Archive for the 'Misc' Category

Most of us find ourselves stuck in long boring meetings or conference calls more often than we care to remember. For a while now, I’ve found some respite in my habit of collecting some of the more hilarious manglings of the English language you find in such situations. I particularly love it when phrases end up meaning the opposite of what the speaker thinks they do. Here’s a selection from the past year:

• Getting “buy-off” on specifications (probably thinking of buy-in or sign-off)
• An item being “delegated to the bottom” of a menu (meaning relegated)
• “visa versa”, used to mean something like “for example” (confused between vice versa and vis-à-vis)
• “The train is already out of the tracks” (I think you meant to say station)
• Extolling the close, mutually beneficial relationship between their organisation and ours as “incestuous and symbiotic”
• “Begs the question” used synonymously with “Raises the question”

And some from emails:

• “By all intensive purposes, I think I have the account setup and everything ready to go.”
• “These are often required and might shoot you into a foot”
• “I wonder if he’s been unendated with calls or e mails?”
• (From a Kenyan security newsletter) “Wait until the crowd has disbursed”

Feel free to add more in the comments!

There’s a fascinating post over at TCUK today about agencies building their own applications. We even get a mention in the intro with reference to Forkd. The comments get pretty heated too, with some people claiming agencies that have the time to do such things are over staffed while others are worrying about how to fit internal developments alongside client work.

So, given we’re mentioned, how do we feel about it?

It’s always going to be hard getting the balance of client work and your own projects right. We started work on Forkd in summer 2005 and launched it in early 2008. In that time the world and his wife had built a food social networking site and we were on the back foot right from launch. Keeping a focus on internal development ideas while working with clients work is always going to be a killer.

That said we have more in the pipeline and aren’t going to stop…

The reasons (at least for us) are threefold. First up, what better shop front is there than something that you made for yourselves? A real case of putting your money where your mouth is; new customers can see exactly what you could be making for them.

Secondly, scaling a technical agency is hard. You only have the person hour to sell, and growth only comes through selling more person hours. That is, unless you can “productise” some of your own work. And what better than productising something that you and your team enjoy making and using?

Third – it’s always best to learn new technology on something that isn’t so important that your business depends on it. That latest cut of your favourite app server from svn might look like it provides the killer feature (or bug fix) you need, but do you really want to try it on your current big client project?

And to those that claim agencies must be over staffed if they can do work like this… We all know that the entire team will have downtime whether it’s explicit or not (and all of you with “100%” utilisation just have a miserable staff hiding their downtime at the water cooler or on facebook). A shared goal to aim at during that downtime makes the downtime explicit and supported, which makes a whole let of sense to me, anyway.

And hey, who wouldn’t like to be the next Skinny Corp?

I nearly cried. I went to svn up in a local check out of one of the projects I’m working on, knowing that I was a good few days behind and instead of getting the usual stream of files I got an error message:

Could not read chunk delimiter

I logged on to the server and ran svnadmin verify /path/to/repo and got a different error message:

Decompression of svndiff data failed

Much googling later and I found fsfsverify.py – a script that repairs broken fsfs-type svn repositories. The author (jszakmeister) doesn’t allow comments on the page of his blog that hosts the script, so this is a public thanks for really really saving my bacon!

Andy mentioned how useful Firefox keywords are for Trac. Remember a quick way to create your own shortcuts is to right-click on any search form and click on “Add a keyword for this search…” Or even quicker, download this handy set that I adapted from Lifehacker’s. Here’s how to install it:

• Save the link to your desktop
• In Firefox, from the Bookmarks menu, choose “Organize Bookmarks.”
• From the Bookmarks Manager File menu, choose Import. Choose “Import Bookmarks from File.” Browse to and open the file you just saved.

Continue reading to see the list of searches.

Continue reading ‘Firefox keywords (more)’

Astroturfing attempt (by a charity, even) unmasked on MetaFilter. Merciless. This comment (by a MeFi moderator), addressed to the guilty company, gives a nice plain-English explanation of how bad things got, and why behaviour like this does not fly:

For those of us who have been interacting and working with web communities for the greater part of a decade, I’m dismayed that people who are newer to the playing field see this as just another way to game the web to hype themselves. There’s much more to it than that, on all sides.

There’s also a forensic summary of the affair on the MeFi wiki.

Marketers should not underestimate members’ protectiveness of their community. Nor how badly practices like this can backfire.