I'm just back from a weeks holiday, during which I used my 6110 Navigator to check my emails every now and again. Unfortunately I didn't quite have the settings sorted out completely to allow me to send email from my phone, so I had to wait until I got home to a proper internet connection again to investigate further and review what those settings should be. Anyway, for the record, those settings (found under Messaging -> Options: Settings -> Email -> Mailboxes -> [mailbox name] -> Connection Settings -> Outgoing e-mail) are:

My e-mail address, User name and password - normal settings
Outgoing mail server: smtp.googlemail.com
Security (ports): StartTLS
Port: 587

This seems to work :-)

Labels: 6110, gmail, smtp

// posted by Jane @ 10:34 PM   

The first project I worked on at Madgex went live last week. It is a customisation on the Origin Job board, and is a series of 8 Dutch job sites working off one database, one Admin site and one Recruiter access site. New job seeker sites are due to be added early next year, so it has been designed to work with 20 - 30 different job sites.

I moved on to a new project before the sites went live so Mike picked up the project and saw it through to launch. Thanks Mike!



The sites are:

• Elsevier.nl - Vacatures
• FEM Business
• ElsevierFiscaal.nl
• Overheidsmanagement.nl
• P&Oactueel
• ControllersMagazine.nl
• Nursing
• accountancyvandaag.nl

As with all projects it had its challenges, but as this was my first localised project, it also had its learning opportunities. Despite the clients only wanting the sites to work in Dutch, I decided to strip all of the static text into resources files and allow the opportunity to display any of the 3 sites (job seeker, recruiter services or admin) in either English or Dutch. This was primarily to allow for easier development and support. There is an entry in the Web.config file to allow the culture to be defined. So far, it has worked pretty well, except that to update the resources file the web sites all need to be stopped to prevent them from locking the file. However, updates are rare so this isn't a big problem in the grand scheme of things.

One of the great delights about Madgex is the way that the design works. We have creative designers who do the pretty bits and we also have a team of HTML developers who do HTML and CSS (and some javascript) meaning that as a developer I integrate the HTML with the objects and get it all functioning. So, instead of spending hours doing cross browser checking or trying to work out how to get a certain effect to happen, I have a designated HTML developer who does this for me and tells me what I've done wrong, leaving me to get on with the functionality. Perfect!

All in all a succesful project which involved great team work, and great people. Looking forward to the next one.

Labels: madgex, portfolio, project

// posted by Jane @ 8:50 PM   

So, having had a few days to think about, here are my thoughts about barcamp Brighton.

Having it the weekend after dConstruct was good because lots of people were already down in Brighton for dConstruct, and so people who might not have normally made the effort to get down to Brighton came along and everyone benefited. It probably added to the attractiveness of the proposition on this occasion. It also meant that people were already in a "learning" mode.

Having it the weekend after dConstruct was bad because lots of people (including me) were hungover after the after party and so some of them turned up pretty late on Saturday (I'm talking after lunch here). Also, some people only seemed to attend on Saturday as my impressions were that there were quite a few less people around on Sunday. I guess this is due to people having long distances to travel and so is understandable BUT means that people who would have been prepared to stay around all weekend potentially missed out (the tickets sold out in 21 minutes after all).

Overall, and after the success (and possibly due to the success) of this barcamp I don't think that the next barcamp Brighton needs to follow dConstruct to be a success - it may be a different crowd, but I have no doubts it would still be a rewarding experience and would have plenty of willing participants.

Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, event

// posted by Jane @ 7:20 PM   

Whilst at barcamp Brighton I spent some time talking to Paul and Phil from BT Osmosoft (who sponsored vast amounts of pizza and beer) and amongst other things they were reminding me about tiddlywiki, a single page wiki file. I made use of tiddlywiki within monkeyGTD for a while, but haven't revisited for some time.

