Bird Stream

Beeston Centurions U9s sports men of the league

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:54:32 -0700

Listen!

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It's starting #esendexis10

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:00:47 -0700

Listen!

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Add Filters to Views Using Named Scopes in Rails

Wed, 25 May 2011 15:18:00 -0700

This really helped me deliver a rather lovely solution to filtering records on Bunch Rides.

http://www.idolhands.com/ruby-on-rails/guides-tips-and-tutorials/add-filters-...

and here's what I did: http://rides.bunch.cc/clubs/54

and the helper code:

def table_filter(filters, selected_scope)
  content_tag(:div,
    raw(filters.collect { |filter| 
      content_tag(:a, filter[:label], :href => "?show=#{filter[:scope]}", :class => ('selected' if filter[:scope] == selected_scope)) }),  
    :class => 'table-filter')
end

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Can Nottingham make the most of its own creative class?

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 03:07:22 -0700

I was interviewed recently, along with Toby Reid (@tobyjbreid), by the Business Editor of the Nottingham Post. We both believe Nottingham as all the ingredients to become a creative and tech power house.

http://www.thisisbusiness-eastmidlands.co.uk/nottinghamshire/Nottingham-make-...

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My interview on The Entrepreneur Show

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 04:36:00 -0700

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I was lucky enough to be interviewed by @robwilmot on his Entrepreneur Show yesterday. It was a great opportunity to share my views on how Nottingham is going to harness some of the current successes in the creative and technology scene to really cement is position as a leading centre for the UK.

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The Big M Went Bold And Got It So Right

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:25:00 -0700

I was at the Big M mobile conference (http://thebigm.mobi/) on Monday and am very glad I was. Chris (@bookmeister) and Mike (@m1ke_ellis) made some bold decisions in putting on this event and they paid off.

Bold Decision #1 - Bath

Tech innovation and Somerset are not necessarily two words I would associate but they absolutely showed the rest of the country what a great scene exists there. Nottingham (where I live and work) could learn a lot. It is a beautiful city that is a joy to visit. In the battle for talent that cities are (or should be) engaged in now, they have served Bath well.

Bold Decision #2 - No WiFi

Didn't miss it, in fact I'm glad it wasn't there. The mobile signal was good enough to get emails if anything urgent cropped up. I would imagine this was one of the reasons why people talked to each other more and probably got more out of the speakers. I go to too many conferences these days where people are too busy, surfing, and interacting with people that aren't there rather than engaging with the speakers.

Bold Decision #3 - Price

£200 for a one day conference seemed reasonably pricey and pitching this right would have been a really hand wringer but it was spot on. It meant everyone who came really wanted to get something out of it and I'm guessing it meant they could afford the calibre of speakers that they attracted.

Bold Decision #4 - Comedy/Rock Club Venue

Forget anonymous hotels or convention facilities, more events like this should be held in this kind of venue. Komedia (http://www.komedia.co.uk/) had all the facilities and looked fantastic. People arrived and there was a palpable buzz as they went through the door into the venue proper. Going to a gig for 'work', brilliant. It was especially entertaining watching as a bunch of geeks spilled out on to streets at the breaks, blinking as they readjusted to a bright and very real world still existing outside.

If they run it next year I will absolutely be going as should you.

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Going International (live'ish)

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:25:00 -0800

Thanks to @pcmcreative for live streaming my talk at Nott Tuesday last night.

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Let's Show Graduates What Nottingham Can Offer

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:26:00 -0800

I think it's time we showed graduates and under-graduates that Nottingham not only represents a great place to get an education but also a fantastic city in which to build a life and career. We have some great creative and tech companies in the city crying out for talented people to join their successful teams. We need to connect people with these opportunities before they depart for more 'traditional' destinations.

To do this, I'm running a recruitment event for internships, work placements and graduate positions in the creative and tech companies of Nottingham.

Before you run a mile with visions of milk-rounds and corporate presentations I'm going to set it up it in a way that better reflects how we, the new wave of businesses in the city, operate.

While I appreciate that we're all often in 'competition' for the best talent we can get, a collaborative approach will reap for more benefits for us all. Let's level the playing field a little and work together to represent Nottingham to the next generation of talented individuals so they can join us in changing our own particular worlds.

So here's the, current, plan

Contribution to the costs are in proportion to the employers size. I'm looking for a couple of larger organisations to underwrite the event (Esendex will be one) in order that we can get it up and running. Current thinking is: 1-5 employees £75, 6-15 £150, 16-30 £300, 30+ £600.
No presentations, no formal standing up in front of a room full of candidates. Each employer will be represented by a number of existing team members (in proportion to the number of opportunities/size) there to discuss them with the prospects.
Venue will probably be something like Antenna and the costs are to put money behind the bar and some simple catering.
Promotion is through word of mouth, contacts, social media and every other way we all know how. Of course the success of the event will rely on everyone knowing about it.
Participation numbers (both employers and candidates) will controlled and ticketed, using Amiando probably
I'm looking at April as the best time to run it.

