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Pod1 to host Magento developer meeting July 28th

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Pod1 are hosting a Magento developer meeting in Westbourne Park, London W10 on July 28th. All the details are at http://blog.pod1.com/technologies/we-invite-you-to-a-magento-developer-get-together-july-28th-at-pod1/

There will be geeks, pizza and beer.

Filed in Pod1, e-commerce, magento | | Comments (0)

IBM buys Coremetrics

Monday, June 21, 2010

IBM have bought Coremetrics, a major vendor of hosted analytics services. Since I’ve been implementing eCommerce sites, Coremetrics has been one of the few serious alternatives to the (free) Google Analytics service that most people use, and it’s now going to join the IBM world. The competition in the analytics space is now dominated by big Internet companies:

  • Adobe own Omniture
  • Yahoo own IndexTools
  • Google owns Google Analytics (which used to be called Urchin)

And now IBM own Omniture. Webtrends remains independent, but it’s telling that these major companies have decided they need to own serious, serious analytics offerings. Data is key to CRM, to site personalisation, to content optimisation, to so many things, so the company that has the best data has a strong competitive advantage.

Incidentally, this is an interesting turn in the evolution of the IBM product set as well. They’ve been acquiring companies for years and adding their capabilities to Websphere, and this is another one of those stories. What that has led to (according to the experts I speak to) is a rather loosely integrated set of software tools, that don’t have the same origin architecturally, and aren’t therefore all that consistent in user interface or structure. They do get assimilated to an extent, but obviously one doesn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a company to rewrite its code, so the whole collection is a bit of a mixed bag. Very functionally rich, but quite hard to work with.

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WordPress 3.0 now out

Saturday, June 19, 2010

I’ve just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress, which was officially released last week. I haven’t looked at the new features very much yet, but the upgrade process was quite smooth. Because I was being cautious, here’s what I did:

- Backed up my database using mysqldump
- Made a new directory for the latest WordPress software
- Downloaded it using Subversion (svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0 . was the command I used)
- Copied the wp-content folder from my old blog directory to my new one using rsync
- Copied wp-config.php and .htaccess from the old blog directory to the new one
- Changed the root directory of my blog by editing its Apache conf file
- Logged in and updated the database, which WordPress did automatically

The whole process was slightly complex, perhaps I made it so, but it was safe, as I never over-wrote the working blog in the old folder. Everything seems to be working fine now.

Filed in Tech | | Comments (0)

Android phones – first impressions

Monday, June 14, 2010

I’ve been using an HTC Desire for almost a week now, so I’ve got enough knowledge of how it workable and how it compares to other phones like the iPhone to write this short piece.

First of all, it’s a great device in its own right. Very fast, a great screen, the on screen keyboard is great, and the music player works really well with my itunes collection.

The fact that it has desktop widgets rather than an application launcher like the iPhone means it’s very easy to personalize in a useful and attractive way. My homepage currently contain links to my favourite applications (as with the iPhone) but also buttons for calling people, a dynamic weather feed, news feed etc, and a tiny music player. It makes the things I do all the time much easier than they are on the iPhone.

The app store (called android market) is useful, with lots of free and commercial apps. I’ve installed WordPress (with which I’m writing this post), Ocado and a program that reads business cards and converts them to contacts automatically. There doesn’t seem to be the same breadth of apps as you see on iTunes, but there are many, and the range is growing daily. There’s no Apple police to delay launch of new apps, so I expect there will be a lot more innovation long-term than there is on the iPhone: the presence of Flash, Python and a great scripting environment on the phone all argue for this. We won’t see debates like there were about Skype and spotify on the iPhone. By the way: Skype and LinkedIn, please release an android applications soon.

It syncs perfectly with Zimbra, our work email system, and with Google mail, and even links up your Facebook and Twitter contacts with your address book, though there could be privacy concerns with this.

So all in all this is a very useful and impressive device, personally I would say much better than the iPhone, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens as it evolves. The location based features, using gps and cell mast triangulation are the next area of exploration for me.

Filed in Android, Google, Tech, mobile | | Comments (0)

Pod1 launches World Cup charity fund-raiser

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Since Pod1 is doing so well in South Africa, we’ve decided to use the World Cup to raise some money for a charity that works in Southern Africa to help orphans affected by AIDS / HIV: Starfish. We’re holding a competition, the rules for which are as follows:

•Choose a team in the World Cup and submit a bid for that team by email to worldcup@pod1.com
•The highest bidder for each team will receive that team in a sweepstake
•Bids close Friday June 11th at 5pm
•Teams allocated Monday June 14th – please pay by June 16th

•The owner of the winning team will receive 40% of the total pot
•The owner of the second place team will receive 20% of the total pot
•The remainder will go to Starfish

In addition, Pod1 will contribute £100 to the charity for every employment offer that it makes and is accepted by the end of the World Cup on July 11th.

