Ambriel Consulting

Everyone wants their staff to innovate, but how to get them to do it? It’s a popular word: it means “to make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products”. That has consequences.

Be a transformational leader

Obvious? But most organisations force transactional leadership, because it’s easy to monitor.

Have a vision, develop your charisma, provide people with an intellectual challenge, and be there every day, committing to the change: get on with it. Give people personal attention: care that they succeed individually.

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37Signals’ Getting Real is a great read. As they say, straight-through server-side systems require more rigour, but I can see this is the way to go for web applications:

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

And I’ll be making time – at last – to learn Ruby on Rails…

This URL:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=t&chtm=europe&chs=440×220&chd=s:az&chld=GBFR& chco=777777,00ff00,0000ff

Generates this:

Too easy for words! More here.

Apple’s Time Capsule is the new right answer for my backup needs.

That’s one less server running all the time…

For 10.4, This little script makes sure you have your ssh keys in your shell, with the agent running. SSH agent is already available in 10.5.

if [ -f ~/.agent.env ]; then
  . ~/.agent.env -s > /dev/null

  if ! kill -0 $SSH_AGENT_PID > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo
    echo "Stale agent file found.  Spawning new agent..."
    eval `ssh-agent -s | tee ~/.agent.env`
    ssh-add
  fi
else
  echo "Starting ssh-agent..."
  eval `ssh-agent -s | tee ~/.agent.env`
  ssh-add
fi

In terminal,

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture "/Library/Desktop Pictures/Plants/Leaves.jpg"

There, that’s better.

I expect this image looks scrappy if you are visiting with Internet Explorer:

Try viewing it at 100%.

A poor show on Microsoft’s part: to support the format, but badly. Fine detail, such as the rich metallic shading in this graph, is preserved when the image is scaled in Safari.

This image was prepared using Apple’s “Numbers”, part of the iWork suite. The suite competes with MS Office, but a family pack costs only £69. OpenOffice compares poorly on quality. iWork seems a winner, despite its silly name.

Now this is going to be a shorter post than it deserves to be, but after using various Wikis, XPlanner, MS Project, physical task cards, spreadsheets and taking a look at Mingle, I have to advise anyone with a software project to manage to take a look at FogBugz.

When you find yourself schema validating in an XML IDE – I mention no names – and the error messages make no sense, use Xerces2 Java instead. Alternatively, use XSV or even Microsoft’s MSXML.

Certain XML IDEs have extremely poor schema implementations. This is unfortunate because they make it so very use to use schema validation and therefore stretched developers will use and trust these poor implementations.

You can ask me for help on this subject, but try Xerces2 Java first.

Service orientation is an architectural concept, not a given if you use an implementation of the web services stack. It is independent of the communication protocol in use. There, that’s off my chest and I can move on…

There’s far too little worthwhile stuff written about service orientation, a problem I aspire to rectify. For the moment, I recommend Fiorano and ThoughtWorks. Both firms seem sensible and committed to delivering engineered solutions rather than merely selling an implementation of web services.