Armed with a USB stick with sample tiddlywiki sites on I decided to give it a go for storing test cases for a project I'm working on at the moment. I set it up and got it running pretty quickly, although I decided to forgo the "If running on safari run these commands" instructions and work on firefox instead (anything for a quiet life!). I deemed this a success and took the wiki into work and set it up there, along with creating a project based one to store tasks and stuff. Of course, I'd missed the fact that this was a single user only wiki by design and so it wasn't long before Simon inadvertently overwrote my changes.

A few searches of google and various suggestions later I stumbled upon tiddlylock. This solution is nothing more complicated than a tiddler with code in it and tagged with systemConfig, but it seems to do the job nicely enough. Now if I make some changes to the wiki, and Simon attempts to make changes too, it tells him that I have it locked at the moment, so he can read it, but won't be able to edit. With some discipline from both of us, i.e. saving our changes immediately, this will become a workable solution which doesn't involve us having to find a server somewhere and install and maintain a full wiki solution.

Labels: barcampbrighton, tiddlywiki, wiki

// posted by Jane @ 6:53 PM   

Sunday arrived and having headed home to bed on Saturday evening I strolled into the office at around 9am to see what was happening. The first, and only, issue arose when Ian arrived and informed us that breakfast was half an hour late due to Pret's oven breaking down or something. We pushed the sessions back by 15 minutes and soon caught up again, so no real damage done.

There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)



I managed to see 4 sessions in total:

• Multi Lingual Sites - a discussion - led by Sjors Timmer
• i18n and l10n - Mark Norman Francis
• CSS tips - Vicky Lamburn
• Web testing with Selenium - Kerry Buckley

These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.



After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.

Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event

// posted by Jane @ 6:42 PM   

Ok, so starting off the day with a hangover was inevitable, but not ideal. I got to the office at around 9.30 and started helping out. We had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in before the attendees started to arrive, and in fact several arrived early. We hadn't even finishing putting name tags together and so I had to head downstairs armed only with a list (in the order that people registered in) and name badges for those people with first names beginning with A, B or T. I was hugely intimidated opening the door and facing a vast amount of people in the foyer. Still, I got them processed, and it wasn't long before reinforments in the guise of Alex and Gillian appeared to help out. Phew! I obviously wasn't the only one with a hangover as people continue to drift in up until around 2pm, meaning that one of us had to be on the door to let people in and out. At around 2ish, Glenn, Sally and I decided that we'd done enough of this, and that people could phone from now on as the next sets of sessions were about to start.

I managed to attend quite a few sessions during the afternoon and evening, and I have to say I really enjoyed them. The sessions I saw were:

• Social Media - the cats at Nixon McInnes
• Social network portability - James Littlejohn, Tantek Celik, Jeremy Keith and Glenn Jones
• The perfect cup of tea - John Sutherland
• hAvatar - Alper.nl
• How Clearleft work - James Box, Paul Annett and Andy Budd

Following on from dConstruct yesterday this list of things to read, or look into just continues to grow.

The food sponsors have been incredibly generous, with lots of pret food for breakfast, a wonderful spread from The Cherry Tree Mediteranean Deli (which Ryan Carson decided to throw away after lunch rather than leave around for people to nibble on - what a waste of truly wonderful food) and loads of pizzas and beer. Not forgetting the generous amounts of fruit, chocolate, crisps and soft drinks too.

I've got a few talks I want to attend tomorrow, especially the Internationalisation and Localisation one - as this is relevant to my last project and a recent blog post so I'm hopeful that I can work my helping out duties around them.

Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event

// posted by Jane @ 11:30 PM   

Yesterday I attended my first dConstruct conference, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. My day started when I met Nick to put the PCs together for the Madgex stand, and we managed to get ourselves all set up before the doors opened at 9am. Between the 18 strong Madgex crew we manned the stall during all the breaks throughout the day, whilst still managing to attend all the talks - a great balance. We were there mainly for recruitment purposes, and so we'll see in the next few weeks whether that has worked or not.



