On Friday google changed the graphic on their homepage, as they now seem to do quite frequently, to represent an important anniversary within the styling of the word “google”. Last Friday it was particularly striking:

I could rant about google abandoning its principles of elegant simple clarity in favour of cutesy gimmicks, but let’s face it, they are kinda fun.

If you click on the image, it takes you to a google search on the topic, to reveal what the image is all about. In this case they were commemorating the invention of the first laser, and so you are taken to a search for “first laser”, which predictably enough brings up wikipedia’s Laser article as the first match, to provide a useful explanation “The first working laser was demonstrated on the 16th May 1960”.

With such a striking image on the homepage of google…. (that’s the homepage of google!) …presumably millions of bored of people click the image to see what it’s about. We’re talking a shed load of web traffic, but it’s all good clean fun…

…but wait! It’s also showing some sponsored links. Laser related websites? Well no actually. The topmost prominent sponsored link says “Forget the first laser… findcheapmobiles.com”. These bozos have registered a particularly sneaky ad word to direct a large slice of this web traffic onto their unrelated website.

Clever advertising, or an abuse of the system? Google obviously decided this was an abuse. A few hours after I took this screenshot, all the sponsored links disappeared from the “first laser” results. I’d be inclined to agree. The site is not related to the search, and actually in this case users aren’t even searching, they’re just wondering what the image is about. Also clever though, and an interesting of example of google having tricks played on it, not just by blackhat S£O sp@mdexing scam artists, but by their own customers.

I’ve attended another couple of free talks this week:

Frank Cohen: The Next Step in Unit Testing and Java & SOA

Frank Cohen spoke about his company PushToTest and the open source “Test Maker” product, but despite being a bit of product plug, it was interesting and entertaining. He spoke about the rising tide of awareness around unit testing, and explained his company’s approach of providing consulting services around this free open source product. He’s clearly taken on the challenge of competing on an open playing field, which reminded me of the business ideas of wikinomics.

Of course the talk was supposed to be about unit testing in general, and he did talk about various other open source testing tools, which was educational for me, since I’m coming from a world of very expensive “enterprise” proprietory software. I do think that GH Tester holds its own against pushtotest and open source offerings, but it also appeals to an entirely different client base; enterprise customers who are willing to shell out for a supported “product” and a unified interface with drag-n-drop goodness. It was clear from the talks and demos, that there’s lots of open source test tools out there, but most still require you to get your hands dirty with raw coding of scripts / xml configurations, and while being “domain specific” is an advantage, using multiple tools is always a pain. Having to get to grips with two or three different tools with different gui/config faff, is a hassle GH Tester avoids.

Nonetheless I learned a lot, and enjoyed Frank’s friendly presentation style. In fact I found him very approacheable, and wound up chatting with him for hours at the pub afterwards.

Antoine Borg, Mule: SOA or IRL?

I originally thought the title of this talk sounded more interesting than Monday’s, but obviously not many other people agreed. When I turned up, there was only two other people there! I actually attended a talk about mule before, back in the days when EJUG talks were still running, so this served as a refresher. I’m trying to think how GH Tester could hook into this ESB. Connect to a mule broker? or perhaps suck in the mule config, and generate transports from the endpoint definitions?

I went along to a ‘pub standards’ meet-up last night. Actually it was a ‘sub standards’, the mini one which happens in between the monthly pub standards meet-ups. On upcoming.org I spotted that muz was attending this, so decided to gate-crash at short notice.

The pub was hopelessly crowded, so didn’t mingle with everyone, just chatted to muz, and one other guy. ‘Chris ???’ from Yahoo. Some very interesting conversations, so I’ll be tempted to go along again I think.

Muz made an interesting point. “Show us your spreadsheets” is a good thing to say, to kick off an investigation into how an organisation’s data is flowing in ways which could potentially be more efficient (i.e. when seeking potential IT development projects)

MS Excell spreadsheets are so pervasive in many organisations. Often spreadsheets are where the information is input, stored, processed, and output/reported, so perhaps they should be the first place to look when figuring out what a new application could do for them. What’s more, spreadsheets are extensively misused and over-used in situations where terrible cock-ups can ocur by people failing to, for example, email a spreadsheet to a certain person, save a spreadsheet with a certain filename, in accordance with various interwoven human-enforced processes.

