I have to look this up every time I do it so here’s a fast tutorial on changing the letter for a USB storage device under Windows XP. I’m using this for my newly-flashed iriver that I told you about recently.
Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. Your device will be listed and if you right-click there’s an option to “Change drive letter and paths”.
I love PHP. I’ve worked with a fair number of languages and I have to say that I absolutely love PHP. I love its cleanliness, its elegance, and its fabulours online documentation and community support.
I come across a lot of people in various walks of life who rubbish the language because of various perceived (usually historical) weaknesses. So when I saw this article from DevZone I felt I had to post and say how much I agree with it. I also think that the PHP community might benefit from a little more self-promotion once in a while … but it seems that everyone is rather too busy “solving the web problem” (the original aim of PHP) to worry about little things like that :)
Well the website for my netball club is definitely going ahead, They are even more up for it than I imagined! So you can find the new site at www.shipleynetball.org.uk and hopefully it will actually get some content soon.
I installed a new copy of Jooma! which was just as easy the second time as it was the first – you literally sit down to install it and before you remember you forgot about your coffee, its done and you’re already fiddling with the administration tool. This time I installed some extras.
I can’t say enough about how much I like the eventlist component from schlu.net. In addition to the date management bit which I tried out before, I’ve also installed the calendar module that is also available. I know its very alpha but I haven’t managed to break it yet and its exactly what this module needed! Also it makes sense for the users on the netball site to click on a particular saturday and see all the fixtures by day so that’s very good.
Another thing I must mention again about this component is the locations functionality. We play at one of five venues and you have to input the venues before you input the events but then once the address information, directions and whatever have been input they get associated with the fixture automatically … and its got a google maps link too :)
Pretty URLs are something I feel quite strongly about. They’re strong and human-memorable which I think counts for a lot. I understand they’re also really good for search engines although I’m not an expert and I am under the impression that search engines kind of read your content these days. Well this was a complete faff from start to finish. It took me literally two hours from start to finish and that was only because I gave up, set the thing up manually, and sat down to write this before bed. Here are the steps I think I probably needed to follow, in the order it happened.
Anyway I still like Joomla! and I think its going to be a nice simple interface for the people who are going to be writing articles for the site so I’m still quite pleased with it, if temporarily exasperated! If anyone knows what I was missing then suggestions are gratefully received.
Its all sorted and we’re booked onto the London PHP Conference in February. Its a bit of a geeky thing to do as a couple I suppose but I’m really looking forward to it. There are some speakers that I will be positively star-struck to see in the flesh (Cal Evans and Rasmus Lerdorf) and some people that I’m really looking forward to meeting in person that I have had contact with online.
Due to the exciting way that train fares work here in the UK, its much cheaper to travel to London on Thursday evening1, stay both Thursday and Friday night in a hotel in central London and then travel back on Saturday afternoon. To be fair the journey back is cross-country and takes 4 hours but I upgraded the tickets to first-class for £3 and we won’t be changing trains so I’m sure it will be fine.
I’m really looking forward to hearing the talks and meeting the people at the conference, I’ve never been to anything like it before and I can’t wait! Also two nights in central London with Kevin can’t be a bad thing :)
1 To put this in perspective, its costing us £9.50 to travel on Thursday night and the walk-on Single Fare is £273. It really pays to be organised.
Well its early days in our relationship but so far, Joomla! and I are getting along just fine. Since I installed it I’ve had a proper fiddle with most of the bits and pieces (mostly turning things off actually!!) and now its looking much better.
Since I’ll want to introduce fixtures, I’ve used a calendar extension called EventList from schlu.net and its fabulous. It took me ages to get the idea that to change how a category displays its items, you edit the menu item that points to it. It still seems like a bit of a funny concept (what if you link to it from somewhere else?) but it really works now I’ve figured it out. I used this to stop the date and author being displayed in the “Venues” section, since they don’t mean a lot. To remove the same information from the individual articles I edited each article individually.
I’ve also changed templates, there are loads available to download but I was struggling a bit with ones I didn’t like or didn’t know how to change. In the end I chose the “sporticus” one from www.rockettheme.com, it was easy to change the colour and I made some other changes to it as well.
At one point I got quite stressed with the layout of news articles on the front page, one or two was fine, but three did a funny layout with one at the top and the next two next to each other. Once again its the menu item property, I changed the number of columns to put all the articles in line with one another and it looks great!