Firstly, let me know what you think. What have I missed, what could be improved, what help can you give in promotion? Please use the comments so we can have a discussion.

Secondly if you can offer opportunities to graduates or under-grads then come direct: adam.bird@esendex.com, @adambird

We've started something in Nottingham, let's push it to the next level.

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Mobile Boarding Pass Success

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 01:18:17 -0800

I've tried mobile boarding passes before without success. By the time I've tried to navigate round my phone to get to the appropriate image or web site, getting a piece of paper out has generally been quicker. So it was with a degree of scepticism that I tried out the BA iPhone app with it's board pass option for a flight to Lyon today.

It worked a treat.

The key for me was that it worked well enough for the gate agent who hadn't used it before to let me board without issue.

Why did it work this time and not before? A well designed app with good state management and fast app switching was they key. It meant I wasn't tentatively nursing my phone as I approached each of the check points desperately trying to keep the screen alive while not navigating away from the boarding code.

A long promised revolution in travel documentation may well be upon us.

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Base View Model in ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 05:00:00 -0800

I needed to reference some user context variables from within my site master page that had some logic behind their retrieval.

In this example I need to choose the display language for a user.

Check cookie present indicating user's language preference
if not use HTTP language header
if not use the application default language

The pattern I've ended up using is to implement a base view model from which all my specific view models inherit as follows:


  public class BaseViewModel {     
    public string UserLanguage     
    {      
       get      
       {          
           return HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies["language"] != null        
               ? HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies["language"].Value           
               : CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName;     
        }
    } 
}

I then use the generic class for the master page

<%@ Master Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage<BaseViewModel>" %>

Which then allows me to reference the model in the master page and keep the logic for deciding the language to display centralised.

Not sure I'm wholly happy with the inheritance as it adds a level of dependencies which smells a bit off but in the small application I'm working in it was easy to implement and does what I need.

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UI Integration Testing with CassiniDev and WatiN, not Selenium

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:56:00 -0700

This was to be my first foray into UI integration testing. I've always been a sceptic, scare by the brittleness of any kind of recorded UI test. Luckily Gemma and Jonathan in the dev team persisted and showed me Selenium RC and WatiN. Both these solutions allow you to write the integration tests in code, a critical requirement for me.

Also key for me was this had to work in Hudson, my chosen Continuous Integration server, so simple deployment and management was key. I love being able to check everything I need into source control and have it 'miraculously' run on the CI server with little or no config.

The first thing I needed was a deployable web server I could, ideally, run in process. Enter CassiniDev and specifically the CassiniDev4-Lib.dll. Now this was really tricky to get going ;).

1. Add reference to CassiniDev4-Lib.dll

2. Put following code in my TestFixtureSetup

_hostServer = new CassiniDevServer();
_hostServer.StartServer(@"..\..\..\mywebapp");

Selenium wasn't quite so simple.

It failed the simple deploy requirement because you have to run the Selenium Server and then use the RC libraries to interact with it and send commands to then run on browsers.

It also has/d a bug where it sends a HEAD before it sends a GET which breaks if your MVC Controller Action as an HttpGet attribute. It sends a 404 because HEAD isn't acceptable.

Sky from the CassiniDev team was über-helpful finding this out for me http://cassinidev.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=227174.

WatiN was a different story though. Very simple to use and all run in process. There were a couple of gotcha's though.

I had to make sure NUnit was properly running .net 4, stackoverflow helped me there http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2635794/nunit-fail-with-system-argumentexception-the-net-4-0-framework-is-not-available

And I got a rather gruesome COM exception when I pushed it all up to my CI server.

NSystem.UnauthorizedAccessException: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with
        CLSID {0002DF01-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 
        80070005 Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)).
    at WatiN.Core.IE.CreateNewIEAndGoToUri(Uri uri, IDialogHandler logonDialogHandler, 
        Boolean createInNewProcess)
    at WatiN.Core.IE..ctor(String url)

Luckily I found this post that talks through setting the COM permissions correctly for this kind of issue. Specifically giving the correct permissions to the user account used by the Hudson server. How To Fix UnauthorizedAccessException Retrieving The COM Class Factory For Component With CLSID

Early days, but I now have a green build that includes actually navigating to one of my forms and entering text within an integration test.

Selenium seemed to be the obvious choice for UI testing. I read somewhere that Google is throwing loads of effort into developing it so it would be a good horse to back. However, when I look at my requirements I don't need what Selenium offers.

Multi, cross-browser testing is nice but I'm just looking to confirm stories are operational and routes through my application are valid. The simplicity of WatiN seems to satisfy that nicely.