On the flip-side, it has to be said that MS Excell is pervasive for a reason. It’s extremely intuative to learn and use, and incredibly versatile as information management tool for taking on almost any task. Can’t remember which friend once said to me “Excell is the only software that microsoft really got right”. It’s easy to see why people who work at a desk with PC and do nothing but stir information around, would choose to learn MS Excell, and stick with it for every task. If these people would learn to program, or learn how data driven web applications are architected, they would no doubt see the world differently …but that’s our job.

I remember around about 1998 before the word ‘blog’ came along (or before I’d heard of it), the name of the game was having a “homepage” and trying to get lots of hits. I had noticed that some websites had me coming back regularly, because they had little news updates, and I pondered the possibility of doing this on my homepage. News about me. Stupid little things which I had been doing, or thinking, or websites I’d been visiting. Entries would get old, so they would have dates on them, and would gradually disappear off into archives. This would give me a nice space for informal outpouring of thoughts, and the hope was that some of my friends would probably pop back every now and then, and maybe some strangers too. Clever idea hey? ….Never got round to doing it though.

Obviously since then the blogging phenomenon has exploded and really carved itself a place in a new knowledge economy, turning ordinary people into a publishers as well as a consumers of news. blah blah blah. I think it’s great. I’ve always thought it was great, and yet somehow I’ve never got round to doing it. I am actually ashamed of myself for not blogging before, but let me give you my excuses:

I prefer wikis

A blog is a rather self-centred personal expression. It’s a one-man effort. OK you’re forming part of a collective conscious known as the blogosphere, but you’re writing words for your own credit. Nobody else will take the credit or the responsibility for them. What’s more you have to find your own inspiration and your own sense of purpose in any blog entry you write. These things are both good and bad, but in any case very different, from the way wikis work.

On a wiki your words are a “contribution” towards a greater purpose. You are building something together with the rest of the wiki community. There is a purpose to unite around, and the whole effort is collaborative and altruistic. To get excited about participating in a wiki, requires a different kind of psychology to blogging. So there’s my excuse. I am more psychologically predisposed to wiki editing than blogging.

….which seems to be quite rare. Most people knew about blogging long before they knew about wikis, but I think I discovered wikis relatively early on in the adoption cycle. These days wikis and blogging are lumped together in the nebulously defined “web 2.0” or “the participatory web” as I prefer to call it. People are coming to understand the value of wikis, and can sense the power which could perhaps be harnessed (or commercially exploited) somehow, but how many people actually get stuck in a make lots of wiki edits? It seems like self-centred blogging is more popular (and a more prevalant psychological trait) than altruistic wiki barn-raising.

Blogging software choices

My second excuse: While considering starting a blog, I have been boggling my mind with a myriad of complex software choices. On at least two occasions I have gone to the drawing board with a plan to build bespoke blogging software, and I did actually start coding something (from scratch) on at least one ocassion. There’s a number of feature ideas I had at various stages, which were not available, or not available together. ‘bliki’ functionality is one example (fusion of wiki and blogging modes of publishing) The integration can happen at many different levels. I investigated the idea of blogging from within a MediaWiki installation. Still quite like this idea actually. But using a wiki to do blogging is inelegant for several reasons. Mainly I would be missing some more advanced pure blogging features such as ‘trackbacks’ and ‘RSS’ (per post basis) Equally to build a blogging system from scratch would leave me missing these advanced features, unless I spent a lot of time re-inventing the wheel.

I’ve finally shelved all my half-baked plans and just whacked a wordpress installation on here on the basis that
A) I will probably never get time to finish developing a blogging system from scratch
B) I will probably never have time to install/develop/test MediaWiki plugins to acheive decent blogging functionality.
C) If I do finally get around to doing any of that, I can migrate. It’ll cause some URL upset, but it’s not the end of the world. I need to start creating blog content before I worry so much about how exactly to present it.

Obvious really, when I think about it. But then again it seems sad to turn down the opportunity for a bit of fast paced web hackery. Cobbling together something in PHP is an attractive alternative for me.