Naming is Hard

Every now and then we have a Hack Day at Madgex. We’ve just had our third one (the second one during my Madgex tenure), appropriately named Madgex Hack Day III (photos, tweets) and accompanied by some brilliant t-shirts. While Andrew, Graham, Nick and I spent the day dicking around with a table football table, an Arduino board, LINQ, ASP.NET and WinForms, Jane and Chris worked on a keyword search engine built in T-SQL called Banana which uses configurable field weightings.

You see, at Madgex, we’re a bit fond of tropical fruit. Last hack day, a group of us worked on Mango, a .NET implementation of the Django templating language, which we’ll soon be using in our production websites.

Perhaps it’s a subconscious effort to offset all the cake we eat, or perhaps we’ve just taken the five-a-day campaign to heart, but now Jane and I are working on Papaya.

Another perk of working at Madgex is that we are allowed to spend up to 15% of our time working on our own projects and learning, and this is in addition to any training required for our jobs. This scheme is called Ideas and Learnings Projects (ILP) (photos, tweets).

On the learnings side, fellow Madgexians have been running sessions on areas they are knowledgeable about (ranging from unit testing to time management to neuro-linguistic programming). We’ve also had external speakers. Dan Webb spoke about Metaprogramming JavaScript and Simon Willison introduced us to Comet (and he’s coming back soon to talk about OpenID). Equally, people can spend time on traditional learning courses such as professional accreditation.

There are a plethora of projects being worked on too. Some people are assessing new technologies (for example, Adobe AIR). Others are working on internal tools. Still others are working on projects which may see the light of day in our Job Boards. The projects are the part of ILP that excite me the most. I’ve got several on the go at the moment, which I will be blogging about, and one coming up that I’m especially excited about.

So, what’s all this Papaya business?

Papaya will be a tool which allows us to version our databases and to ensure that they remain in a consistent state across schema and procedure changes. This comes out of the investigation Jane and I did into DBVerse. When writing change scripts, you will add information about the changes to a XML file. This file will group sets of changes into releases with version identifiers and single change scripts with version identifiers. Each change or release will state the previous versions it depends on so that the tool can ensure change scripts are only applied to the database when it is safe to do so.

While the premise of Papaya doesn’t sound that exciting, it will hopefully be a really useful tool and it’s a great opportunity to polish my SQL skills.

I recently designed a website for O’Fabulous, a wonderful boutique hotel in County Donegal, Ireland, created by my friends at Swell Group. Now, the May issue of Homes & Gardens has featured O’Fabulous in its Destinations section:

This is everything that a boutique hotel should be: small, perfectly formed and oozing personality. O’Fabulous indeed.

Click below to see the full article [jpg]:

I recently had a support call for backnetwork where posts weren’t coming through for one of the organiser’s feeds. The problem was that the feed was in Atom format, and we don’t currently support Atom on backnetwork (we’re working on it!). I searched around for an Atom to RSS converter but couldn’t find one that reliably worked. I’d recently been using Yahoo! Pipes for my reading list, and remembered that Pipes offers RSS output and has a feed input module.

Was it possible that I could use Pipes to convert from Atom to RSS? The answer is yes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/bruceboughton/atom_to_rss

It’s always nice to get some recognition for a job well done. Jane, Iain, Mike and Alison have all been working hard on the Haymarket project for a couple of months now. I joined them in December to work on some of the new features for Brand Republic and it’s been good.

It’s sites like this that make me proud to work with all the great people at Madgex. Well done guys!

So, finally, I have ditched my PC for a nice shiny new Mac—a 24″ iMac to be precise. Did I mention it’s sexy? Right now I’m feeling a bit disoriented, mainly because I’m a keyboard shortcut kinda guy (what’s this round orb on my desk?) and they’re all completely different on the Mac. That’s ok though cos I wanted different, right?

My initially skeptical girlfriend fell in love with it the moment I turned it on and she discovered Photo Booth. By the time I showed her Front Row she was begging me to swap my PC back in exchange for the Mac!

There are a few things I’m finding a bit funky but it’s probably just a case of inexperience. For example, the button I presume is “Home” on the super-thin super-easy keyboard doesn’t behave as IBM-PC home does. Shift-home selects all text to the left, but Home alone doesn’t move the caret to the far left? Same jive with Ctrl-delete and Ctrl-backspace: no word-at-a-time deletion for you, matey. Also, I would be grateful if someone could point out to me what the mysterious key above the “7″, left of “=” on the number pad does?

Also, I’m kinda out of the loop with which software to go for. For example, for an office suite (for occasional letters and presentations): iWork, Office 2004 for Mac, or OpenOffice? For coding, TextMate? Or BBedit? Or something else? For email, I chucked .Mail for Thunderbird. I was in love with Thunderbird on the PC despite it’s Ugly Betty looks but on Mac it’s just gorgeous, naturally!

All in all, a great purchase—I heartily recommend anyone considering the switch to jump in feet first!

I recently joined the BrightonDigital mailing list, which is a business-oriented digital media mailing list for Brighton (duh!). Although it’s got nowhere near the traffic of Brighton New Media, it’s steadily growing in size as Ian notes. While BNM seems to be a catch-all mailing list (recent topics have included alien sightings, a worldwide exclusive on Propellor-gate at Brighton Marina, and who’s lost their iPod?), BrightonDigital has a more focussed mission statement:

1. ask business questions, get feedback on ideas
2. announce new services we’re offering and talk about what we’re doing
3. post things we want to celebrate e.g. new clients, possible collaborations etc
4. focus on business rather than programming

All in all, BrightonDigital seems well worth joining if your business is digital.

Grrrrrr… it makes me soooo angry when a site makes you login to unsubscribe from an email. Normally, if I want to unsubscribe, it’s because I’m bored of your service. What makes you think I remember my login credentials? Calm breathing, Bruce. We can get through this…

The Singleton pattern is an important design pattern in programming. I wanted to implement this in PHP4. I wanted a generic function to store singletons of any type. I also wanted to implement keyed singletons (which for confusion’s sake I named multitons) so that I could store and access objects by their type and a well-known key (such as their primary key in a database).

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Its dictionary includes the word fucking out-of-the-box (via Daring Fireball).

PS: The second best thing about the iPhone is that it’s now available for purchase, so the hype might finally die down.