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ASP.NET MVC2 Wildcard Mapping on IIS6

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 02:09:00 -0700

Spent a little while tearing my hair out on this one. I followed Steve Sanderson's post ( http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2008/07/04/options-for-deploying-aspnet-mvc-t... ) but I was still getting the classic IIS 404

Finally found the answer in the Web Service Extensions section of IIS Manager. I had to enable the ASP.NET v4 extension

But just clicking Allow here didn't work. I actually had to go to Properties > Required Files and Allow the aspnet_isapi.dll.

Sorted

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One of my favourite features of the new office

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:39:11 -0700

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Office coming together

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:49:48 -0700

A big few days to get it all done but we move in here on Monday.

There's no mistaking where you are.

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How we laughed!!!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:08:29 -0700

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A DVCS working process

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 08:44:00 -0700

I've started working with Git using GitHub as a remote repository. This introduces into my life branching as a cheap operation and makes for a potentially different way of working.

After a discussion with the guys at work on Friday afternoon, here's what I've come up with:

Start a new feature => start a new branch.

git branch master [feature branch name]

The master branch is preserved for the current release code. My Hudson instance is only monitoring that branch for changes and ignoring all other branches.

I then push the branch to my remote repository so I get the benefits of a back-up as well being able to share the branch if I need to collaborate with someone else on it in the future.

git push [remote repository address] [feature branch name]

The code rythym then becomes add files, commit to the branch and then push to the remote repo branch.

Once the feature is finished then it's a case of squashing the commits on my local master branch and then pushing them to the remote copy.

git checkout master

git merge --squash [feature branch name]

git push

Then it's just a case of deleting the feature branch when I'm happy it's complete

Would appreciate any thoughts on this, does it sound sensible?

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Test teams are pointless and counter-productive

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:21:08 -0700

In an Agile world unit tests and integration tests, in our case driven
by BDD declared stories, are a fundamental part of a development
team's output. It could be argued that this is the most important
element as these both prove the software works and document what it is
supposed to do.

Coverage is key to the success of this. The developers need to ensure
their tests cover sufficient scenarios so as to ensure the software
delivers when used in anger.

The traditional approach is to have a dedicated test team that checks
the code in isolation as developers 'can't be trusted' to do it
themselves.

Personally I think this is balderdash.

The test-team-as-gatekeeper approach encourages a lack of
responsibility in the development team. They can produce what they
like, safe in the knowledge that the test team will pick it up. And,
if they don't, well they're mainly to blame rather than the
developers. After all, they're not testers.

Far better to have developers engaged all the way to delivery and beyond.

Pair programming, peer reviews and giving rapid iterations for the
customer to critique and break all ensure the coverage is complete.
But there is nothing like actually engaging with the user to really
bring home the importance of the feature being worked on or to bring
in to stark relief the usability assumptions they've made.

So, death to test teams. There is no place for them in an agile world.

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Premier Inn getting it so right

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:44:00 -0700

Stopped at the Premier Inn in Port Solent to break up the long drive back from France this weekend and am really glad we did.

We arrived at the end of a long day of travelling which was made longer than expected by very slow progress getting off the ferry and through passport control. Incidentally the immigration officer was in fine spirits given the knackered and undoubtedly surly holiday makers he was encountering.

The woman on reception at the hotel couldn't do enough to help us:

Parking was full so we were concerned about 4 bikes on the back of the car in the overflow car park - no problem we'll put them in a meeting room for you.
We were too late for food from nearby restaurants - no problem, here's a takeaway delivery menu
Takeaway won't take our order because there isn't a house number to go with the postcode - no problem, I'll speak to them.

The room was clean, a decent size with comfy beds. We all had a great nights sleep.

Breakfast the next morning was busy so we had to wait for a table, the staff member suggested we help ourselves to coffee and juice while we waited on the reception seating. There were about 10 families waiting but there was enough seating and because of the progressive approach of making sure we all had a drink in our hands everyone was happy waiting. When we had breakfast the food was plentiful and decent enough quality.

There were so many opportunities for the staff to turn our stay into a bit of a pain through going through the motions rather than helping. Instead every one of them were friendly, helpful and it worked wonders. We left refreshed, fed and pleased we'd stayed the night.

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Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:22:00 -0700

Just finished reading this for the first time many, many years after first watching and loving Bladerunner, the film it inspired.

It's a wonderfully dark and deep story, far more so than the film. The vulnerability of Deckard, subsumed in the naivety and beliefs of the post-apocalyptic world he inhabits, is a far cry from the cerebral, flawed hero around which Ridley Scott's film is centred. Philip K Dick's androids and humans are much less binary than their cinematographic counterparts.

They are both enthralling works in their own right and if you've only got round to seeing Bladerunner, you should definitely make time to read the book.

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Ready to come home is sign of a good holiday

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:49:15 -0700

Traditionally, not wanting to come home is considered the sign of a good holiday. You never want the fun to end.

However, I reckon being ready to come home is a pretty good indication that you're refreshed, recharged and ready to take on the world again. Your holiday has done it's job. Assuming of course you've had a good time.

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