For the latest deadline-driven push to complete the testing and bug-fixing on time to deliver to the client, with a five-person team working in timezones from Eastern Canada to Brisbane, Australia (with a couple of us on Pacific time in the middle and the project manager on Chicago time), we started a group chat using skype. Teams have done this for years, of course, using IRC, so the technique isn’t new. Skype has the nice feature that you can switch clients (in my case from PC to Mac laptop to Android phone), and the chats automatically sync so you can catch up on what happened since you last logged on (in my case also answer questions while sitting in a concert at my son’s school, or at the airport). Yes, I’ve heard the concerns about security back doors with skype but the choice of chat system isn’t mine to make.

Seven days, 2351 lines, and 29964 words later, we shipped. Coordinating the test files, regression testing, bug fixes, and documentation updates with the competing projects, late nights, and timezone issues would have been much more difficult with any other means of communication. Yes, the chat got confusing at times with various issues being discussed simultaneously amongst the three of us who were most involved, and there was a certain amount of “can you remind what that issue was about again”, but some of that was due to the late nights and deadline pressure rather than the medium of communication.

And it was fun, more fun than email messages. Chats are more immediate, less formal, we made each other laugh and wandered off topic at times, which doesn’t happen much in email in a corporate setting. It’s somehow easier to write “well done!” or “I need coffee” or “can you explain that again” in a chat than email. And in some ways it’s almost easier than being in the same room with people. With the amount of work in a short time, and late nights/long days, tempers occasionally get short and irritation rises. In a chat it’s easier to step away and not say something you’ll regret later; easier to say “I need a break, I’m going for a walk” than if you’re in the same office as someone else working on the same deadline.

Remote teams are often said to not be as productive as teams in the same office. After this experience, I think some of that lack of productivity is due to the people, and some to not figuring out how best to use tools (even simple ones like chat) that are available. Of course, everyone has to forget their ego, and be prepared to say when they don’t understand or need more details (often easier in chat than face-to-face). And be understanding when things go wrong, while still working to put them right again. A good project manager who knows when to keep out of the way and when to offer encouragement also helps, thanks AM!

One potential cause of these sorts of crashes is old drivers. So I updated the sound card drivers, the mouse driver, the video card driver, and most others I could find. Net effect on freezes: zero.

Some web site suggested old versions of Java might be a problem. I uninstalled Java completely, and reinstalled the latest. Net effect: zero, except for mucking up my installation of Eclipse and costing me time playing around with environment settings to get the right combination of Java versions set up again.

The famous (infamous?) Windows chkdsk program found no errors.

Checking whether any important kernel files had been corrupted, using system32/sfc.exe, showed no problems.

Microsoft has a Memory Diagnostic Tool, worth a try. Result: no apparent memory issues.

At this stage I was running out of good ideas, so I tried something more random and moved the USB cables for the mouse and keyboard to different USB slots on the back of the PC. I did this two weeks ago, and the system hasn’t frozen since. Coincidence? Maybe moving to a different slot made Windows reinstall the USB drivers?

Unquestionably believe that which you said. Your favourite justification appeared to be on the web the simplest factor to have in mind of. I say to you, I certainly get annoyed at the same time as other people think about issues that they just do not understand about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and defined out the whole thing without having side-effects , folks can take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thank you

There are more, but that’s the pick of this week’s crop.

I’m writing a Sinatra app and want to add Twitter OAuth for signing in. A good way to do this appears to be with the omniauth gem but I ran into an issue. require 'oa-oauth' is the documented way to require the right gem, but the error I was getting was ‘require’: no such file to load — oa-oauth (LoadError), despite having installed the gem. I use RVM to control the Ruby environment, so also checked I’d installed the gem with the RVM version set to the version of Ruby I was using (1.9.2). Hunting around I found a partial answer on the issues list. Partial, because the answers there didn’t help, but the suggestion to try bundle show omniauth did. Bundle came back with Could not find gem ‘omniauth’ in the current bundle.