The other thing I must mention is the community, I’ve registered for the forums but so far have been able to find things I needed just by searching the threads. The tone of the forums is much nicer than I’ve seen elsewhere and most of the Joomla! gang seem keen to spread the word. I must also give a special mention to my phpwomen friend and personal Joomla! consultant, Amy who has been very helpful and even answered questions before I ask them :)
As a geek, I sometimes create websites for other people or organisations who don’t have the technical skills to create them themselves. Tonight I’m meeting with the Netball Club Committee (well they are meeting and I am gatecrashing) to discuss whether a website would be useful for them.
The thing is, for a non-technical person, it seems that anything is possible on the internet, so some very interesting conversations will result. These are usually started with the line “Wouldn’t it be cool if …” and end with things ranging from “the website could phone you and tell you someone replied to your forum post” to “we had a dancing reindeer all over the clean and stylish site you just redesigned … as its Christmas”. [1]
I’ll let you know what requests I get hit with tonight, I’m hoping they’ll think that news and events will be enough to be going on with but we shall see!
1 I ignored the first and ended up giving in to the second request.
After I wrote about the death of a gadget, I decided that I would definitely just go out and buy something which would make music, to use in the car and at the gym, which wouldn’t matter if it died too. So I got one of these logik orbit mp3 players (mine was actually black). I thought it would fit the bill, it was dirt cheap (35 GBP for 2gb player), little, and had multicoloured backlight which I love!
Not such a good idea. It had an internal battery that never seemed to hold charge for long. The mini-usb connection was a faff but that was the least of the problems I had. Often, it would play and show the battery as half full or even more, but if you turned it off for ten minutes when you stopped at a service station and then asked it to play again, it just wouldn’t turn on. This thing took longer to boot than my sister’s windows machine, an old hand-me-down from me with goodness-knows-what installed on it. I regularly ended up on a long drive or in the gym with no music, not something I enjoy. The best was when we used it in the car while visiting over Christmas. I had never really noticed before but it doesn’t correctly identify the tracks. When playing a track, it would show you 3 random pieces of information. They weren’t even necessarily an artist, an album and a title – you would just get any three. My favourite was “we will rock you” being labelled as “Kylie” sung by “Andrew Lloyd Webber” from the album “various” :)
So I got an iriver T20 from Scan’s Today Only for a little over fifty quid.
Its beautiful. Its cute, its tidy and its elegant. The biggest downside was that it is a “play for sure” player, but following instructions from a couple of sites, it was possible downloaded the manufacturer’s new firmware and turned the device into a normal USB mass storage that can be seen and understood by Linux as well.
This device is tiny (did I mention it’s also quite cute?), has a lovely quality of screen, a separate line in socket and a USB connection that retracts into it when not in use. The menus are not terribly intuitive but so far I haven’t found anything I wanted to do and couldn’t find out how. The battery doesn’t seem to go flat at all, it plays ogg-vorbis format and frankly its the best thing I have spent money on in a long time. Isn’t it satisfying to have something that you really like?
Next week I’ve been asked to go to the netball club committee meeting and tell them a bit about what a website is and whether I should be making them one. In order to get my brain in gear I’ve been thinking about tools that would be suitable for this … I have been looking for a reason to try out Joomla! for a while, because the phpwomen.org site uses it and I don’t know much about it. Anyway last week I read a good review of it in LinuxFormat which reviewed a number of CMS tools and rated Drupal best but gave Joomla! the same score but said it was simpler.
So I’ve just installed Joomla! for the first time and it was as easy as falling off a log :) Actually it might have been even easier than that, once I set off through the process of installing it then suddenly I was all done and fiddling with the admin tool! This product has a very active community behind it so I was quickly able to grab some free templates and suchlike, very cool (especially as they look quite complicated to write from scratch) and appealing to my instant-gratification appetite.
All items (my items are like articles, I’m still learning so not sure if this would always be true) have to go into a category, and all categories have to go into sections. It is necessary to set up the sections and categories first, before creating anything to go in them; the Joomla! manual explains that these are like folders and drawers and your room would be a mess if you didn’t. Its easy to move things around later anyway so that’s no big deal.
I found it confusing to add a link to a section and realise that this would then list the categories within it, rather than the items. However I got around this by removing the menu item and creating a new one which pointed directly to the category.
