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Archive for the ‘Working’ Category

Posted on May 25, 2010 - by J Lane

Web Directions “North” (time for a Canadian solution?)

As a previous attendee of Web Directions North, I received an e-mail today about what’s happening in that conference series:

Over the last year or so, we’ve been looking for a location that will be home to the sort of event we really want Web Directions to be – an event that brings together folks from all over North America, and indeed the world, and showcases the latest technologies and techniques, the latest know-how.

We’ve been looking for a city that’s easily accessible from just about anywhere in North America. A city that doesn’t necessarily get the attention, and events, that some other cities get. A city with a thriving, exciting web scene, and a city that’s got a lot on offer over and above our event.

In Atlanta, we really believe we’ve found that city. Midtown Atlanta, where the event is held, is a thriving, diverse community, of restaurants, cafes, nightlife, and more, and home to Georgia Tech, one of the world’s leading technology focussed schools. Loews Hotel, the venue for the conference is brand spanking new, only opening in April this year. And with the busiest airport in the world, Atlanta is a direct, affordable flight from almost anywhere in North America (and beyond).

To capture the essence of this new home, Web Directions North is now Web Directions USA.

When Web Directions North (WDN) was first announced, it was a major thing. Prior to WDN, there were no general web conferences in Western Canada. There are WordCamps, and Drupal-specific things — but nothing that focuses on the basics, and remains platform agnostic. It’s been a while since I looked at it, but there were a few tech conferences in Eastern Canada, and definitely a ton of stuff going on in the eastern US. There’s SWSWi in Texas, and the odd thing or two down in California.

There’s An Event Apart in Seattle now (I don’t *think* it existed then), which is probably as close as we’re going to get to a Northwestern conference.

So what?

Why does it matter where a conference takes place? Who cares if it’s in Vancouver, Denver (as it was last year), or Atlanta, Georgia? The speaker lineup is what matters, right?

Ultimately, it doesn’t. If budget is a concern, look for conferences closer to home. The thing that made Web Directions special, though, was that it was in the Pacific Northwest. The fact that it was north of the border was nice too, it’s nice to not have to deal with the random security measures at the US border. Even Americans visiting Canada have an easier time of it than anyone having to cross into the US.

There is a huge tech community north of California. Portland, Seattle, the Microsoft stronghold and Vancouver are a hotbed of tech/web. Why would you leave that? I was disappointed when they moved to Denver because we lost the Canadian “magic”. I thought it was probably the hassles of the Olympics that drove WDN out of Vancouver in 2009. I guess I was wrong. I briefly lamented the additional travel costs, but would have made it work for the right speaker lineup.

Maybe it’s time…

A year or two before Web Directions North was announced, there was some conversation amongst Canadian designers and developers about growing our own web conference. Maybe the time has come for that again.

Let’s get a little show of hands if there’s any interest in bringing the tech back to Vancouver (or an alternate city?)

Posted on May 9, 2010 - by J Lane

Summer is looming

One of the weird things about living on Mayne Island is that the summer brings mixed blessings.

On one hand, it’s warm and you can get out to the beach and go for hikes a lot more. It’s a great time for exploring and enjoying everything this island has to offer. Everyone becomes a little more social as they emerge from their winter hibernation. There are a ton of new faces as “tourist season” starts up, and the island’s population doubles (literally).

The down side is that it can also become an absolutely insane time of the year. A lot of people work seasonally on the island. They slow down a lot in the winter and earn the majority of their living in the summer months. Personally, I’ve made a decision this year to work like crazy this summer. I’ll likely be taking on a full-time job in addition to keeping Industry Interactive running. That’s partly a financial decision, and it’s partly a social one: I’m becoming a little too much of a shut-in working from home. I need to get out of the house this summer, and stretch my wings.

As of now, I’ve got a couple of contenders for what will be taking up that “full-time” role. I’m weighing the pros and cons of each, and trying to come up with a plan for making things work. Regardless of what I end up in in the end, this summer is going to be fun, and really interesting. I’m a little excited, and a little nervous at the same time.

Posted on October 24, 2009 - by J Lane

HelpMeApp

Keeping with the tradition of writing about my ideas well in advance of them being ready for primetime, my next side project is going to be HelpMeApp.