The answer turned out to be to edit the Gemfile to add gem omniauth to it, then running bundle install. After that, bundle show omniauth found the gem, and require 'oa-oauth' in my Ruby app worked as well.

This is an issue that quite a few people have had. Apparently what’s going on is that Google calendar supports three types of availability for events: free, busy, and tentative. In the UI on the browser and on the Android they only show the free (available) and busy. BUT, when you create an event on the Android calendar, it’s assigned the “tentative” status. I have no idea why, since I added those events to the calendar myself, they’re not invitations that I still have to accept or decline. And the fact that there appears to be no way to change the status once the event has been created just makes it worse. I tried changing the status manually to “busy” in both the browser and the Android calendar app but that didn’t work. The only thing that did work was to delete the event and recreate on the desktop.

Fortunately tungle implemented a fix — you can choose to mark the supposedly tentative appointments as “busy”. Here’s hoping any other apps I may wish to sync with my Google calendar also implement this feature.

What I found interesting was this quote, from https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html:

“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”

It’s been recognised for some time in other businesses that the skills required to be a good manager are not necessarily the same as those needed to do good technical work. I’m glad to see the data coming from Google to support the notion that good software project managers do not have to be technical enough to be lead developers (although they do need to have enough technical skills to know what’s going on).

As always, the days were full, and this year I made it to the party at the Academic as well, which gave me a chance to chat to different people. I’m still trying to figure out whether I liked the Moose cocktail the Academic designed for us or not. The food was good, and the candy bar went down well with everyone.

I managed to miss the morning keynote (the school run took priority), so for me the sessions part of the conference started with the first panel I moderated: Courting Controversy: Dancing with the Devil. Rebecca Coleman, Kazia Mullin, and Lorraine Murphy had everything so well organised that I didn’t need to do anything, I just sat there and watched and listened, prepared to help if they needed it (which they didn’t). They have all summarised their takes on the panel; there are lots of useful hints in there as to how to deal with controversy (and anyone who allows any sorts of comments will). I’m glad I got to listen to this one.

I sat in on the Social Media and Online Defamation: Keeping Out of Court panel for a bit, some interesting information there about the upcoming Supreme Court decision on whether linking to something libellous means that you are considered to have libelled someone yourself, which is a frightening concept and will definitely have a chilling effect on spreading news if it goes the wrong way. Rob Cottingham has a summary in cartoon form. It was interesting comparing this panel with the courting controversy one; “play it safe” vs “be brave”.

I didn’t make it to any sessions after that on the Friday, dealing with various issues or chatting with people in the atrium, but I did make it to the Township 7 winetasting, albeit at the end. And then, of course, the party.

The party was followed by the morning after, being in time to welcome people to the second day and introduce Chris Wilson for his keynote From Dial-up Modems to Post-“Social Media”: A Journey. I enjoyed it, especially when he reminded us all just how fast technology has changed and how much of what is available today would have seemed unbelievable 10 or 15 years ago.

After lunch I moderated Tim’s Sex, Lies, and Wikipedia talk, which, of course, didn’t need much moderation. Tim hasn’t written up his talk, but a search on “Tim Bray wikipedia #nv11” will bring up lots of summaries written by others.

Anthony Marco’s Podcasting with Soul: Try A Little Tenderness was a mix of music and advice on podcasting. He used the music to show how the same basic message (or melody) can sound very different, depending on how it’s presented, and talked about how to get that joy and inspiration into podcasting. I found it interesting, even though I don’t listen to podcasts, with inspiration for written blogging as well.

The last panel was Altruism vs Narcissism: what’s in it for the online reviewer? with Monica Miller, Kyrsten Jensen, Nicole Christen, and Marina Antunes. I ended up asking quite a few questions of the panel to get more details on interesting items. The advice can be best summed up as: keep your integrity. Don’t say you like it if you don’t, but also don’t be too harsh on small independents. In some cases, just don’t post a public review, but in most cases, say what you really think (while stressing it’s your opinion and experience, not Universal Truth). The session was lower energy than lots, since it was getting a little late in the day, and Kyrsten had almost lost her voice, but I think people found it interesting.

