty­der bru­gen af ‘gener’ over­alt noget lidt andet; man har ikke fat­tet noget som helst… 

Den mind­ste psykiske ska­vank “lig­ger nok i gen­erne” og lysten til at skråle med højt og længe, så snart en pop­sild bræger på en af de utal­lige kom­mer­cielle ‘flade’-orienterede sta­tioner “lig­ger helt sikkert i gen­erne”, siger man og fniser ind­forstået og trækker vejret gen­nem sin Look100. Havde salig Højholt lavet Gitte-monologer i disse dage, ville Susanne nok have fået en tilsvarende fork­lar­ing, og vi ville have grint og hus­ket, at den vend­ing skulle man nok holde sig fra, og hvor var det godt set og hvor­dan kan folk dog også finde på at sige sådan noget vrøvl, det har jo intet med gener at gøre. 

Og når bøger om iværk­sæt­tere, der forhåbentlig inde­bærer bare en smule opfind­somhed, så bærer titler spun­det om dumheder, fla­gende med sin uopfin­somhed, så synes jeg måske godt lige man kunne…

A Ger­man (almost) his­tory les­son for the week­end: Ein Colt für alle Fälle. When I was a kid, this guy and his two friends were on Ger­man national tv a lot. Big trucks (with a secret com­part­ment for hid­ing the blonde girl dur­ing mis­sions), rocket-backpacks, and lots of action — all of it with Ger­man dubbing. 

The story of the stunt­man (whose real name is Colt Seavers, but try telling that to kids watch­ing the show every day in Ger­man) with a bounty hunter-hobby and trusty side­kicks is rumoured to be made into a film starring…George Clooney! More info in this Dan­ish site — where the vis­i­tors seem to share my expe­ri­ence thatt good old Colt maybe is German.