One of the biggest problems I’ve run into with managing Mailmangr support is keeping a handle on the bug reports, feature requests and inquiries that come in. I’ve got them scattered between a todo list in Basecamp, my inbox, and an online ticketing system. I know that there are a million help desk/bug tracker apps out there, but I have yet to find one that’s really easy and great to use from both sides. I’m currently using Zendesk, but I’m really not nuts about it (it’s just the best I’ve found so far). I’m going to build HelpMeApp to be exactly what I want it to be, and then if other people are interested in using it, cool. If not, at least I’ll stop dropping the ball on Mailmanagr requests!

I want something that’s equally easy for people to submit requests to, as for employees that have to respond to and manage those requests. I had considered building HelpMeApp as another Basecamp/Highrise API project, on the back-end to manage all of the data; but I think there might be too many constraints with that idea. You need to be able to merge requests, for example, and there’s no easy way to merge messages in Basecamp — so I don’t think the model will work. There will likely be pretty deep integration though, just because that’s the way I roll (being able to add requesters to Highrise, and keep a history of their requests for example).

I’ve got a couple of other ideas to kick things up a notch or two. I’ve actually managed to roll a couple of ideas that I’ve had in the past into HelpMeApp, and I think they’re pretty complimentary. I’m pretty excited about where it’s going.

The bug/feature request list on Mailmanagr is starting to decrease in length now, so I think the time is right. Any thoughts out there, or “must have” features? I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I’d like it to look like, but if you’ve got a “it would be really neat if”, I’m all ears.

I’m probably going to do a big of a “live blogging” of the progress, although it could be slow at times. There’ll at least be the occasional update over at Industry Interactive about how things are going.

Posted on September 4, 2009 - by J Lane

ColdFusion 8 on Snow Leopard

Seems like every time Apple does an update, ColdFusion breaks. Usually it’s some problem with Java, this time it looks like Apple running 64 bit Apache under Snow Leopard. That’s not new though, Leopard also ran 64 bit Apache that cause a few pains on install (you’d think the 64 bit ColdFusion installer would do the trick, but sadly it fails early in the install).

The trick that worked for me:

Uninstall/re-install 32 bit ColdFusion (it’s probably not necessary, but I wanted to make sure that nothing else got messed up during the Leopard -> Snow Leopard upgrade).
I installed as standalone, multi-server should be fine too.
I didn’t configure the Apache connector during the install, I just told Coldfusion to use the built-in server.
After the install finished, and I verified Coldfusion was working, I popped open a terminal and went to: cd /Applications/ColdFusion8/bin/connectors/
(Again in Terminal): sudo nano apache_connector.sh (you’ll have to enter your password)
Change the line that starts with -dir to /etc/apache2, the line that starts with -bin to /usr/sbin/httpd and the line that starts with -script to /usr/sbin/apachectl
Press “Control-O” (that’s oh) and “Control-X” to save the file and exit the editor.
Type: sudo ./apache_connector.sh
It’ll report that everything went smoothly. If you try to access http://localhost/, you’ll notice that Apache isn’t running though. Grab the recompiled connector from Scott Pinkston’s article on ColdFusion 8 with Apache on Leopard (thanks Scott!)
It’ll download and unzip. In your terminal window, type cd /Applications/ColdFusion8/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1
Type sudo cp (and the drag the .so file from your Downloads folder onto your terminal window) and type ./
For good measure, type sudo apachectl graceful.

Yup, a 12 step program to get ColdFusion running on Snow Leopard. Maybe someday Adobe will just be able to make an installer that works properly.

Update: As was noted in one of the comments, images aren’t showing up properly in the CF Admin. For me, the problem seemed to be that Apache didn’t think my web root for http://localhost/ was actually /Library/WebServer/Documents/, but that’s unlikely to be the case for you. To “clean up” the install I did a couple of additional things (listed here separately so as not to ruin my great “12 step” joke above – har dee har har).

In the Terminal, type sudo pico /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and look for the like that reads:

DirectoryIndex index.html

Change it to read:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.cfm
Also in Terminal, type “sudo chown -R _www:_www /Applications/ColdFusion8/wwwroot/CFIDE/”. That will set the ownership of the CFIDE directory to _www, which is the user Apache runs under. That should fix any permissions problems you’re having (if not, drop a comment!).
Give Apache a “sudo apachectl graceful” once this so that Apache picks up the config change from step 1.

Posted on August 31, 2009 - by J Lane

Thinking about new projects

Maybe it’s because summer’s almost over, or maybe it’s because I haven’t started something new in a while, but I’ve been thinking about starting a new project. I thought that I’d post about it here just to get the idea off my chest and see if there’s any neat ideas/feedback out there.

The gist of the project is to offer an local, online farmer’s market.