And that was it! Northern Voice over for another year.

What the book did accomplish was to make me think about the consequences of a world in which oil is much more expensive than it is now. It doesn’t need to be the case that we can’t find any more; a serious insurrection in Saudi Arabia that caused major disruptions to the flow of oil is not out of the question these days, and China is using an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s oil, which will automatically result in price increases.

Some of the questions are easy to ask: What happens if the cost of shipping cheap goods from China trebles, or quintuples, or worse? What happens to commuters when the cost of getting to work is multiplied by 3, or 5, or 10? As the cost of heating goes up, how many more people will die of the cold in unheated, uninsulated, houses? What happens to the cost of food (a large factor of the Tunisian uprising) as the cost of the fuel rises, given that the Green Revolution that saved so many lives depends on cheap petroleum-based fertilisers?

The price of oil hasn’t gone below $50 per barrel for the last 5 years (according to http://www.oil-price.net/). We don’t know what’s next: it may hover around $100 per barrel for a while, or leap to a much higher level; either way there should be at least some discussion of what oil is best used for, what we can substitute other technologies for, and an investment in those technologies before we need them. There are options already for power generation, even if most of them also have issues, but there seems to be less focus on food and transport (both people and goods), and if anything, there seems to be an ever-increasing use of petroleum-based plastic materials. I don’t see much productive discussion around these issues — anyone got good pointers that don’t veer off too much into apocalyptic fervour?

First option: graphical installation. It’s much easier to work on other things and occasionally glance at the installing system when there’s a graphical user interface. I wasn’t sure what to use for the domain name, since this computer will be used inside the home network, so I left it blank for now. I can always change it later. I also picked the easy “one partition” option as I saw no need for multiple partitions. Then, I just let ‘er rip.

These days you get a nice list of predefined collections to install; I chose the graphical desktop environment (yes, it’s a server that I’ll mostly access via ssh, but why not?), web server, SQL database, ssh server. Then it was time to wait and do other things, like noticing how it’s raining outside. Again. April in Vancouver, sigh.

Some time later… Debian’s installed, and now I’ve decided to try The Debian Way to install WordPress, rather than installing it by hand as I did last time I set up WordPress on this box. apt-get update, followed by apt-get upgrade and apt-get install wordpress installs a bunch of stuff into /usr/share/wordpress, including a file, wp-config.php, which doesn’t appear in the stock WordPress installation. Sure enough, it’s a Debian-specific file. Guess I’d better go and read some documentation. I want to set up separate blogs with separate domain names, not just separate sub-domains, and WordPress MU doesn’t do that by default. It will be interesting to see if the Debian version of WordPress tackles that configuration.

Step one: move the WordPress blogs on to an interim hosting solution, namely the same host where I currently host this blog. My package allows infinite add-on domains, so that works. To start with, I made sure I had no broken links on the blogs in their old home — I didn’t want to try to hunt down errors in the new blogs that already existed on the old ones.

The whole process worked fairly well (install new WordPress system on new host, export the old blog, import to the new one) except for a couple of wrinkles, which I’m detailing here for next time I need to do this.

1. when setting up the new blog, before you’ve switched the DNS, don’t put the final URL in the settings dialog. This just means you can’t log in to the temporary site and you have to go into PHPMyAdmin and fix the URL back to the temporary version. Get the site set up properly first, then switch the blog URL and the DNS settings.
2. The image attachment probably won’t work. If you import the posts and check the “import file attachment” box, some of them will attach properly, but not all, and you’ll have to manually upload a certain proportion of your images using SFTP or something similar. If you don’t check that box, none of the images will be attached to the right posts and you’ll have to manually upload all of them. If you’ve used standard markup to show photos, that works anyway, but if you’ve used the gallery shortcode, you’ll have to manually attach the images to the post. The best plugin I’ve found to help with this is the Add From Server plugin, where you can attach the images after you’ve uploaded them all. It’s still a lot of work if you have a lot of images.

Apart from that, step one went well. Now I have to make sure I have all the other useful files saved somewhere, and get on with the OS install.