Monthly Archives: March 2008

Atlassian’s 20% Time Experiment

I’ve had a couple of opportunities to meet Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian in the last 12 months, first at Morgo and more recently at Kiwi Foo Camp.

He is a nice mix of very smart but still approachable. I like that.

Atlassian are an impressive company, and a good role model for a couple of the businesses I’m working with.

He recently blogged about an experiment they are running at the moment where they are allowing staff to spend 20% of their time on their own pet projects. This in itself is obviously not an original idea. What makes this interesting is that, unlike Google, they are going to be open about how it works for them in reality:

Atlassian’s 20% Time Experiment

Lots of companies talk about doing this sort of thing, but hardly any I’m aware of have actually gone as far as trying it out. Doing so in the open is pretty brave. Here is what they say about the potential impact on customers:

“What does it mean for customers?

In the short term, this will mean slower or smaller, but more innovative releases. How much slower, smaller and more innovative? We’re not sure – we’ll find out and be honest in communicating it here.

(From my back of the envelope calculations, for 7 products we’ve made over 50 releases in the last 12 months.)

The long term thinking is that some of the 20% results will filter into the products and outweigh the short term release slow down in terms of customer benefits.”

You have to give them credit for that at least.

I wish them luck, and will watch with interest to see how it goes.

Just tell them it’s sport

I like this quote from the Sky Sports Magazine advert:

“If you want to drive like a maniac, beat someone up, fire guns, punch a man in the head, shower naked with a group of men … you can. Just tell them it’s sport.”

Can you add anything else to this list?

How about:

Dress up in lycra…

Photo: scoop.co.nz

Or a nappy…

Sumo Tanga

Photo: freakingnews.com

Or a tux…

Photo: snooker.org

Dress all in pink…

Photo: Ian Poulter from golf.com

Or sport a beard and mullet and drink beer (as you become world champion)…

At darts!

Photo: tribuneindia.com

Dress like a clown

Photo: blackhillstravelblog.com

Or worse

Photo: pbs.org

Just tell them it’s sport!

Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments below. :-)

Playing with colours

I’ve been doing a bit of design work over the last week or so, which has been fun. I’m not a great graphic designer, but I can do enough to be dangerous. I enjoy having the freedom to experiment with different ideas without having to bother somebody else to do the heavy lifting.

This is the first time I’ve really got stuck into this sort of work since I switched to my Mac, so I’ve had to get used to a bunch of new tools.

Coda LogoFor HTML and CSS I’ve been using Coda, which I chose basically on the strength of its logo (see right), but which has turned out to be a nice tool. I especially like the built-in reference books, which are great for somebody like me who doesn’t spend all of their time coding and needs regular help.

http://www.panic.com/coda/

For image editing I’m using Pixelmator to replace my old favourite on Windows, Paint.net. It’s taking me a while to get used to this, and I’m not sure I’ll continue with it beyond the free demo period. I am feeling quite slow using it, and it’s missing a few of the things I use a lot – for example, it doesn’t support vectors at all so there is no rectangle tool, instead you need to select the required area and then fill in the selection which seems cumbersome when you’re doing it a lot. I’m also pretty slow with it generally, but I have a feeling that will improve once I get on top of the keyboard shortcuts etc. It’s very pretty, but I’m not sure this is the right tool for the job I have in mind.
http://www.pixelmator.com/

I’ve had a quick play with Inkscape, but it uses X11 and doesn’t really feel like an OS X application.

What other alternatives can you Mac users recommend?

(In looking around I did find a really cute tool called Scribbles. If you’re into graphic design I definitely recommend having a play with this, just to check out the smart interface, including a whole new approach to layers which seems really intuitive. It’s designed for kids, but I suspect that kids of all ages could have a lot of fun with it.)

I’ve also found a couple of other useful tool-lets which I thought I’d share (for my own future reference if for no other better reason):

At Webstock Dan Cederholm talked about basing a colour palette on a photograph from nature. This tool from De Graeve makes it easy – simply upload your image and it will pick out a range of complementary colours from the image. It even gives you the hex codes:

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

They also have a simple fav icon editor:

http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/

HexPicker Preview

Robin Wood has a really useful introduction to the OS X Colour Picker, which is actually much more powerful than it first appears.

The magnifying glass and swatch drawer were both new to me.

And, what’s more the picker can be extended with third-party add-ons.

I found this from Waffle Software, which adds a simple hex picker tab (see screenshot right):

phttp://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/

Fun, fun!

What other tools are people out there using for this sort of thing? I’d be interested to get your suggestions.

:-)

Katakana spam

I’m not sure how I would manage without the Gmail spam filter.  A consequence of having my email address published for any nefarious spiders to pick up, I suppose.

But, even then, it’s not perfect.  I’ve had a couple of important messages spammed by mistake and so remain unread.  So, I try and look once a week just to make sure I’m not missing anything.

Lately the volume of messages has exploded, and the vast majority of them appear to be coming from Asia:

Asian Spam

Is this just me or are others seeing the same thing?  Any idea what’s behind this?