One of the things I enjoy most about the summer is the farmer’s markets here on Mayne. It’s easy to find fresh, seasonal, local produce on Mayne Island. Besides the farmer’s market every Saturday, a lot of the local farms will also do sales right at their gate.

In the winter months, it can be difficult to get fresh produce. The stuff that the grocery store brings in is at best not so fresh, and at worst decomposing on the shelf (seriously). I’ve heard that because we’re a small island and a small store, that we usually get the leftovers when it comes to produce distribution.

The first winter we lived here, one of the local farms offered a box program. Weekly produce boxes full of fresh greens, kale, radishes and other tasty treats were a godsend. Why can’t we have that year-round? What do local growers do to sell their stuff in the off season?

Even during the summer months, I heard some local growers saying that they had huge amounts of certain things, with nowhere to sell it. They could only move so many cucumbers every Saturday morning.

So the idea is this:

Local growers set up a profile page with contact info and a map showing their location on the island.
They select from (or add to) a list of products that they have available. They can indicate whether they have “Lots”, “Some”, or “Little” of any particular item.
People can then log on and see what’s in season, where they can get it, and get in contact with growers to arrange to buy some. I’d love to work in some type of electronic payment setup too so that cash wasn’t so important, but I’m not sure that this particular market is ready for that.

Down the line (version 1.5), I’d also like to build in a recipe tie in so that if you’ve never had (for example) kale before in your life, and you have no idea how to prepare it, you can get some ideas. I don’t think that building yet another epicurious.com is called for, but maybe a short note/link database for recipes.

A key to this will be marketing it locally. It’s the same story as with any online marketplace — you have to hit a critical mass of buyers and sellers before it’s useful to anyone. It will be free to list and free to search (I haven’t figured out whether there’ll be any sort of revenue model to this site – I can’t see advertising being that big?)

Posted on August 9, 2009 - by J Lane

Apple Mail’s Handling of Attachments

When Apple said “Think Different”, they weren’t kidding. Especially as it relates to their handling of certain types of attachments in Apple Mail.

The Background:

My company, Industry Interactive, produces Mailmanagr. Mailmanagr lets people post messages, todos, milestones and files directly to Basecamp from their e-mail. Among other uses, if you’ve got a client that just can’t get used to logging into Basecamp and posting stuff there, you can just forward the messages they send you through Mailmanagr. Works great, unless you’re using Apple Mail.

While most mail clients (like Gmail, or Outlook) will handle files as attachments, Apple has decided to include them inline in the message. This is true for any type of file that Apple things is an image — so JPGs, GIFs, PNGs, PDFs — anything that displays within Apple Mail and doesn’t require a third party application to view. There are ways to get around it, and to force Apple Mail to deal with them as attachments, but that’s messy. As far as I can figure, it all comes down to this:

–Apple-Mail-14-963253153
Content-Disposition: inline;
filename=image004.jpg
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: image/jpeg;
x-unix-mode=0644;
name=”image004.jpg”

Instead of the standard:

Content-Type: image/jpeg; name=”image001.jpg”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
X-Attachment-Id: 0.0.1

The problem here is that certain types of clients can’t figure out that there is an attachment on the message. Mailmanagr suffers this problem and so “image” attachments forwarded from Apple Mail don’t get sent through to Basecamp.

The Solution:

There is a workaround, but it’s extremely messy. In Mailmanagr’s case, I have to write a completely different way of dealing with file attachments for Apple Mail than for any other e-mail client. It’s a pain – I’ll have to sniff the “X-Mailer” and then handle accordingly. So far, only one customer has had this problem so I’ve been putting off developing the fix.

Posted on May 27, 2009 - by J Lane

Expansion anxiety

I’m at a funny place right now, but I’m sure that I’m not the first to be here. Industry Interactive has enough client work for more than one person (me). Timelines are starting to stretch out, Mailmanagr is waiting in the wings. I’ve flirted with hiring before, and had even announced that an old high school friend of mine was going to join in part time (that didn’t end up happening though, he became tied up in another project). The truth is, however, that I’m one step short of terrified.

My biggest hang up at the moment is with being responsible for another person’s livelihood. If a client is late to pay, I can survive and coast on savings for a month or two. If I have to pay someone else, that arrangement becomes complicated. I’m building a case reserve to try to buffer that problem, but I don’t have a ton of cash saved yet.

So where to I go from here? Is this just a “gut check” moment, where I’m going to have to take the plunge? Or is my hesitation rooted in an overall sense of instability? Do I wait a little longer and build up that reserve?