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Are projects actually supposed to be fun?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

When Wembley Stadium was being built, I remember all sorts of media stories about how badly the project was going, how incompetent the company doing the work must be, and what a disaster it was. Now we have this fantastic stadium, that we’ll be using for decades. Even my recent new kitchen was painful. Often, because of my role, I’m involved in projects when they get painful, and it’s made me wonder once or twice if stress-free projects are really the goal. Of course we can optimise all our processes to make things as smooth and as slick as possible, we can use our experience to avoid issues that are likely to arise along the way. I’m wondering, though, if that’s really the right thing to do, if the goal is to get a project done as quickly, as efficiently and as well as possible? The project will (hopefully) be short, and our enjoyment of its output will (hopefully) be long, and perhaps that’s the main thing?

If this makes sense, perhaps it means those of us who work on projects should have thick skins, and come prepared for adversity, rather than spending too much time making sure everything progresses in a smooth, flawless way.

I’m not suggesting that we should discard good practise and professional delivery at all, only that perhaps we should all be prepared for the tough times, and accepting of them when they come, because it will be worth it in the end.

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Magento on OS X – Snow Leopard and php

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

A few weeks ago I wrote a post explaining how to get Magento running on an OS X system, using the Entropy php distribution. When I wrote that I was running OS X version 10.5, and I’ve since updated to Snow Leopard: OS X version 10.6. This has presented some problems, as Entropy is not compatible with Snow Leopard. I was getting weird errors trying to do anything at all after installing Entropy, which led me to a well-concealed forum post that contained this information, and led me off to look for alternative php installations for my Mac.

I also got quite a lot of feedback after that post (my most popular blog post ever, unexpectedly) that I should look at MAMP, an easy to install MySQL / php / Apache application for the Mac, so when Entropy didn’t work, I thought I’d give MAMP a try. Unfortunately, MAMP runs an old version of php, and Magento needs version 5.2, so that was no help. My team tell me I can update MAMP to run a more up to date version of php, but that seems perverse when MAMP is one of those tools everyone describes as ‘easy to use’ and ‘no hassle’. So I continued looking.

Yesterday, I found a solution that works: Zend Community Edition, available from here. I downloaded and installed it, and found it had installed its own copy of Apache (as an alternative to OS X’s), a current version of php, and MySQL, as well as some interesting management tools I haven’t got into yet. I loaded the database into MySQL, set up the hosts file entry described in my original post, and copied the Magento code to Zend’s htdocs folder, then ran the installation, and it worked perfectly.

I’ll write a Zend version of the installation instructions soon, but for anyone else having the same problem, Zend works with Snow Leopard and Magento, and is a viable solution, at least for R&D and demos like those I need to do locally.

Filed in Pod1, Tech, e-commerce, magento | | Comments (3)

Buddypress – now installed on this blog

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

I’ve installed the Buddypress add-on and theme compatibility on this blog. For an explanation of what that is and why I’ve done it, click here.

Filed in Pod1, Tech, web 2.0 | | Comments (0)

Transport for London’s random money generator

Monday, March 1, 2010

If, like me, you have a travelcard and pay as you go on the same Oyster card, you maye recently have started to notice odd amounts being deducted from your card’s pay as you go balance.

This is because those clever Oyster card people, who have been paid millions of pounds to implement pay as you go functionality for London’s trains, can’t figure out how to deal with journeys where part of the journey is covered by the season ticket, and part by pay as you go.

Imagine you’re travelling from Wimbledon (Zone 3) to Waterloo (Zone 1) and you have a season ticket for Zones 2 and 3. The intuitive thing would be for the journey past the end of Zone 2 (which happens to be at Vauxhall) to be deducted from your pay as you go balance. What seems to happen, though, is that the cost of the whole journey is deducted: meaning you’re paying twice for the portion covered by your season ticket.

Surely this is a bit of elementary software development. I’d be happy for anyone on my team to code something that would do the trick. I may well add a question about this to my recruitment test for developers. TFL, the Oyster card people, have come up with a ridiculous work-around though: the Oyster Extension Permit. So when I plan to travel from my season ticket area to another area, I have to get another ticket so that I don’t get ripped off. Sadly, the machines at my station can’t even issue this permit, as they don’t sell Oyster card tickets.

Most people won’t notice, though, because Oyster card users only get statements online if they buy credit online, and very few people can therefore see where their online credit has disappeared to.

Filed in Mistakes, Tech, Travel | | Comments (0)

Python Magento example code now on Google Code

Monday, March 1, 2010

I’ve been using Python with Magento for small administrative tasks for a couple of months now, and I’ve created a library of useful / example functions that I’d be happy to share and extend. These are now hosted at Google Code, at this URL: http://code.google.com/p/python-magento/

Feel free to comment, extend, ask for extra functions and such like.

Filed in Pod1, Tech, e-commerce, magento | | Comments (0)
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