Amnon on Lossless

Here is an interesting comment I got via email from Amnon (one of my former colleagues from Trade Me) about my lossless post from earlier in the year:

“I really liked your post on storage and compression, but consider this: Two years ago people were paying $500 for a 60GB iPod. Today they’re paying $500 for an 8GB iPod. Storage capacity is up against other factors in evolving technology. Miniaturisation, reduction of moving parts, wireless network storage… At some point ears can’t tell the difference with a compressed music file, and your eyes (and monitor) won’t benefit from a 12MP photo that will only ever be printed in 6″ x 4″, if at all. But when the first finger-sized quantum portable PC comes out, maybe you’ll be stoked all your photos aren’t saved in RAW format. Just a thought… Plus, how could people download all those movies and albums if they weren’t compressed? ; )”

What do you think? I’m interested in your comments.

Is compression a worthwhile trade off in order to gain mobility?

What about when you’re back home with your fast network, big screen displays, quality amp & speakers etc? Don’t you really want the best quality source files you can store?

Do we even have to choose? Is there an easy way that people could store hi-res full quality files in a central location on a home network and somehow easily sync compressed files to our mobile devices?

Fire away.

Built for you

At the end of last year I went along to hear Michael Palin speak as part of his promotional tour for his new book and TV series (which is currently screening on TVNZ).

He told a great story about the filming of “The Life Of Brian”. Apparently the film was originally backed by EMI, but when they found out the details of the script they freaked out and pulled their funding (lots of which had already been spent on sets etc, but that’s a different story).

So, somewhat desperate the Pythons eventually convinced George Harrison to pick up the pieces. He even got a cameo role. The rest is history.

Years later Palin said he asked Harrison why he decided to take the risk and put up the money. His response: “I just wanted to see the movie”.

Nice :-)

ETech

I had a blast at ETech in San Diego.

At every turn there was somebody interesting to meet, chat with or listen to.

I took a ton of notes, with good intentions of turning them into a blog post, but that’s not going to work out.

Instead here are four random/great quotes from the week:

  • Steve Cousins, responding to a question about his proposed open source platform for personal robots: “In the civilian robotics area we don’t really use the words ‘killer application’”
  • “Exercise – the poor mans plastic surgery” – from Kathy Sierra slideware.
  • Nat Torkington, via Twitter, in response to an Ignite presentation by Noel Dickover from the US Department of Defense: “General rule for ETech speakers: ‘decreasing the kill chain’ tends not to be the goal of the average attendee.”
  • Tim Ferris, explaining why his PDA doesn’t have an internet connection: “I don’t trust an inbox in my pocket any more than I trust dark chocolate in my house.”

And, one quirky website:

Finally if you have six and a half minutes to spare, you should check out Saul Griffith’s Ignite presentation on Howtoons (which I can recommend if you have some young kids to entertain) from the first night of the conference:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wyLHOTwvzf4

Saul is a super smart but friendly Aussie, who also did a keynote later in the conference on Energy Literacy, which was also excellent. I really hope this will be available online sometime soon so I can link to it. In the meantime this interview gives you a bit of the flavour:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wbwxF47x5ss

Blog bankruptcy

I now have one million half written blog posts in my drafts folder (more or less).

I suspect this is a pretty common situation.

This morning I’m declaring blog bankruptcy and accepting that I’m never likely to have the time to finish many, if not most, of them.

There are a few which are pretty much done, but have just never been published for various reasons. I’m going to keep these, and push them out over the next couple of days.

In keeping with my theme of the moment, the others are toast.

Deleting them is a big relief. If I’d known that I would have done it much sooner.

1984

I picked up an iPhone in San Francisco.

In the queue at the store was mostly Europeans and Antipodeans, which doesn’t bode especially well for AT&T I guess.  Invalidating the warranty was much easier than I expected. :-)

When I checked my email I found a message from Apple asking me to rate the customer service I got at the store. Obviously they had matched my credit card details to my previous purchases through the online store back here and got my address that way.

Their service in store was fine, but their CRM system is weirding me out a little.

Meanwhile, Budget let me down and didn’t have any GPS units left when I picked up my rental car, so I’m really loving having Google Maps built into the phone.  I would literally be lost without it.

My name is Rowan, I’m an addict

Some say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

For the last month or so I’ve been using a great tool called RescueTime to help me put some hard numbers around the size of my computer addiction.

RescueTime is a YCombinator company, and part of the latest in-take. They have just recently made their tool available to the public. As you would expect they are iterating quickly at this point, and it seems to be getting better and betters as they tweak it.

The system is very simple – you just run a small application in the background (available for both Windows and Mac) and this records which applications and websites you are working on throughout the day. You can login to see a summary of this information, with pretty graphs, on the website. You can also tag applications and pages to help identify specific items or groups.

For example, here is a summary of the number of hours I spent using my laptop during February:

RescueTime data for Feb

The red is Email and the yellow is Yojimbo (which I use to keep track of notes, including keeping myself organised and draft blog posts/ideas etc). The grey is everything else.

As you can see the trend is awful, although exacerbated by the fact the the last week of the month was my last week at work (if it were a one-day manhatten then after a quiet start the innings accelerated nicely with some big slogging in the final overs) …

But, with the excuses out of the way, over 165 hours is much more time that I would have guessed I spent doing this sort of thing. Which is exactly the point – there is no need to guess (incorrectly) anymore. This tool helps put some hard numbers around it and allows you to be much more aware of the time you spend staring at a screen.

I suppose some people might be pleasantly surprised by the results they get, but I suspect that most (like me) will be prompted to aim for less.