Ian On The Red Dot

I love how the Internet makes it easier to learn from good (if not excellent) practitioners of a craft. In this case, learning how to write marketing and PR copy from Daniel of Young Upstarts.

Both of us wrote a post about Fly Entertainment’s luncheon seminar with James Sun.

You can tell whose day job is to sell things and people. Hint, not me.

My post was about the event. Descriptive. While I introduced James, I didn’t sell him. Compare what I wrote to Daniel’s pitch on why you would want to learn from James.

Why should you listen to this 32-year old young punk, you ask? Let’s see:
* He’s founder and chairman of location search engine GeoPage.com,
* James’ rubbed shoulders with Donald Trump and Barack Obama,
* He started his own investment firm at 18 with US$5,000 and became a self-made millionaire at age 22, and
* Did I mention he’s good-looking? (Sorry ladies, he’s taken)

If you’re interesting in winning tickets for the seminar, Young Upstarts and SGEntrepreneurs are both running competitions.

Side note:It is also now possible to not just write an essay about marketing, but easily test out what was learned and measure the effectiveness of what was taught in the textbooks, lectures and tutorials.

Got to love the Internet.

Government can possibly better drive innovation with procurement instead of tax credits. Tax credits can be gamed with creative accounting. Tax credits guarantees nothing. Procurement does – you get a product that meets your needs plus that little innovative bit.

Technical innovation is useless without marketing, selling and collection of money.

It isn’t about selecting winners but deselecting losers.

Business models is where money is made. Technology is the enabler.

Turn a cost into a revenue.

There is a difference between using the “fb:share-button” (XFBML) tag for a Facebook Connect site and using Facebook Share.

When using the “fb:share-button” tag on a Facebook Connect site, it is important that the site takes into account the Facebook login status of the user. When using Facebook Share, it is not necessary. If the user is not logged in, the user will be prompted to log into Facebook before sharing can occur.

First result for the search ‘Newspaper Jargon’:

takeout

A longer story that takes a step back from daily, breaking news stories to put a running story with frequent developments into context and perspective.

slug

An internal name for a story, usually just one word. Elex might be the slug for a story on school elections.

scoop

As a noun, a story no one else has; as a verb, to do it to the competition.

These two links were invaluable:

Selenium and HTTPS:

Create a new Firefox profile (firefox.exe -profileManager). In this case the name of the new profile is selenium-https-profile.

java -jar selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate

Dealing with self-signed SSL certificates when running Selenium server with Firefox:

Delete everything in the directory except for the cert_override.txt and cert8.db files.

Xvfb:

In the X Window System, Xvfb or X virtual framebuffer is an X11 server that performs all graphical operations in memory, not showing any screen output. From the point of view of the client, it acts exactly like any other server, serving requests and sending events and errors as appropriate. However, no output is shown. This virtual server does not require the computer it is running on to even have a screen or any input device.

Running Selenium on a Solaris server so that can run Cucumber tests via Hudson daily after each successful build. The problem was Selenium + Firefox had no display to output to.

The solution was to use xvfb and output to it.

Varargs:

As a client, you should take advantage of them whenever the API offers them. Important uses in core APIs include reflection, message formatting, and the new printf facility. As an API designer, you should use them sparingly, only when the benefit is truly compelling. Generally speaking, you should not overload a varargs method, or it will be difficult for programmers to figure out which overloading gets called.

Object[] args versus Object... args

find com -type f -exec md5sum {} \; >> out.txt

Copy the out.txt file to the other directory.

md5sum -c out.txt | grep -v OK

The reason why this was needed:

SmartSVN failed on me. The working copy was shown to be the same as the trunk copy, and while the trunk copy showed it was at the latest revision, the working copy wasn’t. So the wrong file was deployed. The solution was to re-checkout the code after nuking the whole directory. Only then would SmartSVN show the latest trunk copy (and working copy).

Dan North introduces BDD:

Story Template:

As a [X]
I want [Y]
so that [Z]

Story Acceptance Template:

Given some initial context (the givens),
When an event occurs,
then ensure some outcomes.

The fragments of the scenario – the givens, event, and outcomes – are fine-grained enough to be represented directly in code. JBehave defines an object model that enables us to directly map the scenario fragments to Java classes.

Dan North on stories:

It has to be a description of a requirement and its business benefit, and a set of criteria by which we all agree that it is “done”. This is a more rigorous definition than in other agile methodologies, where it is variously described as a “promise of a conversation” or a “description of a feature”. (A BDD story can just as easily describe a non-functional requirement, as long as the work can be scoped, estimated and agreed on.)

Via Nadnut who decided to deck up as a hot nerdy teacher:

The Glycemic index (also glycaemic index) or GI is a measure of the effects of carbohydrates on blood glucose levels. Carbohydrates that break down rapidly during digestion releasing glucose rapidly into the bloodstream have a high GI; carbohydrates that break down slowly, releasing glucose gradually into the bloodstream, have a low GI. For most people, foods with a low GI have significant health benefits.

more at Wikipedia