The default section listing is horrible, its a big table with the date, the author, the section, the title, the phase of the moon and a bunch of filters and other navigation. The category in question is a list of netball venues and there are about five of them! I faffed around with templates and had a bit of a dig in the code (I knew there was a reason I always use PHP stuff even though I rarely fiddle with the code as it only causes upgrade nightmares), but I couldn’t work it out.
To cut short a long story, in which I learned the true size and depth of the Joomla! community from the sheer volume of material that’s around, what I actually needed to do was edit the properties of the menu item (obviously!) to make the category display differently. I’ve turned off all the guff and now I’ve got a nice, tidy list. sighs contentedly
First impressions are that I love Joomla! but I’d need a good reason to install a tool with quite this many capabilities. This website uses textpattern and that’s more than enough for every day, but Joomla! can handle so many different types of content that there’s hardly anything you can’t do. Anyway the main purpose of the new site is to show fixtures so I will soon be trying out some events calendar extensions … I’ll let you know how I go!
This is a nice little tool that I use a lot, especially when I only want to see stuff posted by real people or posted in a given timescale: blogsearch.google.com.
A search on Zelda got me (via a couple of links), to this zelda name generator. I love the internet!
(my Zelda name is Malon, incidentally)
In the wider world of software development, supporting software is seen as the lowest form of employment in that field. I have to say that I totally disagree, working as a support developer needs quick thinking and expertise on every subject that might come up plus a whole raft of complimentary skills to understand how different users and environments can affect the outcome. The exception to this is first-line support, which is a different job altogether. Here are my thoughts on what the differences are, and why first-line support can be demoralising for a developer.
First-line support is the initial point of contact for a user. This person usually knows what questions to ask to narrow down the likely cause of the problem, and can deal with common queries about functionality. They usually have access to a knowledgebase so that they can research simple problems and help the users. The first-line support person may also do some basic investigation into a fault, for example replicating the problem and investigating obvious causes. A good first-line support person is organised so that they can keep track of lots of calls/users/faults/tasks, and has good communication skills for dealing with non-technical users over the telephone or by email and for conveying information about technical problems to the next level of support as needed.
Second- and third-line support tends to have less clear boundaries. Usually second-line support is a skilled developer who will develop a solution to the problem, whereas a third-line support person might be a more senior person who designed that part of the system in the first place. Sometimes the distinction is not made at all. These developers will be looking at existing problems which have been verified and they will then apply their technical abilities to correcting the problem. Often they will have only limited contact with the user; their solution may be conveyed via the first-line support people.
Having worked as a support developer I have to say its a great place to start in an organisation. You get an overview of every part of every version of every product and come into contact with large portions of the organisation itself and its user base – or at least that’s my experience from working in an ISV. As experience is accrued you can take on more and more difficult faults to fix and can also start to specialise in areas that you are now knowledgeable about. If there is a structure to move from first-line into second-line support, I think an intelligent person with an enquiring mind and a good attitude can thrive.
I could write at length about this, but I’ll save it for a(nother) rainy day.
If, as a manager, you ask developers who report to you to do support, you’ll normally get grumbles. Ask them to do exclusively first-line support and you’ll get a revolt (there’s a joke in there somewhere, about revolting developers, but I can’t quite form it). It might seem to you that they are lazy, don’t want to use the phone, or would rather surf with their headphones in all day like they do now when they’re supposed to be developing, but (for me anyway) there’s more to it than that.
I can’t speak for everyone but personally I find second-line support invigorating and rewarding. Users present problems or other unexpected experiences, and I’m able to make their lives a bit better by using my skills to help. I feel helpful and its rewarding – even if the users aren’t actually very grateful! First-line support is chaotic, my secretarial skills are good but its really hard to ignore the fact that you could probably untangle this user’s problem because you have to get them off the line and talk to the next one. The whole thing becomes a fog of error messages and phone numbers! Personally I’ve worked in first-line support before and my organisational skills are well up to the task – I’d even say that I’m good at it. But “invigorating and rewarding”?
Not at all. A bit like doing a good job when working in MacDonalds wouldn’t be invigorating and rewarding![1]
1 Actually I’m not sure that really conveys the depth of difference between an ordinary development role, even one which is mostly maintenance, and the front line of support. Any better metaphors are gratefully received!