The conference started with Glenn doing the introductory talks, managing a couple of mentions of Madgex and of course barcampBrighton over the weekend. He handed straight over to Jared Spool who spoke very engagingly about "The dawning of the age of experience". His was the first talk to mention the iPod/iPhone - a theme that proved to be very popular throughout the day. He also mentioned to get chicken sexing into his talk, before ending with a spot of magic.

After a short break, we then heard Peter Merholz on "Experience is the product". He used a lot of real product examples, including tivo, wii and palm pilot - all of which I've had and loved (and despite what he said, Tivo was available in the UK but not for too long, but the service is still running well). He explained how important characterisation of a product is and how important getting the process right was - often designs work from the data first, through the logic and into the user interface, where for a truly successfully product the reverse is more often the case. He said that he wanted to do the talk without mentioned the iPod, but he failed, and used the iPhone as a reference point too.

Next up was "Waterfall bad, Washing Machine good" by Leisa Reichelt which was all about managing products to succeed, and minimising the risks. Her slides were sheer genius - photographs of post it notes. Very innovative, very pleasing. The first part of the talk was a bit dull - rehashing the waterfall methodology and explaining what it was and why it was flawed - something that has been accepted for a long time. The second part became more interesting trying to mesh together agile with user centred design to produce a crossover discipline getting the pros of both methods.

Lunch time next, and a quick trip to my most frequent lunch spot of Pompoko.



The post lunch lull, or graveyard shift, was manned admirably by Cameron Moll, and his talk on "Good vs Great design". He had some really interesting points and was engaging, but my best memory is the brother number 1 shaving hair off the back of brother number 2s head with Mum's razor. One key takeaway for me was the concept of blurring a page layout, and greyscaling it to see what still stands out afterwards. He also recommended the "How Designers Think" book - as a developer do I need to know this, will it just scare me?

Next up was "Building a sense of place" which was an on the couch session with Denise Wilton and George Oates using their experiences of B3ta and Flickr. They chatted around a lot of areas, how the sites started, where they been, where they're heading. Jim blogged the gist of the conversation, so I won't bother rehashing it. I was amazed by the concept of the Faces of Sydney project that George mentioned, and somewhat concerned by the fact that the male face has a hint of David Beckham about it.

After another short break, it was Matt Webb talking about "The Experience Stack". This was my least favourite talk, and in my opinion his A - Z concept prevented a joined up, continuous talk as we jumped from space to space. He also used way too many big words which after so many talks with so much information and so many ideas contending for space in my head just left me a bit dazed.

The final talk of the day was Tom Coates talking about Designing for a web of data. Tom was excellent, and came across as being a really passionate kind of guy. My favourite quote was when he explained twitter as being "Twitter is a way to generate error messages on the web". He explained how important giving services for your data was - 90% of twitter usage is via APIs. He had some great points about designing your product to "play well with others" before starting to talk about fire eagle which looks like it'll be a great service, especially for me with my nice new shiny nokia 6110 navigator.

Then just the wrap up, with the thank yous and the prize draws, and I won the star prize. which I believe to be a copy of CS3 suite. Yay!



After a very rapid deconstructing of our stand and kit, and dropping it all off at the office, we headed to the after party, and proceeded to fail to eat any food, but to manage to drink quite a bit of beer. All in all a great day, with some great speakers and some amazing inspiration. My list of things to follow up on is pretty long!

Labels: Brighton, conference, dConstruct, dConstruct07, event

// posted by Jane @ 10:09 PM   

It had been a busy few days over at Madgex. We are one of the premium sponsors at dConstruct, running the backnetwork and hosting barcampbrighton over the weekend. To be fair, its been business as normal most of the time, but we did have to pack all our kit away this evening in preparation for an office shuffle.



Our t-shirts turned up this afternoon for dConstruct and then five of us headed off to the Dome to setup our stand for dConstruct and after a bit of fun working out what how to put the thing up, we ended up with a pretty good looking area. I'm meeting Nick tomorrow morning to set up the PCs before registration and then we're good to go. We've also got flyers in all of the dConstruct bags for the various jobs we are recruiting for at the moment (mainly C# developers, creative designer types and an information architect).



