Isotoma Limited

Watching the TV last night I saw an advert for EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) which instead of giving a URL suggested that the viewer "search for EMA online". This is the first time I've seen this type of advertising in the UK, although strangely only last week the article about search terms taking over from URLs in Japan over at cabel.name was doing the rounds. Searching for EMA across Google (first both paid and natural), Yahoo! (first paid, second natural) and Live (first paid, third natural) seems like this works in this instance, but I can't help but fear the torrent of spam that will start to follow major ad campaigns that feature particular terms.

As Cabel says in his article this change seems inevitable for all the reasons that he lists, but it sure is going to make management of search placement a lot more complex over the next few years.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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!

Posted by Andy Theyers at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s worth choosing carefully which extensions you install, since too many of them will definitely slow down Firefox and use up memory. Here are the ones I rely on every day:

Firebug. Simply the most indispensible tool for the web developer. One of those rare applications that you love more every time you use it.

FireFTP. Not only will I never need a standalone FTP application anymore, but this actually outperforms any I’ve ever used.

Tab Mix Plus, mainly for the Session Manager. I typically have 3-4 FF windows open, one for each project or aspect of a project, and many tabs in each. It’s imperative that I retain this from one day to the next. Session Manager can reload the last session, or the one before that, or save any number of sessions to a particular name.

Web Developer toolbar. Before Firebug, this would’ve been #1. A lot of its functionality is supplanted by Firebug, but it still has many useful tools and some handy keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Ctrl-Shift-S Toggle CSS, Ctrl-Shift-E Edit CSS and Ctrl-Shift-A Validate HTML. It’s also great for evaluating accessibility.

Netvouz buttons. This is my online bookmark manager. For why I use it instead of Del.icio.us, see my comment (the 5th one) on this review.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic. I need it for one simple reason only: making snapshots of web pages longer than the screen. The basic (free) version creates a PNG on the desktop; the pro version will copy the snapshot to the clipboard.

ColorZilla. It has a lot of functionality that I don’t use, but I find it the quickest way to read colour values off web pages. (I’d need Photoshop open otherwise.)

What are yours, and why?

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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)" »

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Going firmly in the 'you learn something new every day' bracket... Karen just pointed the office in the direction of Mozilla keywords. Combined with Trac they mean you can type things like trac 705 into the Firefox location bar and get transported to ticket 705 on your trac instance. Enormously useful when people keep mentioning "#705" in IRC rather than pasting the link.

• Add a new bookmark to your Firefox bookmarks for (say) https://projects.isotoma.com/forkd/ticket/%s
• Give it a keyword (in my case tforkd)
• Type tforkd 705 into your Firefox location bar
• Voila!

Posted by Andy Theyers at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have recently started experimenting with Xen - the free software virtual machine monitor from Cambridge University. It has not been a pain free experience, and judging by the forums, I am not alone in this, especially when trying to install an Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon guest.

After a couple of days I have managed to distil the forums wisdom and my own experience down into a few simple steps. Read on for my procedure for installing Gutsy as both dom0 and domU.

Continue reading "Xen and the Gutsy Gibbon" »

Posted by Nat Blundell at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just came across L’enclume’s delectable little website. HTML pretending to be Flash, with all the advantages of HTML. Search-engine friendly, bookmarkable, readable, accessible.

Made by Fudge, whose own site is very well built on similar principles. Look at a page like this, for example, with and without CSS or JavaScript. Graceful degradation in action.

Back to food, I found l’enclume via this mouth-watering post. Anyone for “Cold foie gras slices, with foie gras ice cream on a pistachio and nori wafer”?

Thanks for the link, winjer!

Posted by Francois Jordaan at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Apparently, ceiling height affects how we think. We’ve just moved to a new office with a much higher ceiling - in fact it’s got a mezzanine so part of the office must have a 20ft high ceiling. Maybe we should have a special “thinking desk” at that end of the office ;)

Posted by Doug Winter at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've talked before about the trouble handling the inevitable poison that comes with successful online communities, particularly for businesses who are getting in on the whole community site piece. Cory Doctorow tackles the subject again from a slightly blunter perspective... Worth a read, and worth pointing out again that being prepared for bad behaviour when encouraging User Generated Content (or Authentic Media if you must) is an absolute necessity.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the horticultural amongst you may know, Isotoma is in fact a plant. We named the company after the flower because (a) we had some in our garden and (b) because the .com was available (the we at this point being myself and my darling wife). Of such things are history made.

I was reminded of this because I have a Google Alert running on the name of our company. My alerts this morning informed me of two novel facts about “Isotoma”, a word about which I am gaining encyclopædic knowledge. First that Isotoma is an ingredient in a stimulant and second that not only is Isotoma a plant, it is also a pretty gruesome looking arthropod.

After some consideration, I reckon that is a score draw.

Posted by Doug Winter at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting study of how well some major UK sites cope with IE7. IE7 was pushed onto Auto Updates yesterday, so presumably an awful lot of people have downloaded it already.

Posted by Doug Winter at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the fast approaching release of IE7 (possibly even this Thursday) it's worth having a look at the changes they've made to their CSS support. There's been lots of complaining that they are still not achieving standards compliance, but this post, like a lot of the IE7 blog, shows a real desire to tacke the problems we've all been having.

Posted by Andy Theyers at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting post, pointed out by Yoz Grahame. There probably is something in this, oddly - there really is a cultural value to architectural decisions, just as with all decisions people make in organisations I guess - people don’t only make decisions with regard to what is right for this project, but they also try to make decisions that are defensible within the structures of their organisation.

Posted by Doug Winter at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A very well intentioned piece over at InfoWorld by Matt Assay ruminating on the lack of a recommendations engine for Open Source software. I was with him for a while, until his last paragraph:

The record labels - bless 'em! - perform the music selection and promotion process reasonably well. Surely a software analog is ready to be born....

Er... Surely that's Microsoft, Oracle, CA, Apple and the like isn't it?

Despite his rather wayward conclusion the initial point is still valid though. Here at Isotoma we are those Open Source Systems Integrators that he talks about and sometimes it's no easier for us to decide on the right software for a particular project than it is for a first time Open Source user.

The traction that a project has, the political environment that the software or component you are interested in operates within, the commitment of the core developers and a myriad of other factors all need to be taken into consideration alongside the more practical functional and technical requirements. Some way of demystifying those non-functional factors for the casual user would really enable users to maintain a positive experience of OSS (outside the likes of the biggest projects like Apache, MySQL etc.).

And with all that said, even the most stable projects can collapse unexpectedly (although, like freedb, they will likely recover).

Posted by Andy Theyers at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)