I took advantage of being there this evening to register ahead of time, and so am now happily sorting through my schwag, and stickering stuff.

After a quick burger at GBK, where most of the rest of the geek community of Brighton were, we headed off to Heist for a few pre-conference beers at the pre-conference party.

Taken from backnetwork, here is my blogroll prior to the conference kicking off properly - it'll be interesting to see whether it grows over the weekend.

• Alex Goluszko
• Alex Farran
• Alex Laurie
• Andy Budd
• Aral Balkan
• Bruce Boughton
• Clive Walker
• Dan Glegg
• Danny Hope
• David Stone
• Denise Wilton
• Glenn Jones
• Ian Ozsvald
• James Wragg
• James Box
• Jay Caines-Gooby
• Jeremy Keith
• Jessica Spengler
• Jez Nicholson
• Johanna Hunt
• John Montgomery
• Jonathan Markwell
• Josh Russell
• Natalie Downe
• Nick Tong
• Niqui Merret
• Paul Silver
• Paul Annett
• Richard Dallaway
• Richard Rutter
• Rosie Sherry
• Seb Seb
• Simon Willison
• Sophie Barrett
• Tom Hume

Labels: barcampbrighton, dConstruct, dConstruct07, madgex, photos

// posted by Jane @ 11:08 PM   

Last night me, and some others from Madgex, headed off to a VBUG evening at the Clarendon Centre. Last nights speaker was Ian Cooper and he spoke about LINQ within C# 3.0. A subject I've heard about, but not seen much about. Ian presented highlights of 2 talks he has previously presented, one about LINQ in general and one about LINQ to SQL.

LINQ looks really interesting, and like it might be a really good addition to the toolkit to allow for quicker development of certain projects. It is a shame that LINQ to SQL currently only has SQL Server interfaces available, but hopefully other providers will come along before too long. I really like the idea of having the ability to change the physical database provider without having to write new database access code. I am, however, a database kind of girl, and enjoy writing SQL, so I'll still fight to have some SQL intervention sometimes - Ian said that LINQ won't always be performant, so some intervention will be needed at these points - maybe that is where I'll be able to make use of my SQL skills.

I've never been to any of the VBUG events before, but if the caliber of last nights is anything to go by I'll be heading along again soon. Especially if the pizza, beer and free book are usual.

Labels: .NET, Brighton, event, vbug

// posted by Jane @ 9:21 PM   

We're planning a trip to Wales for later in the year, and one of the places we're looking to stay at has the following disclaimer:

Please DO NOT use postcode search on Google, Yahoo, etc. as you will be taken to a wrong address. If you are using satellite navigation please ONLY use the coordinates in the format below:
Co-ordinates
N52.85005
W3.91084

My new phone has GPS and the Route 66 navigation software. Great I think. I'll just pop in the coordinates and away I'll go. Not so easy as it turns out. Under the Search options there are the following:

• Free Text (enter some text and hope for the best)
• Address
• Nearby (i.e. close to where the gps detects I currently am
• History (a list of places I've searched for or been at recently
• Landmarks (places I've entered and saved)
• Contacts (people I have in my address book

I tried entering N52.85005 into both Free text and address, but to no avail.
I did a quick search on the internet, and just found postings from people saying that Route 66 didn't work with longitude and latitude inputs - you can send a longitude and latitude by selecting Send -> Cursor Position or Send -> GPS Position which displays the settings in a text message or other format.

After a bit of playing around, I discovered that if you choose to add a Landmark, via the My Landmarks -> New Landmark -> Blank method you can enter the usual information - Name, Street, Zip code, City etc, and at the bottom, tucked out of the way is Latitude and Longitude. By entering the information in as a landmark, and saving it, I can then show this on the map and use it for navigation purposes.

So, not a straightforward method - but it works!

Labels: 6110, gps

// posted by Jane @ 10:22 PM